Business laptops
 

I hate buying laptops for my company, but it's my job so I gotta do it!

I have purchased Dell and Toshiba in the past, but lately, Dell's service sucks, not to mention their lousy battery life on some of my recent purchases. My local favorite geek store (Memory Express) also sells Acer and Asus notebooks. Does anybody have any experiences to relate with these brands? I need to have either XP Pro or Vista Business Edition on these new notebooks.


TIA!

i recently just retired my old asus, dropped it and broke the screen. It was a work horse for me and lasted almost 3 years. And i am known in my company for being the hardest on equipment (IT hates me)

I had an Acer for 5 years with no problems, so when I retired it I bought another Acer and didn't even look at any other brands. My friend has had two Dell's and has had nothing but problems with both of them (I would have learned after the 1st one) I'm sure people will have other opinions but the Acers have been good for me.

My last workplace we bought 5 Acer laptops... 4 out of 5 the lcd screens failed, and Acer would not replace them ... left a bad taste.

Dell, I had an inspiron 9300 for a year or so.. Harddrive died in it, called Dell, said the harddrive was dead, no questions sent me a new one :mrgreen: .. Not sure what they're like now.

Asus, pretty slick machines. I find some of their models they use very abnormal keyboard layours, and that really irks me when the layouts get changed.

But for business, I found Acer is still the most bang for your buck company.

I bought an Acer about 6 months ago from Memory Express and still very happy with it. I doubt that I'll ever go back to a non-laptop computer. Battery only lasts about 3 hours.

I just recently bought my second Gateway and both of them have been great. My old one i packed with me everywhere. Office and home everyday and anywhere i traveled. When it finally died the screen went out on it. I believe it was just over 3 years old. But it had a ton of miles on it. My new one is pretty awesome. Only problem is not many places sell Gateway i have never needed warranty so i do not know what that would be like.

Keith

I know two people with Acers that have had the HD kaput within the first year. They were reaplced on warranty, but that makes me ask, "Will the new one only last a year too?" :lol:

I would recommend HP. I won't buy anything else - for laptops anyway. Oh, except the Durabooks. Those are great, but you probably don't need that.

Have you given IBM (Lenovo) a try? I work in IT and have used nothing but IBM's since I was hired back in 99. T21, T42, T60 etc.

I haven't had one issue with any of them. I've dropped them, had my daughter think it was a spring board and nothing, not a scratch. I also like the feature of taking out the dvd drive and adding an additional battery in that bay. I pretty much only use the dvd drive on business trips, but for around work or the home I use that additional battery.

My home laptop is an HP 17" which I love as well but a little on the large size for business.

Our shop has about 20,000 Lenovo laptops, and frankly, the move from IBM to Lenovo wasn't a good move. I just spent a couple of hours with the sales rep complaining about hardware issues, driver incompatibility, etc. While some of the new machines look nice (X200, W700), we're having "issues". We also have a limited number of high end HP, I run 2 of these at home (XP, Windows 7) and I love them.

I've been using a Panasonic Toughbook at work. The battery lasts for about 5 hours in the field and it's been performing great for me!

Majority of our shop have moved from Toshiba Tectras to HPs with docking stations. Biggest issue was lack of dedicated serial port and getting the USB/serial adapters to work but all seem okay with them now.

As for Dells service, can't complain. Last Tuesday had a desktop that wouldn't boot so called Dell Service, on Thursday tech (contracted to Dell) was on site and replaced the motherboard and Pwr supply.

I have a Lenovo SL400. It is ok. Its a bit bulky, the mouse moves by itself sometimes (due to the trackpoint getting stuck I think), and one of the trackpoint buttons squeaks.

I found this:

http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/s...ghlight=lenovo



http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/...=188917,00.jpg

I buy Lenovo for our company's road warriors too. Great machines. Consider the smaller and LIGHTER X series as the T series my users are complaining of being too heavy. Don't bother with the R series. We buy our Lenovos from these guys:
http://www.sevengroup.ca/

Tell Simon Wong that Keith from Radiant recommend them. :biggrin:

And you actually can drop them from 12 feet :)

to be fair, the X61's are pretty decent models. We have our fewest issues with these...

Not sure about how well they'd work in the...uh, work place, but

Give me a MAC (MAC) you got your mac you got your Mac

ahem. thanks

A MAC would work well in the workplace if, say, your workplace was a boat, and you wanted your workplace to not drift around. :)

We do have a few Mac users, but I'd guess it's 35000 Windows PCs to maybe 100 Macs?

