NOT SONY. Worse than HP.

Lightscribe (whatever it's called) is kind of a gimmick. It works, but
it requires special, expensive media and it is very slow. Very few
people actually use it on a regular basis.


R. P. wrote:
> "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