- Day off work to sort out laptop issues: £500
- Cab to the train station: £8
- Return ticket to London: £74
- Refund on the noxious, defective Macbook Pro: £2059
- Going back to a laptop that doesn’t numb or burn your fingers: priceless
So yesterday it took a further half hour of explanations at the Apple Store, because the manager I was told to see was not in. But eventually, a full refund was offered, and I have to commend the staff for being friendly and helpful throughout.
Meanwhile, Maurizio reports that he has his Macbook Pro back from repair, and it is still hot and it rebooted twice randomly yesterday. I get the feeling that for each new switcher Apple is gaining, they are going to be losing several long-term customers and evangelists due to sloppy support and sloppy hardware. Doesn’t seem like a very good way to build market share to me.
I’m currently downloading Ubuntu to figure out if I can cope with Linux these days. If so, I’ll be looking for recommendations for PC laptops. Main requirements: it should be quiet, and not look completely hideous. I don’t suppose anyone does them in brushed aluminium, do they?
Related posts:
I just bought a Maverick from Novatech which I’m very happy with. OpenSUSE went on it with almost no problems – the only tricky bit was the Wifi which required a download of a driver (since it doesn’t seem to have made it into the mail kernel yet).
Everything else (graphics, network, sound, hibernate, etc) just worked.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbranges.html
I did have that URL in a link in the main text, but it got zapped and your blog spat out this error:
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x8419e7c) Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at /var/sites/andrewsavory/cgi-bin/mt/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 1187.
Last month I set up Dell Latitude D620. It has Intel Dual Core Centrino, and 512Mb RAM. Let alone how slow Windows is, I am amazed to see fast execution, which was more than I expected. It was quiet, it didn’t look ugly, so I recommend this laptop PC.
You know what I’m going to say here
IBM T60 is probably as close an alternative (although slightly less screen real estate) as you’ll find. I’ve had no end of grief from Dells, and Sony aren’t even worth mentioning…
I’m very very happy with my Toshiba Port�g� R200 – it’s shiny, it’s light, it’s quiet, and it’s got somewhere between 3 and 4 hours battery life depending on load. Better still, the hardware other than the finger print scanner is supported in the 2.6.17-rc series of kernels.
Possibly hasn’t got the power that you’re after though – it’s only a 1200MHz Pentium Mobile…
Toshiba tecra m5 here. Dual core, quiet, thin(ish
and lovely screen.