Friday, March 14, 2008

Shopping for a new laptop

I’ve been shopping around for a new laptop because the one I have can only display a maximum resolution of 1020x768, and the colors look washed out at numerous angles. Not sure how much time I’ve spent moving the screen up and down trying to determine if the color displayed is actually the one I want… not very helpful for web design.

I take good care of my stuff and tend to keep things for many years, so I wanted to make sure the laptop I got was reliable. Needless to say I also needed the screen to show colors accurately and at multiple angles. I also hate the super-shiny screens that most laptops seem to come with these days. The ability to display brilliant colors is great, but having the screen double as a mirror is not. I don’t want to see what’s behind me while I’m working. Finally, it has to be affordable, like under $1000 if possible.

Those were my requirements. My “nice to haves” include a volume knob (I hate pushing buttons to adjust volume), and Windows XP (I’ve heard awful things about Vista and have no need for it). Not a whole lot, really. Unfortunately I got neither of them. Oh well, on to my shopping research and decision…

At the start of my shopping around I immediately ruled out Dell laptops. In one of my past jobs, the bosses and sales people had Dell Inspiron laptops. Those things had nothing but trouble. There was always something wrong with them, and they were always being sent for repairs. I hear AlienWare is nice, but they’re kind of expensive and I’m not using it for gaming. 

At first I thought Toshibas were among the best, but after doing a lot of Googling it seems the Toshiba Satellite models, their most popular line, seems to have a lot of people complaining about problems. Even worse are the stories about the awful customer service. Very disappointing, because most of the Toshibas have the volume knob I like so much. I decided that a Toshiba non-Satellite model would be great. Unfortunately all the electronics stores I went to—Circuit City and multiple Best Buy locations—all the Toshibas were Satellites. Phooey.

Sonys also seem to have a good reputation, but all their screens are ultra-shiny, I hate ‘em. Acers were often recommended by people as a good value, but there were also some complaints about hardware reliability. A lot of people love their Acers, and there seemed to be an equal number of complainers with bad Acers. Asus is a brand I had never heard of, but a lot of people seem to think they are really good. They’re supposed to be pretty reliable laptops, however I’ve never seen any of them in any of the stores. I could order them online easily enough, but I need to see how the screens are before buying. I’m very particular about that since I rely on that for my web design work. Lenovo and IBM were mentioned as really reliable laptops as well. Those two brands confuse me because I’m not sure if they are the same company or not. Whatever the case, I never saw any Lenovos in the store, and IBM Thinkpads are a bit expensive (like Sony).

I started to lose hope that I would ever find one that would fit my requirements, because I was limited to the ones I’m able to see and test out in the stores. Finally today I went into Fry’s Electronics and browsed around there and ran into multiple Fujitsu laptops. I’d totally forgotten about that brand because I hadn’t seen any in the other stores. These laptops looked good, and when I compared them to some of the Sony models, which are well known for their vibrant colors, I thought the Fujitsus were better! The screens weren’t so shiny. They were glossy, but not to the point of distraction. I found one Fujitsu Lifebook that was red-tagged at $699, with 2GB of memory, DVD burner, 120GB of hard drive space, and a bunch of other goodies. It sounded like a really good deal.

I was unsure of Fujitsu though, I hadn’t heard anything about it. Is no news good news? So I went home and did some research. Turns out most of the user experiences have been very positive, with glowing reviews. Apparently Fujitsu is one of the few laptops that are still built in Japan instead of China. Not just assembled in Japan with parts from everywhere else, but I think the whole thing is manufactured there. This translates into a more rock-solid product, and may be why there aren’t as many of these as there are Toshibas and Dells. Actually I have no idea where Toshibas are made, but that’s beside the point. So even though it had no volume knob and came with that bastard of an OS (Vista), I decided to go for it. I went back to the store and said I’ll take it. They had one left! Lucky me!

So here I am testing out this thing. I spent most of the day and all night fiddling with it, which is a whole other story. Windows Vista… what a time-suck.