Suggest a laptop for my wife*

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I love my Acer netbook and it has never failed me, it think that Acer (and a lot of other laptop and computer makers) have put their problems behind them. Technology has caught up to the point where most make good products. There was a spate of really bad technology for a few years...especially with a lot of budget brands and budget computers coming out back then that have now been squeezed out of the marketplace.

My parents use an Acer netbook as well.

I have an Acer Laptop and it's been fine for me too. While the computing bits are fine, it is however, of noticably more flimsy construction and chassis than Dell's of equal price. That flimsiness is fine for something that stays at home or relatively static, but for someone lugging it to/from the office I'd definitely want something a little more durable.

What about a Macbook with Windows on it? Serious question... I thought they had some hardware advantages.

Nope, see sclitheroe's post just above yours. Despite what the marketing spin doctors might have you believe, you're using the same "lousy" parts as the rest of us.

[puckluck]

Acer is horrible. Worst Laptop I have ever used.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by SebC

What about a Macbook with Windows on it? Serious question... I thought they had some hardware advantages.

When Windows Vista first launched, PC World ran a bunch of benchmarks to find out the "best Windows Vista laptop" on the market at the time... It turned out to be a 15" MacBook Pro.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Not disagreeing, but I think it’s more an indication of the reality that most manufacturing has consolidated down to a few manufacturing companies, and so the variability in build quality across major brands has significantly decreased. Most laptops are actually branded products from Foxconn, Flextronics, Quanta, Asus or one of two or three other major white label manufacturers.

When you fire up your shiny Macbook, you are actually using an Asus or a Quanta. Many macheads have a hard time admitting it, but its the truth. Your Acer probably comes from the same factory, built by the same robots and people, as any given Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc.

Edit: check this quote out from wikipedia:

Quanta Computer Incorporated (TWSE: 2382) is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of notebook computers and other electronic hardware. It is the largest manufacturer of notebook computers in the world.[1] Its customers include ACER, Alienware, Apple Inc., Cisco, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Gericom, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Maxdata, MPC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens AG, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and Toshiba. It was founded by Barry Lam in 1988. Lam continues to head the company

Everything Apple currently sells is manufactured in China, not Taiwan. These guys may have made some ram or an LCD panel for them at one point, but the don't build MacBooks or any other finished Apple product.

Even if they did... while the offices and company name might be the same, that doesn't mean the equipment, plants, employees, starting materials or design specifications are the same.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that a Lenovo or Mac has anything in common with an Acer or Gateway. Years of statistical data measuring hardware failures will prove otherwise.

Edit: Not being argumentative, btw. I'm just saying it's going to take more than a random quote from Wiki to get me to believe that Apple = Acer. The Apple/Asus thing, I can believe though. Asus makes surprisingly good laptops.

[GreatWhiteEbola]

I have had my Acer for about 2 months, already I am having issues with the power adapter. However, the battery life is awesome, I dont have to plug it in at all during an average 8 hour day.

I haul it all over the place, there is already something rattling around in the chasis... time will tell the longevity of this ACER.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by SebC

What about a Macbook with Windows on it? Serious question... I thought they had some hardware advantages.

Power management is often lacking in bootcamp. This may have improved with the release of Windows 7 compatible bootcamp drivers, but I honestly haven’t tried. VMWare is my preffered solution for requiring Windows on a Mac

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Power management is often lacking in bootcamp. This may have improved with the release of Windows 7 compatible bootcamp drivers, but I honestly haven’t tried. VMWare is my preffered solution for requiring Windows on a Mac

That's true. My old 17" with the 8 hour battery would give me maybe 3 hours at the most under Windows 7.

[FanIn80]

Bam: http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/...2aff0ca552en02

Tell me that isn't sexy.

Edit: Well, except for the battery of course. "Up to 2 hours and 40 minutes." Yeesh.

[Old Yeller]

It's not really that we wouldn't entertain trying a Macbook, it's the fact that the IT geeks at her work WILL NOT support Mac hardware (regardless of if the hardware is superior or not) so there's no point in even trying.

At the very least, this discussion is adding things I should look at. Battery life believe it or not is another thing we didn't even really consider.... less than 3 hour battery life for a laptop seems absurd and essentially defeats the purpose of owning a laptop in my opinion.

Also remember, she wants a max of a 15" screen. One because it'll more than likely be lighter, but also the bulkiness of some of the laptops we looked at that were larger than 15 inches really turned her off the benefit of the larger screen size.

