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The Official Overclockers.com Notebook Retailer List And Rating System -- Vote Now!!

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Acer - 9.8

Would be a 10.0 if I didn't have a slight problem with the touchpad that I got fixed within 10 minutes on the phone with Acer Tech Support. It was really Microsoft's fault because their stupid external Mouse Drivers decided to overwrite my touchpad drivers for no apparent reason :mad: :mad:

Dell - 8.0
 
i'd give the dell 600m a 9.5 out of 10...

it's thin, light, great battery life, looks sleek, quiet, and very tweakable with 4 or 5 software programs that allow overclocking, fan speed tweaking, setting performance levels...etc..and they can usually be had for a reasonable price...

i guess it would be nice if the case felt a bit sturdier...hopefully i won't drop it...even the hearty ibm's might not like to be dropped anyway...
 
laptops i've had: sorry i don't remember all the model names, i got 7. I plan on being overly verbose.

toshiba tecra: 8 Very solid machine, but big and nothing special. Also, neomagic video sucks

hp pavilion n3110(?) celeron 433: 5 piece of crap: 1 dead hdd, 2 dead power connectors and a simply horrible passive matrix screen, some pcmcia cards don't even fit into it (and not because they are 32 bit). Battery of course is dead

IBM 600E: 7 Solid, relatively small good screen but prematurely dead battery (which you need to update the bios, IBM did not impress me there) Also, neomagic video sucks

Dell ultraportable 500mhz PIII: 9 waaay small about 1" thick, fast for its time, good battery, good screen, but only 800x600. battery did die eventually. Also, neomagic video sucks

Gateway Liberty 2000: 10.0 can i rate this thing or is it too old? its a 100mhz dx4 but built like a tank. From Jan 26, 1996 but the battery still works well and it's had the same install of win95 on it for 9 years. Before you say anything, I have literally never had it freeze or crash. That sounds like an exaggeration but it is not. You can also change the cpu speed at any time, and access the bios at any time with a function key, even while running applications in windows or before even booting into windows. really small, about 1.6" thick but can hide under a sheet of paper easily.

Sorry i like it alot. Don't think i would like the newer ones that much, im getting an acer :santa:

also had a Sharp: I give it a 6.7 dead battery
also have a Texas Instruments at 12mhz taht still works, excepting the battery of course, and i would give it a 6 because it was exceptionally poorly built. 2 dead batteries. I think TI sold their laptop division to acer or something though, so they need not be added.

toshiba sattelite [email protected]: gets an 8 because it is stable and solid. Every once and a while has issues with wireless. Fat big and hot though, due it being a p4. Can't blame that on toshiba. Too new for the battery to die yet.

(inhales)
 
I give compaq a 7 out of 10.

the reason is because when I bought the laptop there was nowhere saying that it came with pc2700(only 256mb is upgradeable the other mem stick is nowhere in sight), nf3 150 chipset when there is a sticker saying that the processor can do 1600mhz when the chipset only supports 1200mhz.

But it runs pretty cool most of the time, has a widescreen brightview screen that looks great, and it has a card reader on the side that would be handy if it supported cf (my camera use cf).
 
updated

toshiba tecra: 8 Very solid machine, but big and nothing special. Also, neomagic video sucks

toshiba sattelite [email protected]: gets an 8

Hey that's 2 votes for the same... ah o well... since you own 2 different ones I guess I can allow it...

nice input everyone!

Does anybody know of a way to tabulate the number of cells that have information so I can have a total #votes displayed in OpenOffice spreadsheet?
 
Compaq Presario 1600 XL1 purchased around april 2000

I give them a 6/10

The customer service was pretty good. I had a few problems with the lid and modem at seperate occasions and they sent a box for it to be shipped back right away and it came back promptly as well.

The laptop itself was well constructed (dropped a couple times, dog stepped on it). The bottom would get pretty hot at times with just one fan. The modem died a second time. I didnt try to overclock it but it did have dip switches to change the multi and fsb which i used when i updated the cpu.
 
Perfect 10 For Ibm

I vote 10 out of 10 for IBM.
I have their notebook T30 for 4 years in university. I had an HDD failer which they replaced in 1 month. I tried to be as carefull as possible but in the end I did EVERYTHING you can imagine to it. I dropped it many times too.
Once I had it in my backpack with big bottle of vodka (1.75L) and i fell on my back on the stairs completely flat with all my weight 175lbs on the laptop with bottle under it. (Don't worry nothing happened to the bottle:)
In the morning when i realized what happened :santa: , i took it out it was warped like a convex bowl. EVEN THE SCREEN WAS WARPED, cos the laptop sort of wrapped around the bottle, BUT IT WAS WORKING. It took me 2 days to carefully press on a laptop to straighten it out to almost flat.
Year after that i sent it to IBM cos my screen started flickering (NO WONDER). Well they replaced EVERYTHING. A complete NEW chasis, case, mobo, screen, ram. I think they just gave me new laptop.
Superb Customer Service.
Deserves Perfect score. ( I usually NEVER give a perfect score just like that)
PS:
The only flaw it has is an engineering design flaw. It keeps charging the battery even when it's full. So u gotta unplug the cable once it's charged or your battery can only provide 15min of power after a year of such use.
 
Compaq 4 years ago 9 of 10 today 5 of 10.
There armada series notebooks were very up to date and well designed/built. Their parts were easy to come by. I still have a 7400 P2 300 that just keeps banging away. Ive had to put one hard drive in it and replace a screen my daughter broke. It has been dropped numerous times, once being from 4 feet off the ground onto concrete (luckily it landed flat on not on a corner :eek:) Their support site was easy to navigate and i could get part number and compatabilty info quick and easy. Today, im affraid to even pick one up with one hand becasue they "flex" soo much. People i know with them have nothing but problems, and since hp took over, their site support blows too.