Thanks to everyone for all the comments!

Ho Ho! Man you made me laugh with that comment.

Q: What's the difference between a Mac and an Etch-A- Sketch? A: You don't have to shake the Mac to clear the screen. ...

Strange, the one thing that always comes up when buy laptops -- what are the staff going to use it for.

Were I work we only have a few hundred laptops, but it generally goes like this:

If you are travelling a LOT, and need something that will stand up to a bit more abuse -- the thinkpad stands up well for getting acutall work done on a full size laptop.

IF you are mobile all the time (road warrior) and just need to check email, and do a bit of work, the acer asipre or other netbooks are a favorite as they are small and get really good battery life, but they are NOT powerful enough for doing CAD work and anything like it.

If you just need a laptop for the occasional trip and going to/from work and home, the CHEAP acer's are good enough. These are the vast majority of our laptops.

Of course, with that said, with the way our department (IT) works, we never actually use any 3rd party support, so the quality of support from dell/acer/IBM doesn't really factor at all.




Wow, that is a lot of machines! It is rare for me to run into anyone that deals with the number of machines as me :biggrin:, let alone more. I guess this is where I get to rub our linux setup in a bit. -- Last week, I pushed out about 200 software updates to 3000 machines at over 40 sites, and that was during morning coffee. I always love to jest fellow IT people over that one :bounce:

Well ,hmm, we're rolling out our April rollout to 35k + machines right now. While I eat lunch :) We manage several hundred sites all across the province. We actually have a huge deployment schedule with our SMS team, all patches and upgrades ae deployed via SMS. We run Windows because our client asked for Windows (currently rolling out about 3000 Vista PCs/mo). I like Linux, but really haven't used it much the last few years. Now if you want to go on about GPOs, that's my specialty lately :)

I hate WSUS so much. I am sorting out patches this week for about 80 clients over 2 sites and it will probably take me all afternoon to set the deadlines correctly.

I will definitely be looking at SMS shortly.

Sorry for the hijack!

Dare I even ask who the client is? I'm assuming some crown corp or other government agency.

Well, I guess that is what happens when you get over a certain size. I just hate :twised: getting those wannabe computer guys that say silly things like "Oh, you just install it on each machine by putting the CD in, and clicking next,next,next,finish on each machine" and trying to explain why that does work on a large scale.
We acutally run diskless clients (fat clients) for everything now. It really makes backups much easier to do, as every machines gets a full nightly backup every night, going back a full year+.
I avoid GPO, PDC's and most of the windows based stuff now, as it is just too much of a pain. On the plus side, I no longer have to deal with any more Novell netware either :redface:

Sorry for the hijack.

http://www.wsus.nl/site/
Once again Google to the rescue. What normally would have taken me 2 hours was accomplished in 10 minutes thanks to someone else fixing Microsoft's terrible product.

Yeah.... I've conducted some testing in that regard.... But not from 12', that would require a ladder and I'd have to explain to my boss why I climbed a ladder just to drop the Toughbook.

My actual project was to source tough laptops, so they had to go through all the tests I could perform. The larger CF29 and CF30's are not too bad, but the CF 19!! I can't even fit my fingers on the keys :)

Probably shouldn't name client. Ya, you can't go around to that many boxes with a CD - lol. We used RIS images for our XP deployments, and with Vista we built an image using the WAIK tools. Real easy to add HW packs for new models, so our entire OS base fits on a USB key. Way more complex, with multiple runs using more powershell commands than I care to read, but much better than RIS. We also run some thin clients (Wise) connecting to Citrix servers. We don't back up PCs, all data needs to live on the lan. It's fun, and everyday is a new challenge :)
My main job right now is managing group policy, login scripts and image "issues". And like you, I haven't had to play with Novell in years!

Yeah, mines a CF19. I have no issues, but the guys using them do.

I use a toughbook, too, the CF-W7. Took awhile to get used to the smaller keyboard, but what a great laptop! I heard you can drive over it with a pickup truck - LOL (I don't plan to test that). What sold me was a) the weight - very portable at 2 lbs, and b) the disk drive - no flimsy slide out tray.

I'll confess that I often use it hooked up to an LCD monitor - the tiny screen is too hard to look at for 8 hours a day ;)