When buying a desktop computer the issues are so much simpler. Most parts are interchangeable so even if the company supplying it were to go under the very next day, parts would still be available and maintenance would be no issue. Such is not the case though with laptops (nowadays called notebooks I think...). Each company building laptops has its own proprietary design and with rare exceptions parts are seldom interchangeable. Add to this the fact that the features tend to vary widely, each company with its own well hyped slant on what is important and what is not. I spent many hours over the last few months reading ads and articles and visiting dealers in an attempt to get a handle on the whole subject and obtain a machine that would give me the power to do the development work I plan to do over the next few months without breaking the bank. The following will synopsize some of what I learned.
There are several good examples of misinformation which is used to guide the consumer toward certain products. First let's talk about microprocessors themselves. There are several types available these days, not only from Intel (the company currently trying to maintain a near monopoly in the industry) but also from companies like AMD and Cyrix. I hear general comments all the time about how bad these competing products are and how incompatible they are with current software but I have yet to see even one shred of evidence showing any truth to the rumours. I have in fact been using a Cyrix 200 Mhz Pentium chip now for nearly a year and have never had any problems at all. In addition the latest generation of AMD chips seems to outperform their Intel counterparts by a nice margin at a much lower price and in fact the highly touted Intel Pentium II, to my way of thinking, certainly shows little real improvement over the older Pentium chips, certainly not enough to justify its steep price.
The second issue surrounding microprocessors relates to speed. The old axiom that faster is better has been used to sell faster and more expensive chips for years now. I see 400 Mhz chips on the market now and certainly we will be seeing 500 and 600 Mhz speeds soon. Now all this is great and I like a fast machine as much as anyone but let's consider for a moment how much we really wait on the CPU. With the exception of software developers who spend a lot of time compiling code, most of us spend the majority of our computer wait time waiting on either the hard drive, the modem, or the graphics card. I know that I seldom find that the relatively slow 200 million instructions per second of this processor of mine causes me any great inconvenience and make no mistake about it, I am a very impatient man! So when I see a premium of $500 to $1000 for a faster CPU I figure that is a good place to save some dough.
The next issue continually muddied to sell certain products is the screen technologies. The older dual-scan (DSTN) screens are giving way to active matrix (TFT) technology. Compaq also markets a third type of screen but it is really still just a variation of the dual-scan. The dual-scan screens have very slow refresh rates and thus it was often hard to follow the mouse pointer on the screen among other problems. These screens are easy to spot since they are hard to see unless you sit directly in front of them. Some companies still sell the dual-scan technology and in fact during trips to both Circuit City and Best Buy I saw no active matrix screens at all. When I asked the salesman about it and he told me the active matrix is not good due to the fact that it greatly increases battery drain. While this is indeed true, my opinion is that this is a small sacrifice to make for the superior viewing capabilities. The other thing I noticed at these stores was that the only screens they sold were 12" even though 13", 14", and to a limited extent 15" screens are now widely available although certainly at a premium price. Still, if you look at one of the larger screens you will be amazed at how superior it is.
There are also dozens of other things to consider when evaluating laptops, port configurations, type of RAM, amount of video RAM, whether the CDROM and floppy drives can be in the machine at the same time, etc., but I won't go into those. Instead, let me address one more issue I found as maybe the most significant of all. When I first started looking I found that at the average retail outlet there were laptops from just a few major companies: Toshiba, Hitachi, IBM, Compaq, and a couple others. Only when looking at the Computer Shopper (long considered the Bible of computer paraphernalia) did I see that there were dozens of smaller companies marketing what were often much more innovative products at a much lower price. At Circuit City I was seeing computers from the "big 4" for about $2500 which would sell for about $1500 by a smaller company. Of course the downside is that if you buy a machine from a small company and they aren't still in business when it breaks then it might be nearly impossible to gets parts for it. So does this make it worth paying an extra $1000 or more to get a machine from a big company? I decided that the correct thing to do was to find a smaller company but one that had been around for at least 10 years and would presumably still be around in the future.
To cut to the chase, ultimately I chose a machine with 233 Mhz pentium, 64 mb RAM, 3.0 Gb HD, 14.2" active matrix screen, and 56 Kb modem, all for about $2300. If I had purchased this from one of the "big 4" it would have cost more than $4000. It will be here on about 5/28/98 and I will update this page after I use it a bit.
