new laptop

shop deals on amazon
Advertise with us
Shop deals on ebay
Ford SportTrac Forum

Help Support Ford SportTrac Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
G

Gerald Pierce

Well-Known Member
Joined
Sep 14, 2001
Messages
1,277
Reaction score
0
Location
Virginia Beach, VA
Found what looked like a good deal to me at CompUSA....



HP Pavilion zv6130us laptop w/AMD 64 ATHLON

DVD-R/RW CD-RW

Internal 802.11G

80GB HD

512 ram



15.4 in screen





949.00 at CompUSA -- price after 300.00 instant rebate and 50.00 mail in was 599.00



Stock limited to quantity onhand at the stores.



There are also rebates where you can get a free printer, etc, but I did not need all that crap so I just look the laptop.



If someone has a kid that needs one for college, etc.... this seems to be a good deal. I may go back and get another.
 
For what I use it for, it's great. Got all the memory card slots, etc. Came with MS works.... it got deleted right away and I am installing Office tonight. I may also install Open Office to see how it works for me and get rid of the MS Office all the way.



I orginally bought it for my daughter, until I got it home and saw it.... now she gets my old Sony :)



 
Yeah, Caymen, I hear you, but results vary from brand to brand for different people. I have heard the worst and experienced the worst with Gateway, and my HP experiences have been pretty good. Others say just the opposite. Some thing Dell walks on water, others think they are drinking Kool Aid.



PCs are like cars...it's not so much the brand as it is the support (service) you get.
 
loved both of my HP's, the last one I retired and gave to my dad after using it 4 years without one issue, including taking it in the field, surveying and engineering work, now I bought a gateway because could not pass the deal up and love it also, use to hate gateway.



james
 
That's strange, I went out yesterday and bought my wife that exact laptop from CompUSA. I'm not a CompUSA fan, but it is a very loaded notebook for an excellent price.



I used to run an IT shop for a medical research company and got to know the brands of laptops pretty well (mostly what goes wrong). HP is pretty good, overall.



IBM Thinkpad - Mostly motherboard problems, they would just stop working unexpectedly, plus they were brutally expensive.

Acer - Beautiful screens, but the cases shattered like glass. I would usually get a baggy of broken case pieces back from users.

Toshiba - Probably the workhorse of the lot, but tended to have connection problems where internal connectors needed to be routinely re-seated.

HP - Older ones had hard drive issues, the newer ones would occasionally scramble BIOS, but a re-flash usually fixed them.

Compaq - All kinds of design flaws and some of them managed to overheat badly. I wouldn't recommend these.

Gateway - Crap. I fixed a lot of these that people had for home use. These were way too mass produced as a low-cost home notebook.

Dell - They sell you support for a reason, plus work it into the cost as well. They always swapped me a working one for the broken one (after an hour or two on the phone), but I did it a little too often for my taste and most options were not built into them.



The prices are finally coming down, but the parts seem to be expensive still.
 
I run and use nothing but Gateway....3rd home computer and 2nd laptop from them.....i have no had any major trouble they couldnt be fixed in a few minutes...
 
Yup, fmarano, like I said, individual results vary. I consult for one family that has a 15 mo old Gateway desktop on it's 3rd hard drive and 2nd modem. They are kicking themselves for not getting the onsite support.
 
All of my above comments are on notebooks. I supported over 700 notebooks in the field. The desktops in the office were mainly HP and Dell. I spent a lot of time disassembling the laptops to avoid sending them in for service.



I built a desktop for the president of the company that had multiple SCSI hard drives, RAID, and a CAD-grade graphics card - It was a sweet machine. Last I heard, he was still using it.



My only gripe with Dell and HP desktops were the use of proprietary mother/daughterboard setups that assured you had to buy replacement parts from them.
 
If anyone is having or has problems with the Toshiba models regarding the power connection I might be able to help. I recently took my laptop apart and did some soldering to fix the problem. Toshiba wants to install new mobos in the laptops that are affected and it costs alot for them to fix. My model is A75-S206. I know other models are affected because of complaints in another forum.
 
I have had that exact HP laptop for almost a year now...bought it when it first came out last summer from circuit city for $950after rebates...so far its been great, the fan has gotten a little louder but great performance from the AMD chip and setup...top laptop for the money!
 
I've had three Dells' so far when I was working for a software company. The hard drive, fan or battery would die within six months. I have a Gateway Centrino 1.7Ghz and it's okay. Nice to travel with. But, open Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time and start working between the two and the system will come to a crawl.
 
I have 3 sony laptops and love everyone of them. Fantastic machines in all aspects, no problems that I couldn't fix myself or aren't common to computers in general. I now have a Compaq I've had since around thanksgiving and love it. Not a single hiccup or issue with it to date. Runs like a champ.
 
We own A Dell laptop, Dell Desktop, and a Toshiba laptop. All work flawlessly.



At work, we have almost gone exclusively with Dell and Gateway for desktops and Toshiba for laptops. The only problems we ever had was when I batch of MPC desktops arrived. We had four monitors and two CPUs die the first two months in that shipment of 12 PCs.
 
I have a toshiba p35, and it's awesome. pentium 4 3.5ghz, 80gb HD, 768mb ddr2 ram, ati radeon 9700 128mb grafix card, 17" lcd monitor. payed around 1200 at Fry's.
 
I have a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop which I've owned for 5 or 6 years and have had no problems at all. I bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop about 7 months and have no problems with that either.



Granted that with any technology, there's all ways potential problems, and some products are just plain crap, but I think it has a lot to do with how well you take care of your stuff. I've babied this computer since I first hooked it up and I've done a lot to make sure it continues to run strong.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have Toshiba and have had fantastic luck with it. Other I know say they are junk. Hard to say why what happens. But if it works for you, then you have to go with it.
 

Latest posts

Top