Laptop Brand Of Choice

Id like to know what people consider the most reliable laptops are.

Recently this week, my main laptop, owned by my corporate employer, is a DELL latitude D410.  It is extremely tiny yet powerful enough that it totally serves my purpose from all angles.  I use it for developing mainly with dreamweaver and photoshop.  DELL's docking station allows me to have dual monitors with a Digital and Analog LCD.

I have had it for about 1.5 years, and have never had a problem with it.

Until Monday Feb 26, 2007.  The day HELL broke loose.........fun stuff.

In a nutshell, my HD is corrupt and due to the data that is corrupt I can only log in via SAFE MODE.  This is a blessing in disguise, because I am still able to log in and do some backing up, but one file at a time due to data corruption that halts any directory backup if a single file is corrupt within it.  (Even using xcopy).

I have found out through our outsourced IT department (CSC) that this is HD #20 since Jan 2006 for this particular model laptop.  There are only 200 of these laptops being used at my company, and 20 have experienced this HD failure.. OUCH..

This is not a fun thing to go through and even though I am diligent when it comes to backing important data up, this is still proving to be a major hassle that I hope never to go through again.  The biggest disaster that I was luckily able to recover and backup was my FIREFOX profile. 

Whipdaddy, I would seriously consider either a Macbook or Macbook Pro running an Intel Core 2 Duo. Set it up with a nice dual-boot scenario to get your familiar Windows XP running on it (I've heard Vista runs faster on a Mac than OSX). The Macbooks start at US$1100 with a 2 GHz CPU and 13" display, and the Pros start at US$2000 available in 15" or 17" screens with a 2.33 GHz CPU.

I know Amanie uses a Toshiba Satellite, and while it's got a great screen and is powerful, it has been anything but reliable.

Oh ya, there are some pretty rugged notebooks out there, but I don't know if that is what you are talking about.

I worked on a Dell Latitude for a long time and found it worked fine, but it was slooowwww. I had it upgraded and whatnot, but it just couldn't handle the development environment very well. I appreciated the lightweight of it though, better than my Toshiba (which Erik talked about). It has a horribly annoying power problem where it shorts out and can't charge the batter anymore.

I think the macbooks look awesome and they're also lightweight, but I'd still recommend a Toshiba if you want to go cheaper.

It seems like every person I know with a laptop experiences a significant problem with them sooner or later. Which sucks. I love laptops and the convenience they bring, but with all the horror stories that have been surrounding me, it's really making me hesitant to pick one up (if I ever had the money) or even recommend them to friends. I have an old Dell 400MHz Pentium 2 tower that's been going strong for well on 10 years now. No problems with it whatsoever. Problems with towers are few and far between, whereas laptops are near and often.

I think the only brand that gives high quality reliability is Lenovo with their high-end ThinkPad lineup. It used to be IBM until Lenovo bought them out. ThinkPads are expensive, but you're paying for the quality, and from what I've read on the Internet, the quality and reliability is top notch. Everything below ThinkPads, including the fancy Ferraris and Macbooks, have issues. Although the old Macbook G4s were pretty reliable as well. I think it's only since Apple moved to the Intel setup that reliability concerns became an issue, which is unfortunate.

I have absolutely no tolerance for a HARD DRIVE failure.  Especially seeing that they are apparently SEAGATE drives.  I have owned over 6 different desktop computers over the last 15 years, and I have never had any kind of peripheral problem.  So for me to have to deal with this type of HD failure makes me want to scream.

I like the idea of a MacBook Pro, but just as much as I want to have a linux box, Im not sure if im willing to jump over to a MAC.

I recently got off the phone with a client of mine who swears by IBM laptops and has claimed to never have had any type of memory or HD problem in owning 8 laptops over the last 5 years.

IBM = Lenovo.

If you're dealing with a production environment on your laptop I'm starting to feel a lot more confident that the extra reliability is worth the premium price.

Yes, I agree with Omar, get an IBM if you don't want to switch to a Mac. They're built to last. In the past 4 years, I've had 3 laptops. I started off with a Compaq, that died on me after 1 year, then I moved to a Gateway (because it was so light), and after countless times of trying to fix the stupid fan, I gave up, and went to buy one of the new Toshiba M500s. The Toshiba isn't bad, there are times when I get really frustrated with it, but other than that, it's been good. I've had it for almost half a year now, so hopefully this one will last more than a year at least.

I'm going to get another laptop through work next year & I am definitely opting for the IBM.

I had a Dell Inspiron for over 4 years with no problems.  I reformatted the hard drive once when I upgraded from Windows 98 to XP.  I ended up giving it to my nephew and what finally killed it was a bomb in Afghanistan (my nephew is fine).

I got an IBM Thinkpad T41 2 years ago through a special university discount and it has worked like a charm as well.  The only thing is that I need to get a new battery but I had to do the same with the Dell after a couple of years of use.  That's normal.

Maybe I'm just lucky with laptops.  It's desktops that always go on me...