Oh my what an adventure this laptop scenario has been, but let me start from the beginning. I purchased the unit from a company called Hyperdata, you may have seen their ads. It arrived on schedule but imagine my surprise when all it had loaded on it was DOS, no Windows 95 - which had been promised. I called the salesman and he apologized and promised to Fedex me out the Win95 CDROM. It arrived as promised and I loaded it. Well, a few things worked but many did not. The screen resolution was crappy, the sound was worse, most apps either would not run or would blow up during execution. Of course by the time I discovered most of this we were already on the road with no phone or internet connection and besides, the modem did not work anyway so I could not have gotten online if I had had a line. So I called the company and was given a number for tech support - of course it was not a toll-free number and I was put on hold for over 20 minutes and finally hung up. Subsequent calls did not go much better and by the time I finally got to talk to a tech guy I had run up about 40 minutes of long-distance charges. The guy I finally got told me I had failed to load the driver disk before windows, and chastised me for not digging through the manual before loading the operating system to find out the proper loading sequence. I would have to re-format the hard-drive before I could load the drivers. Of course this meant I would also have to reload all my applications and Win95 and many of the disks for doing so were back in storage but so it went and I reformatted. I spent about 4 hours reloading everything but when I was done nothing worked - still. So I called tech support again and this time actually got a guy within 10 minutes - a new record! He said they must have sent me the wrong driver disk and told me I could download the correct version from the web. Of course I could not get online since the modem would not work so I asked if he would send it to me on a disk and he promised to do so. It was to be waiting for me when I got to Nova Scotia. Well guess what...when I got to Nova Scotia 3 weeks later it was not there - surprise, surprise! At least there I was able to get online and download the drivers. I spent about an hour trying to figure out which drivers to download and finally got them. Of course after loading them nothing worked again so once again I got to reformat the hard drive and reload everything. Once more nothing worked and now I was at the end of the line since I did not have a way to call tech support from Canada since GTE will not let you have a phone card if you don't have a telephone number and none of the 3rd party phone cards I bought would work from Canada. Oh yes, I could buy a Canadian phone card - $20 for 12 minutes - yikes!! I knew 12 minutes wouldn't even get me past the time I would spend on hold with tech support so that was not an option.
Enter Luke, a fantastic repair tech in Yarmouth NS. Luke had bailed out Flora many times so I took the whole mess down to him and left it there. He re-downloaded the drivers and went through the whole routine and nothing worked for him either. That left only one option: buy Win 98, which has much better laptop support built into it, and Luke said would support the chipset the laptop used. So they loaded Win 98, reloaded my applications for the 4th time or so, and by golly the thing worked! Hallelujah, praise the Lord! So finally, after about $50 worth of phone calls, which accomplished nothing, about 20 hours of following the instructions of techs who seemed to know nothing, and a $75 bill from Luke (and the purchase of Win 98), the plethera of problems caused by inappropriate chipset drivers were ultimately solved by a savvy tech named Luke and his loading Win 98, which I said I would never load - hehe.
Whew, what a time! Would I do it again you ask? Good question! The bottom line is this: I expect my experiences were about typical of what you get by trying to get better hardware than the 'Big 5' sell and save a few bucks. For me, personally, the quality of the final product was worth it all. The unit works well now although a single battery only will get me maybe 1 1/2 hours of computing at best. I am running at 1024 x 768 screen resolution and the screen resolution is crisp. I only have a 200 mhz Pentium CPU and sometimes would like a bit more horsepower but my experience is still that most of the time the CPU is not the bottleneck. The big problem through it all was that thing that bugs me most about American companies: after the sale is made most could not give a rat's ass about you as a customer and they seldom give the support they promise and which they should ethically and legally supply. Hyperdata is probably no worse than the rest but at this point if I were giving a recomendation it would be to try another company.
Addendum 10/19/98: And I was naive enough to think my trouble were over in the last segment! HA! About 2 or 3 weeks ago we started having trouble getting the machine to boot up - sometimes it would and sometimes it just would not. The problems grew progressively worse until finally it was DOA. At this point we were a week or two from Southern California where Hyperdata's offices were so I decided to just wait and take it in to get it fixed when I was here. We took it in on Tuesday and were assured that the contents of our hard drive were quite safe, they would call us if they needed to reformat. We called on Thursday and they said it was ready and to come on up and get the machine. So we piled into the car for another 50 mile round trip and headed on up. The guy proudly brought it out to us and booted it up. His little chest puffed out as it booted up and displayed a brand new, clean desktop. Flora and I both moaned as we realized what we were seeing - all of our data and applications had been erased and were long gone. This included everything from the trip - 350 pics which will never be able to be replaced, all the things I had written, and all the applications and setup data we had used daily - poof - gone. In addition to that, the second time we tried to boot the machine it was dead, not fixed - kaput. We are less than happy campers. I will not dwell on the bush league treatment we have received from Hyperdata - they are idiots but I too should have known better than to take them at their word - I should have learned by now that only fools believe what they are told by shysters. At any rate, on Tuesday the following week we finally got our machine back and I think it works this time. Our data is still gone, we are not one bit happy about that, but life will go on and hopefully lessons have been learned.
Good luck!
Bob