Toshiba 10 of 10 While the A60 i bought my wife feels flimsy, it performs very well. The restore cd allows for partition sizing so i can dual boot easily. The battery failed prematurly, but we received a new one in two days. The screen looks good, after a year the hinges are still tight. It's a DTR so it gets used every day for several hours. While the fan is a bit noisy, its capable of cooling the prescott we have in it well enough that even rendering video or folding (see our folding @ home forum), i dont need to worry about being branded when using it on my lap.

Since being pretty happy with Toshiba, I bought myself a tecra M2. It came with 512 mb of ram. unlike other companies, they used a single stick of 512 and not 2x256. So when i threw a gig in it, i ended up with 1.5 gigs of ram instead of 1.25 and a stick that was useless. Even though the lappy is fairly small, The keyboard is not bad to use and it came with a mouse pad AND pointer (that sucker comes in handy for driving/clicking). I have not had an issue with this lappy yet, so i have no first hand experience with toshiba support. The site was easy to navigate though, and made researching the lappy i wanted was a snap. For example, while i needed proc type, battery life, weight, etc, i also needed to know if they had a model with a magesium chasis or hybrid magnesium/ plastic (which this one is) or just plastic.

Nearly half of my wife's coworkers have toshiba's (about 25% dells and the other 25% hp's) The Toshiba reps help them with incentives. But its the after purchase thats worth mentioning. They are using everything from the budget models up to the Qosmio. Other than a few battery issues (my wife was one of them) and one bad keyboard, oh and a failed hard drive, they have all been pretty happy (or at least lying to me well)

Dell gets a 7 of 10

I havent owned one of these myself, but i get to fix a few of them, and have friends that have them. Their design is not bad, They seem to perform ok, except i dont like the way they low ball their prices and offer so little. Finding info on their website blows big time. I wasted a lot of time needlessly there. While they are good at answering the phones, their support is quite lacking for anything involving more knowledge than swapping out the battery :/. while this would not prevent me from buying one, it does decrease the chances enough where i probably won't.

IBM 9 of 10
Their laptops are legendary in terms of performance and durability but their price reflects this. Parts are easy to get and finding info is not bad. ergonomically they look like chevy truck of the 70's and 80's which while it gives them a sense of familiarity, they also look quite dated. This is not a bad thing really more of an observation ( I still own three of those old chevy trucks) I may well buy an IBM in the future.


Gateway shares the 5 of 10 rating for compaq for much of the same reasons excluding the fact that i can never really consider a time when they were preferable.

Sony 7 of 10
All i can say as of the last year or so is :/ Their P3's were wonderful, then about the time they started making P4's, it seemed they couldn't make a motherboard last anymore. They really feel solid and can survive abuse, but motherboard failure is too high from what I've seen. Some better quality control is in order before they ruin their good rep.
 
UPDATED.... still no scores below 5 awarded... I woulda figured by now that there would be a few.. I have added BEST/WORST Reputation to the bunch of stastics...


yay the database has grown past 50 votes... time to back it up before something crazy happens that causes me to loose it and I have to enter in all that information all over again :rolleyes:
 
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Its not a list of Retailers or Vendors. Its manufacturers (although some do sell their own stuff).

The quantitative listing of manufactures for laptops like this is flawed because peoples needs and expectations are taken into account for their numeric assesment of the gear.
 
Maybe it should be more interesting to evaluate certain aspects related to these notebooks. For example, for my HP 4600 series:

PERFORMANCE (relative to what you would expect from those specs): 10/10 It does what it says on the label and it does it well. I don't think you should complain about performance if you bought a 500 dollars notebook and it doesn't do very well in Farcry. In fact it's pretty much the most stable machine I have ever owned (It hasn't been bought for gaming though). Don't use the battery much...

BUILD QUALITY: 6/10. Pretty fragile, crappy LCD, bulky. On the other hand, I once modified the power scheme and put in my backpack without turning it off... Stayed there for like 5 hours, when I took it out smelled like melted plastic, but it was OK. And I'm talking here about a very well cushioned Targus backpack...

PRICE: you get what you pay for, and you will have to agree that, ATBE, an IBM is gonna be more expensive than a HP or Emachines. 10/10 here, I payed $600 for mine and it served me well for the last year (8h/day doing everything from rendering to office apps and web surfing)

Average: 8.66

C.
 
I recently bought an IBM t40 (pre-owned) and so far I have found it to be problem-free for a laptop originally bought in 2003 (oldish for a lappy?)

PROS: great IBM support for drivers 'n stuff, well built (takes the weight of a dog jumping on to back of LCD), lots of features (first laptop), long life lappy AFAIK

CONS: IBM safety copy of windows XP's original language came up in asian characters (unique case?) :rolleyes:, heavy, didn't have much luck trying to clear dust from vents.

IBM thinkpad T40 - 9/10


Edit- R40 not T40 :shrug:
 
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Updated: backupver laptopdatabase2


all but maybe one or two of the manufacturers sell and support the laptops that they make so technically I am correct but technically It should be called OEM Rating system but oh well... you all figured out what I meant otherwise it would not have been pointed out...


9mmCensor said:
The quantitative listing of manufactures for laptops like this is flawed because peoples needs and expectations are taken into account for their numeric assesment of the gear.


Everybody has their own different needs and expectations... some people don't need much or don't expect much and others need alot or expect alot... I say that if enough people vote that theese extremes will average out.



again I say If you want a company added... JUST Give em a score for me to put up...


let the voting continue onward!!!!
 
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