"Barry Watzman" <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote:
> HP would not be my first choice; the hardware is ok, but they have
> been less user friendly over time than some other vendors (they are
> not the worst, but there are better).

Thanks for the detailed reply, Barry. I think what you wrote about
HP service might be right, based on my pre-sale inquiry experience with
them through their Web site. After bouncing my email to different
outfits, with each bounce sending me an automated reply of that fact, I
got an actual human email response asking me for the model, product,
serial number, purchase date, etc. as if he was answering a post-sale
question. This guy obviously did not even bother to read my original
question, so what am I to expect from them in the future?

> Personally I'd prefer Lenovo, Dell and Toshiba to HP. I was also very
> favorably impressed by a Gateway that I bought this past summer.

Well, I've looked at Lenovo but (despite noe being Chinese owned)
they are some of the most expensive notebooks around and even so, most
models still come only 1 GB memory. So I quickly eliminated them from
consideration. However, I might take another look at Toshiba, Dell,
Gateway or even Sony. Do you have any good info on Fujitsu, Asus or Acer
notebooks?

> Don't know if the bios will boot from a USB flash drive or not. These
> days, it probably will (most now do), but it's still a model-by-model
> issue to some degree.

That's true, that's why I try to field some pre-sale questions about
things like that and I hope eventually I find a notebook maker who
actually takes such questions seriously. Otherwise I just hope that
somebody here reading my question already has that type of laptop and
can answer from personal experience.

> Pretty much all of today's drives that have DVD burners will burn
> pretty much everything. This is more a function of the drive than of
> the laptop, and most laptop makers use different drives (from
> different manufacturers) in different production runs of the same
> laptop model. But the standard today is to use drives that burn pretty
> much all formats of everything (at least of CD and DVD ... R and RW, +
> and -, single and dual layer). The only thing you won't always find
> is support for "Lightscribe" (by that or another name with a different
> trademark).

One of the reasons I was looking at HP was the Lightscribe feature
and the fact that I read somewhere that HP models seem to use an optical
drive that can read and write CD+G tracks. But I wanted it confirmed.

> Windows updates (Windows itself, e.g. literally "Windows Update") is
> generic from Microsoft. But if you need support (e.g. telephone
> support), that still comes from the OEM (laptop vendor), and all
> driver support and updates also comes from the hardware vendor.

OK, I can live with that.

Thanks again,
Rudy