Buying a laptop that doesn't explode
I guess I have one rule when I’m buying hardware. It shouldn’t explode on me (unless it was designed to).
I’m struggling with buying a new laptop. I have a nice Compaq Presario R4000 that I’ve enjoyed for a year or so and it’s okay spec wise. AMD Athlon 64 processor (3500+), 2.2Ghz, 2GB of RAM. However it’s a big of a dog for doing daily development. I tried doing development on a desktop and sync up things via an external USB drive but it’s just too painful. Paths are wrong, sometimes things don’t work, software not the same, websites or services are not all there, VMs have to be reconfigured, etc.
So now I’m looking at a dual-core system. Dell and Toshiba have some okay laptops but lately everything is just blowing up on people. I mean Apple, Dell, Panasonic, and Toshiba have all done recalls on their systems. There are also reports of ThinkPads blowing sky high. Doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy. The one option that I saw via a review by someone was an ASUS A6Jc-. Looks nice and at least they haven’t started turning into ash piles.
Any suggestions?