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Trivial Pursuits => Wild Card => Topic started by: wombat on January 12, 2014, 12:47:32 am

Title: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: wombat on January 12, 2014, 12:47:32 am
Last week my laptop died. It has been partly brought back to life and is limping along as a zombie but I need another one right away. We went shopping and I discovered that every single laptop now has those nearly flat keys and feels totally mushy and horrible.

I have two questions:

1. What kind of business model is this anyway? There are eighty billion different laptops that you somehow have to choose among, but there isn't actually any CHOICE. Why doesn't any company offer an actual choice, where one thing that differs among the computers is the keyboards? This certainly used to be true.

2. Can anyone recommend a new laptop with a keyboard that doesn't feel like mush?
Title: Re: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: wombat on January 14, 2014, 12:45:08 am
I went to a store and did that. That's how I discovered that you don't have a choice and they all feel like mush.

What I ended up doing was buying a newer version of the laptop I have now. The keyboard is reported to be the same. Someone told me they break all the time in just the way that mine broke, so I got a new model that is described:
Quote
"It was built to military specification, but it's meant to endure an even more demanding user — school kids."

So I'm hoping for the best.
Title: Re: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: wombat on January 14, 2014, 01:31:51 am
It's a Lenovo Thinkpad. I got the current one because lprkn suggested it, so if you want to mock, you better be able to take on a Marine.
Title: Re: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: Choop on January 14, 2014, 03:49:25 am
if you'd have pressed me specifically or bribed me, i'd have recommended a thinkpad. good choice, and good rec lprkn
Title: Re: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: Choop on January 14, 2014, 02:21:51 pm
hey better dell than toshiba. or MAHWIYFF's samsung, with two hard drive failures in the eleven months since purchase

i have a phenomenal dell tower for work, i wish it was mine own hardware. i wish a laptop existed with a dual 22" widescreen and full size keyboard.

i just cracked myself up at the post-filter version of "clit mouse" ( <- hacked for filter avoidings), which i always liked on the thinkpad
Title: Re: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: wombat on January 14, 2014, 02:32:48 pm
They were good. However, they changed third party suppliers for some of the sub-assemblies last year and since then have been having a new crop of failures.

Maybe this is why one of my facebook friends said she'd gone through three of them in the last eighteen months at work. I'm hoping that buying the one that's specifically advertised as sturdy will avoid that problem, or at least give me a leg to stand on when it breaks and I have to yell at them.

Someone else said Toshiba keyboards were good, but I once had a Toshiba that failed due to an idiotic battery problem and swore never to get another.
Title: Re: Wombat has to buy a new laptop and she hates America
Post by: Choop on January 14, 2014, 03:12:07 pm
my optiplex is a 990 from a couple-few years ago, and it's still kicking ass. but then, the internals aren't all dell parts either, which is the major benefit of a tower over a laptop.

honestly if i could get a laptop and bandwidth fast enough to mirror my tower, i'd be happy with that.