[Finner]

How about the Alienware M11x. It's within your price range, extremely powerful and has been getting excellent reviews.

You can read one here : http://gizmodo.com/5504364/alienware...eight-division

You can switch from the integrated intel graphics to a discrete onboard video card, so your wife can use it at work in just integrated, but when you get the new Civ you can switch it over. Battery life is great on it too, in integrated graphics mode with active browsing it was well over 6 hours.

Specs :

The system we tested housed a 1.3GHz Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor (overclockable to 1.73GHz), 4GB DDR3 RAM (800MHz), and a 500GB SATAII 7,200RPM hard drive, a capable set-up that will cost you $1100. You can customize further up to 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, while the base model ships for $799 with a 1.3GHz Pentium SU4100 processor, 2GB DDR3 RAM, and 160GB SATAII 5,400RPM hard drive. Most importantly: Nvidia's 1GB GeForce GT 335M graphics card ships standard with all models.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Not disagreeing, but I think it’s more an indication of the reality that most manufacturing has consolidated down to a few manufacturing companies, and so the variability in build quality across major brands has significantly decreased. Most laptops are actually branded products from Foxconn, Flextronics, Quanta, Asus or one of two or three other major white label manufacturers.

When you fire up your shiny Macbook, you are actually using an Asus or a Quanta. Many macheads have a hard time admitting it, but its the truth. Your Acer probably comes from the same factory, built by the same robots and people, as any given Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc.

Edit: check this quote out from wikipedia:

Quanta Computer Incorporated (TWSE: 2382) is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of notebook computers and other electronic hardware. It is the largest manufacturer of notebook computers in the world.[1] Its customers include ACER, Alienware, Apple Inc., Cisco, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Gericom, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Maxdata, MPC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens AG, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and Toshiba. It was founded by Barry Lam in 1988. Lam continues to head the company

You forgot Compal, they are one of the other ones that manufactuer for Acer, Dell, HP, etc. Compal is actualy the 2nd largest, behind Quanta. I used to own a barebones Compal kit and I thought it was wonderful.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Finner

How about the Alienware M11x. It's within your price range, extremely powerful and has been getting excellent reviews.

You can read one here : http://gizmodo.com/5504364/alienware...eight-division

You can switch from the integrated intel graphics to a discrete onboard video card, so your wife can use it at work in just integrated, but when you get the new Civ you can switch it over. Battery life is great on it too, in integrated graphics mode with active browsing it was well over 6 hours.

Specs :

Alienware is a boutique brand and severely overpriced. It's not something I would recommend to anyone to be quite honest because it is not good value for the money. That said, if you are will to spend, go for it if you like. I think they are a big ugly as well.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Everything Apple currently sells is manufactured in China, not Taiwan. These guys may have made some ram or an LCD panel for them at one point, but the don't build MacBooks or any other finished Apple product.

Even if they did... while the offices and company name might be the same, that doesn't mean the equipment, plants, employees, starting materials or design specifications are the same.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that a Lenovo or Mac has anything in common with an Acer or Gateway. Years of statistical data measuring hardware failures will prove otherwise.

Edit: Not being argumentative, btw. I'm just saying it's going to take more than a random quote from Wiki to get me to believe that Apple = Acer. The Apple/Asus thing, I can believe though. Asus makes surprisingly good laptops.

I knew you would post a comment like this, so I was ready for it (and I don’t consider it argumentative). It’s been Quanta and Asus for the Mac laptop line for a long time. Quanta has been doing the unibodies since the Macbook Air. Quanta is Taiwanese, but shifted production to China starting in 2002 or so.

And while each brand of laptops has different specs, design, etc, the fact of the matter is that they are all assembled in the same factories these days, with the same parts handling processes, manufacturing equipment, same skill level of labourers, etc. These companies don’t spin up custom factories for each brand, there’s no economy of scale in that. If you can teach a guy to load the reflow solder station with an Acer motherboard, you can bet that guy is doing the Apple board too.

This explains why, outside of overall design considerations, most machines have pretty similar reliability records. A 5% spread across the millions of machines manufactured is pretty tiny all things considered, and considering how those stats are collected across manufacturers, probably has a decent margin of error.

