Favorite laptop?

[Papa_Complex]

Originally Posted by fatbuckRTO

Have a low-end Dell Vostro from 2008 that's still going strong. It had some sort of weird problem with a pinstripe screen of death for a couple years, where if I left it on for 24 hours or more it would sometimes lock up and put pinstripes on my screen, but during those years I had the NMCI smartcard software loaded on it. Once I took that off and reformatted, I have had zero problems with the laptop.

NMCI destroys every computer component it touches.

I also have a Dell Inspiron that I got as a hand-me-down, it's from the 2008 / 2009 time-frame. I use it as my primary now because it's a little more powerful and a little more up-to-date (runs Vista, so I've caught up with the last decade). My wife recently sat on it accidentally during a road trip, for about 30 minutes. It was in a cheap Targus case. That laptop is still running fine.

We used Dell Latitudes in Kuwait and Iraq, where we worked in not-dust-tight-at-all-and-air-conditioned-sometimes tents. We cleaned them off at least once a week, and they ran fine for a year in the desert. They were at least two years old at the time, and they were still running fine at the end of the deployment.

Long story short, I recommend Dell.

I've used and serviced a pretty large number of notebooks, over the years. Dell were the first I actually liked. I've used a bunch of Dell Latitude units and rebuilt units from abused scraps left over from clients, and they've all worked well for me. I beat a small XPS unit to death over the course of 3 years by carrying it in my saddlebags, and now have a Dell Vostro. It was the best performance I could get, for a good price, while sticking with Dell.