The reason I ask is I’ve had a bad history with laptops over the past few years, although one side effect is that I haven’t actually paid for one since 2006 so, I guess I shouldn’t complain. My previous laptops are as follows:
2002 – Dell Inspiron 8100 – I bought it with my university student loan and wrote my dissertation on it. Great laptop and I have fond memories.
2004 – Dell Inspiron 9100 – A true monster. It was bigger than my car and weighed more than my house. I remember reading a review once that argued the PSU was so big and heavy it was actually a bludgeoning device used to repel attacking intruders. That made me laugh until it actually arrived… at which point I stopped laughing. Great laptop, but a tad big.
EDIT – Just found a good picture of it in a review (http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=1442) that shows the size:
2006 – Dell XPS 1710 – Probably the best laptop I have ever owned. A good size, powerful and 100% reliable. My fiancee’s brother still has it and it’s rock solid.
So far so good…. unfortunately it is all about to go very, very wrong:
2007 – Dell XPS 1730 – Probably the worst laptop I have ever owned, the build quality was beyond a joke. The first one was replaced because it seemed a child had assembled it with a hammer. The second was replaced for the same reason. The third one would just overheat and turn off 2-3 times a day. Dell replaced the motherboard, CPU, RAM and both graphics cards to try and fix it, but it was eventually replaced. When the fourth one started to do the same I politely informed Dell that it was unacceptable and they were going to give me a full refund.
2009 – Alienware M17x – Fantastic, utterly fantastic. High spec materials, top notch build quality and ran stone cold 100% of the time – which considering what was in it was nothing short of amazing. The only issue was an audio stutter from DPC latency. Dell assured me after purchase it would be resolved shortly in a BIOS update but when they eventually released the “fix” 6 months later it only fixed the issue for ATI based models and naturally I had Nvidia. Seemingly unable to fix the issue Dell then changed the chipset, moved to i7 CPUs and stopped selling it with Nvidia cards. I sent mine back for a full refund, but was genuinely sad to see it go – it was a fantastic piece of kit and was very tempted to just live with it, but a full refund on kit >6 months old was too good to refuse. Especially since the new generation hardware had since been released.
So now, armed with the same £2.5k I had back in 2007 from Dell refunds I had to choose a new laptop. I have done so and am typing on it right now, but it hasn’t been a quick or easy process and I did trial the MacBookPro. I will be talking about what I have learned in the hope the information is useful to others.