Hasnt been a Laptop thread in a while so I Figured I'd start a new one.

Time to Upgrade... My Current Dell 8200 P4-M is being handed down, and its time for me to upgrade. Looking for something with a 2Ghz Pentium-M, at least a 15.4" Widescreen, And durable....

Been a dell guy mostly, but the amount of crap they put on these has grown to a point where I cant stand it...

SHould I just get the dell and just Wipe it and put a fresh XP-Pro on it (Non OEM version...) or is there another price competetive alternative that doesnt come with all the junk...

Well I would probably stick with the Dell and star again, like you suggested.

I was looking out for a new one myself; but i'd like something with a screen smaller than 12", perhaps the JVC XV891? with 8.9" or one of those sony vaio things. I just want to be able to take it around a bit easier; low in weight and sexy too! Processing isn't that important for the work apllications.

For you Impaqt, have you taken a look at those Panny toughbooks?

I havent been impressed with the feature set on the Toughbooks for the price. I've had my current dell for about 2 1/2 years I think and its survived just fine. I'm responsible enough with my notebook that I think the ruggedized price premium seems excessive...

I'd like to spend 12-1500 on a laptop...

You are right about the price, and I guess you are right again about being careful with it too; I've had mine a while now and everythings cool. I'm using the inspiron 1150, pretty simple with a wlan card in the side and CDrom. Don't need much else, but more memory would be good i suppose..

If I change I'll probably go for the 12" X1 range they do.

I've got an Inspiron 8600 with the widescreen that I've had for a little over two years now. It is still running strong even though it travels everywhere with me. I have also looked at the Toughbooks and basically you could buy 2 Dells for the equivalent Toughbook. I program AMX, Lutron, LiteTouch, Vantage, HAI, Panasonic phone/voicemail sytems, set up networks.... so basically my Dell is constantly out at job sites being punished by construction dust and so on... The Dells are being sent out with more and more programs on them but it is pretty easy to get rid of the fat. Just make sure that if you need office or visio or anything else, see if they have a deal on it from Dell, I learned the hard way that I probably could have paid half of what I did if only I had just bought it as a packaged bundle with the laptop instead of later on separately down the road.

When you order from dell, make sure you order under small business as the prices are cheaper, and request nothing on the system except the operating system. They will do this for you, or at least they have done this. Make sure to order the backup cd's, otherwise you will just get a restore partition on the hard drive, so if your hd goes, you are out of luck.

I recently bought a Fujitsu C1320 and althouth it isnt quite 2Ghz, it still outperforms other 2Ghz notebooks. Its by far the best laptop I've owned so far. Best bit is that if I need to work off batteries, I can squeeze almost 5 hours out of it. Oh and I'm yet to find a remote I can't programme with it. Including Marantz RC3200's.

I have just started using the averatecs. For the price I don't think they can be beat. The 2100 series uses an AMD Turion 64 bit proc. It has 512mb ram standard. Dual Layer DVD burner, ati graphics, amazing 12.1" widescreen, and weighs about 4 lbs. Built in wifi, SD/MMC slot, 3 usb, and firewire. Costco's got em for $950. With their 6 month no questions asked return policy I felt safe buying a couple. I've only had them for a few months but so far it's been the best laptop I've owned, especially for a sub $1000 machine.

I'd say the best hardware laptop out there is a Toshiba. (I've repaired laptops in a previous life and rarely saw them.) It's also what I have and I have had no issues. Of course, any manufacturer's laptop will have lots of garbage pre-loaded on it. Best advice is to remove what you don't want from startup.

I've used Toshibas while working with previous employers and had nothing but problems, in 2001 or 2002 there was a class action lawsuit of some kind against Toshiba for their laptops and the company I was working at at the time received some money back for their pain and suffering.

[Link: techworld.com]

[Link: news.zdnet.com]

[Link: pcworld.com]

Heh - after I was out of that line of work. (Didn't care for it too much - way too many itty-bitty parts.) I'm still surprised I didn't hear about it.

got my new dell for xmas from my fiance, nice dell 17" wide screen, huge drive, 512 ram, just got my socket pcmcia 232 card in the mail today, its quite a machine.

i always thought 17" was too big, but once you go 17 you'll never go back, its really nice, keep simpl windows on half of the screen and vtpro on the other or whatever you use, thats really really niiiice. also the centrino has awesome battery life, i really love this computer.

I've owned Toshiba Trecra laptops since they had a 486SX25 processor. They were solid until about 2001. Now there junk, including the one I'm typing from. the last three have all had problems and I won't do it again.

My vote is still for Panasonic toughbook. the kind of problems that Toshiba and Dell are having have nothing to do with how you take care of them. It's the luck of the draw and you got lucky. Industry stats have shown hands down that the toughbook is the most reliable laptop out there. The warranty is excellent and customer service is US based. Just loading a clean OS to rid yourself of the BS doesn't always work either as you dont' always have the drivers you need to make it all work without lots of hassle. The toughbook comes with a clean OS.

I haven't looked in a few months but last time I didn't think the Panasonic was more than about 10% above the rest for similar features. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. But that's just my opinion.

This is the way I order all of my machines. They will remove everything for you. Like TCA said, make sure to get the OS on CD, not the image partition on the hard drive.

I bought 5 Dells in the last year, and they've all been fine. I was able to buy two Dell 600m's for the price of one Toughbook. - 900/1800. The only thing I upgraded was the RAM - 1 Gig is the minimum for these little guys. So the last three were 1000 each.