You can choose to believe that Acer != Apple, but its being built in the same factories, by the same machines, and the same labourers. The engineering and overall design is the only thing that sets them apart.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Everything Apple currently sells is manufactured in China, not Taiwan. These guys may have made some ram or an LCD panel for them at one point, but the don't build MacBooks or any other finished Apple product.

Even if they did... while the offices and company name might be the same, that doesn't mean the equipment, plants, employees, starting materials or design specifications are the same.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that a Lenovo or Mac has anything in common with an Acer or Gateway. Years of statistical data measuring hardware failures will prove otherwise.

Edit: Not being argumentative, btw. I'm just saying it's going to take more than a random quote from Wiki to get me to believe that Apple = Acer. The Apple/Asus thing, I can believe though. Asus makes surprisingly good laptops.

That these companies are Taiwanese has nothing to do with place of manufacture. Foxconn opened their Chinese factory in the 1980s.

Apple is mostly manufactured by Foxconn in China along with iphones, etc. They moved manufacturing to Quanta though for a lot of their Macbooks. Sony did the same thing. That wasn't due to a quality decision though, Foxconn was just charging more money so they decided to go with the cheaper contract.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

You forgot Compal, they are one of the other ones that manufactuer for Acer, Dell, HP, etc. Compal is actualy the 2nd largest, behind Quanta. I used to own a barebones Compal kit and I thought it was wonderful.

Yeah, there are others I forgot too, like Hon Hai, SCI, etc.

There’s a big Flextronics office here in NE Calgary, although I’m not sure what they do here. Flextronics built the original Xbox, which was one of their marquis contracts back in the day.

[Hack&Lube]

Fanin80, you don't need to defend Apple as != Acer. The higher end Acer products are actually very high quality and I will never argue against the fact that Apple are among the highest quality notebooks.

That said, what Sclitheroe said is right, (aside from the fact that your responses are getting predictable ), the reliability margins are very even across the board these days. Technology has just gotten very good and these factories do not have different tooling or machines to produce one or the other. That said, Apple has proprietary designs, may be using more expensive components (ie: Japanese vs Chinese capacitors to boost reliability), and engineering and design that makes them different or better, but you also pay for what you get.

[GreatWhiteEbola]

One of the factors for getting this particular Laptop, was the numerical keypad. If you use numbers in your work, definately get a numerical keypad.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by GreatWhiteEbola

One of the factors for getting this particular Laptop, was the numerical keypad. If you use numbers in your work, definately get a numerical keypad.

The only drawback is that it's much larger and less portable. There are always USB numberpads that you can plug in for work which is what I do.

Back on topic for Old Yeller. I would recommend you go with the larger display size if portability is not that a big concern for you. Your eyes will thank you for it.

~$1500 is actually a really huge budget for a notebook these days. Locally, the best you could do is this:
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...27212(ME).aspx

Intel i7 Processor (it says 1.60GHz but with Turbo, should be able to clock up to 2.8GHz), GTS 360M GPU, 6GB DDR3 memory.

Basically what you would find on a ~$2500 Macbook for $1589. This may be overkill though as Civilization 5 will not be so demanding.

You mentioned this was a work/home computer. How often will she be bringing it back and forth? Is portability a huge concern? What about battery life?

[FlamingStuffedTiger]

You can choose to believe that Acer != Apple, but its being built in the same factories, by the same machines, and the same labourers. The engineering and overall design is the only thing that sets them apart.

This. It's just a question if whether or not these intangibles that a company provides is worth the additional cost.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by FlamingStuffedTiger

This. It's just a question if whether or not these intangibles that a company provides is worth the additional cost.

Plus OSX vs Windows.

I think a lot of these reliability reports are questionable also. They need to do them differently because a huge issue with computer reliability if often down to the user and how well they know how to use and take care of their computer or to protect it against vulnerabilities. I admit that OSX and Apple computers are generally a lot more fool-proof than Windows laptops for the average user.

A lot of people also just don't know even how to take care of their battery. My friend would leave his laptop plugged in all the time and this of course killed his battery. Never leave a laptop plugged in all the time unless your battery is disconnected. The trickle charge will slowly destroy your battery life over the course of a year. Generally, it is recommended to never leave a battery plugged in once it is fully charged for a long period of time. Battery lifetime will always degrade over time and the best way to preserve that is also to not allow your batteries to drain too far. Start charging once you are down to about 30%. Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer batteries have no battery memory so don't be afraid to charge whenever. Never drain the battery all the way. This is actually damaging.