New laptop - advice needed

[Dai]

Originally Posted by Osem

These threads always seem to raise more questions than they answer don't they.

Don't they just.

Been down to PC World today to get some 'hands on' time. I thought actually hefting them around and twiddling about on the keyboards might help. But quite honestly I'm no nearer to a decision even after that.

[SnoopZ]

What i hate about my parents Toshiba laptop is the annoying loud click when pressing the touch pad buttons, so for that reason alone i'd never buy a Toshiba if it suffers from that, luckily my trusty Dell doesn't suffer from that.

[qasdfdsaq]

The loud click is part of the overall cheap feel of the device. The Realtek wireless cards they use are junk, the crappy non-extendable battery is junk, and anything with a Toshiba hard drive in it is junk imo. I've had to replace 3 times more Toshiba hard drives than any other make.

[Osem]

Found these articles regarding reliability:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08...laptop_survey/

Top of the reliability list is Sony and Toshiba with 93 per cent of Which? members surveyed saying their laptop had not needed repair

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile...laptops-651331

Asus and Toshiba make 'most-reliable' laptops

They're from Aug. 2008 and Nov 2009 so has something happened to the Toshiba offering since then?

[progers]

I bought an ACER 5612WLMi several years ago and have no problems with it. I have recommended ACER to several friends who then bought ACERs and have also had no problems.

I've recently upgraded mine to Windows 7 and it handles that very well.

I'd recommend ACERs to anyone

[Waldo Pepper]

Originally Posted by Waldo Pepper

Avoid anything from the HP Pavilion series. Mine worked fine until about a few weeks after the warranty expired. HP were simply not interested.

Having Googled my problem of overheating and it seems the problem was rife regarding the Nvidia chip overheating. I have had to make huge mods to the motherboard by adding highly polished copper shims plus a dose of Artic Silver paste to replace what appears to be a piece of blue tack looking snot as a heatsink transfer material over the GPU. During me finding out what was overheating it sat on top of a huge floor fan blasting cold air over everything inside.

Fortunately for me I had the skill of dismantling the thing after watching several Youtube vids of how to solve the problem.

Despite this problem, I really liked my HP lappy as I had a good optimised version of W7 installed on my SSD with all my apps which I wasn't prepared to give up and buy another. PC World wanted £35 for their "Tech guys" to install my SSD into a new laptop. Two screws and a quick swap would have been about £400/hour from experience of some dork to do.

It took many hours to dismantle fix and put back together. Not something an average Joe would want to do.....so avoid at all cost.

BTW it's still going strong but with many physical mods that include a keyboard with a slight arc to hold down the copper shimms.

In my opinion re-laptops, as we get faster and hotter with multi core CPUs, there is a limit outside Moores law where we can cool them because of the huge amount of heat generated.

I have also found this weekend that painting the heatsink in matt black spray paint dropped the internal temps by over 10 deg C. I think the heatpipe has died which apparently isn't uncommon. Matt black paint allows the heatsink to radiate heat into the air which is moved by the fan.

[Osem]

Well in highly atypical style I have today purchased the following from Costco:

Toshiba Satellite C660 181 - AMD E350 dual core processor, 6gb RAM, 320gb HDD.

It hasn't got all the bells, whistles and gaming capability some machines have but I reckon it'll be fine for what my lad is going to use it for.

Cost £325 inc VAT and 2 year warranty.

Bought a Tech21 impact wrap sleeve at the same time for just over £10 inc VAT just like the one shown below.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tech21-Impac.../dp/B00357XCHS