I figure this is as good a place as any to say this, I won't be spending as much time on BLF as I used to until I get my hands on a new computer. PMs will definitely get checked, and there will be a limited amount of posting. Chances are it will only be a week or two until I'm back on full time.
The laptop and tablet markets are shaky right now and that’s why I’m only updating my desktop for the time being. We’re seeing a convergence of the laptop and tablet into one ultra portable yet powerful device so I’ll wait a year or two to see how that shakes out. So far Microsoft is actually leading that race with the introduction of the Surface RT and pro series, with the latter being equipped with full Windows 8 functionality. I think Samsung and Asus already has models like this but they aren’t marketed very heavily. Also, they aren’t equipped with the handy detachable keyboard. I predict Apple will come out with something similar a year from now and claim victory in getting there first 
haha
So scaru, tell us what you’re considering. Will all the Dell love in this tread cause you to give it another look? 
I will hold the fort down for you.
Yeah Iwill most likely give dell another shot, but I may take the advice of buying from the small business section.
Absolutely do. I still won’t say that the SB customer service is ‘excellent’, but it’s far better than the ‘home’ group.
We’ve got, oh god, probably 75 Dell machines in the building. They range in vintage from 2005ish to current, and overall, the give very little problem. The most common faults are power supplies (easy/cheap to replace) and rotational hard drives. Since last year sometime, we no longer buy any rotational hard-drives, so I expect the failure rate to go down further from here.
We use dells for everything at work and have been almost problem free. When we do have a problem they jump and someone is onsite that day. I think that they may value their corporate clients a bit more than joe blow off the streets.
I would only buy xpe or precision line from them if I was buying for home use (and go through the sales rep from work)
Hope it works out for you.
I just died a little
Haha… too funny
Ive heard good and bad about Dell, perhaps it comes down to some models are well made, some are cheap junk quality, and toss in some luck to the mix
Yeah. My dad bought DELL notebook almost 1 year ago (zero probs). Many of my friends have DELLs too. Only one of them had problems - HDD starts to fail. Replaced for free in 5 days if I remember well. But yeah, their support is quite PITA :bigsmile: Tried to help that buddy and darn, we’ve made pics of those errors, screenshots, used their own program that comes with notebook… and 4 days later they “realized” that HDD was, indeed, broken, lol :bigsmile: After that, as I said, 5 days and voila, new HDD with Win7 installed 
Something interesting about reliability, but take it “as is”:
Mac.
Why not Mac and PC?
I had that exact same desk in the office at my last house
Mac? What’s Mac? Big Mac?
I bought mine from Staples about 12 years ago. I think I paid around $200. It's a good quality desk..
JohnnyMac? Does he have the answer? I wanna know!
All I can say is skip W8 (based on several trusted sources and my own pre-release testing) -working on a friend’s laptop tonight to find drivers for W7 since the mfgr won’t provide them. One more to go and I think I’ve got that one loading now.
What an awesome setup Glenn!!!
Thanks Rick!
I already gave the answer…Dell exclusively but from the small business section. :bigsmile:
Ditto!