Hey PC guys....

[Matra et Alpine]

hmmm mind you "replacing twice"
Is a delicate balance as to whether it's best to get better product and then the service is less critical or less quality and made up for by better service.

[kingofthering]

Check out the Lenovo ThinkPad W-series. Not only do you get a built-in rollcage, you get the famous nipple mouse, a built-in Wacom digitizer in the palmrest, and even two screens if you want.

These things can take quite the beating if you get the rollcage models - I've personally dropped, kicked, and stepped on my T-series. Yeah, they can be quite pricey without the employee discount , but buying direct cuts a lot of the crap out of the price.

Edit - stock warranty (1 yr. base) is pitiful but I've heard good things about consumer service.

[coolieman1220]

what about an Alienware? very powerful and reliable, also supercool and unique.

I love my macs though...

[Matra et Alpine]

Always a lover of the IBMs kingofthering, but wasnt' sure once Lenovo started their own design decisions and prices dropped.

Liek HP about 5-8 years ago when they started chasing the home-market and cut corners.
Like you with employee allocated I'd machines for 10 years that spend 30% of ther year in plane holds and dropped regularly in hotel rooms whilst emptying the mini bar and survived. Newer machines are getting back to that better build quality.

Come back to Q on wht the timeline for replacement is.
Newer chipsets and processors are really pushing the envelope again so that this coming machine in the mass market is faster than last years top end from likes of alienware
Whcih of course means coudl be some GREAT deals for current Alienware -- whose product design I LOVE

[culver]

I like the Thinkpads a lot. My M4400 has cooled me on Dell. As I said, the service was top notch and I know they didn't make money off me. I'm actually kind of hoping it dies one more time just before the warranty is out. Perhaps I can get a 4th computer!

Really, though, three in a row is one reason I hesitate with Dell right now. The other is this wasn't a well designed computer from a usability POV. MY M20 was.

[Sledgehammer]

what about an Alienware? very powerful and reliable, also supercool and unique.

I love my macs though...

But overpriced and underdelivering for the money. I sugest Asus, you get a well equiped full keyboard laptop for under $1000 with the graphics and processor to back up gaming. The only thing I dont like about mine is the battery life, but its been the same battery for nearly 3 years. Full charge and full processor power, I get around 50 minutes, low power mode with 5% processing power cutoff, I get around 2 hours.

[GeerHed]

A year ago I decided I wanted a machine that wouldn't run out of power in 6 months or a year, given all the new bloatware that's always being "upgraded."

So I built my own: a dual-AMD processor, 8 core box with 16 gb RAM, initially 6tb SATA internal disk (now 10) high-end video (dual monitors) and sound cards. I had to go from Windoze XP to W7 to handle all the memory.

After a year, I'm pleased with the hardware, but Windoze 7 has some of the same old bugs that date back to W95: insufficient graphics (GDI) handles and no way to recover them when they're not released properly by poorly-designed or malfunctioning software and memory leaks that reduce the amount of available RAM...both of which require frequent (twice a week, generally) reboots.

Other than that, I'm happy with it. Total price was somewhere around $2k, including some new disk drives. And after a year, I don't feel the need to upgrade, so I guess the project was a success.

Here's the build diary:
http://www.raytherat.com/dreadnought/Welcome.html

GH (aka Ray the Rat)

[Matra et Alpine]

ATI -- 'nuff said NEVER been happy with their drivers
I'm also always suspicious of the quality of the BIOS/driver/OS when using server ships and workstation software.
NEVER convinced the optimisation in both areas is ideal or bug free.
BUT you get a lot of bang for less buck !!

NIce rig.
WHat do you use it for mainly ??

[pimento]

I have an ATi 4870x2 in my PC (Win7), it's been fine. Some driver issues initially, but they've been fine since a few months after. But such is life when you get the latest and greatest hardware.. it'd be nice if it wasn't, but it's just not possible to test every hardware combination out there. That's a nice advantage for Apple.. because they control the hardware, they don't have to worry about being compatible with everything. Microsoft and all that lot have to work on a vastly more varied set of hardware, which obviously makes things far harder to get right - yet on Apple hardware, gaming performance is (last I heard) about 30% faster under Windows 7 than Mac OSX. (Results from Left 4 Dead 2 Mac version vs Windows version). From what I read that was at least partially a driver optimisation issue.

[Matra et Alpine]

^^ The diifference might well be down to the game having optimised DirectX features ?
re graphics, I can be a bit "apple-esque" with nVidia versus ATI.
ie for not completely rational reasons will defend nVidia software and driver updates ahea dof ATI. Used both in many machines built over many years and jsut "gut feel" onNVidia having less "gotchas". I'm sure if I was competely analyticial there woudl be nothing in it ... jsut liek Mac v PC debates

[pimento]

Very true, there's always pros and cons and all. I've used both too, the selection between the two being based on $$$ vs performance benchtesting results available at the time (which take into account driver performance, but not the gotchas).

The game in question has a mac version and a windows version, but the windows one has been out for much longer so I'm sure there is some optimisation to be done with its engine too. From what I can recall I think the comments about the drivers in OSX came from Valve themselves.

Also, as a total oblique, I still find it amusing that PC = Windows. Microsoft did well to grab that term for themselves.

[jcp123]

Windows and pc hardware ain't gotten any better. My year old MacBook is still a far better machine than any pc I've ever had.

[pimento]

Windows and pc hardware ain't gotten any better. My year old MacBook is still a far better machine than any pc I've ever had.

Your year old macbook is running 2/3 year old hardware that's readily available in a windows machine.

[jcp123]

Maybe but it seems to operate better. I don't have all the little bugs and errors I got on windows. And the physical case just seems to be of a higher quality and care level than any PC. Downsides? Compatibility issues, which is really silly at this point. And, no comparable office suite is standard. Other than that I would have to nitpick to find faults vs. Pcs which hand them to me on a silver platter. I'd give a lot to just have win 3.1 or 95 back with some reliability improvements - newer windows seem to focus on adding feature content while trivializing the improvement in glithchiness.

Although ideally, we would cut down this whole computer dependence thing entirely.

[pimento]

Windows 7 has been very stable for me, I think it's the best one they've ever done (and yes, I go back to Windows 3.1 as well). ME was an abomination that managed to kill off that stream of Windows (end of the DOS based line) and Vista wasn't much better, but 7 is a genuinely good OS. I went back to a Win98 machine a few years ago.. it was horribly clunky!