Have you considered a
MacBook? I bought mine
refurbished from Apple 3 years ago, and it came with a full warranty from Apple. it's more money, but it comes with everything most people need to get by with today. I don't care for the Safari browser, so I run Firefox. Oh, and don't forget it is immune from PC viruses. My business computer is an
I-Mac G5, and in 5 years it has not encountered a single virus. I love that machine.
I bought a MacBook for my wife, and our son has a MacBook Pro as well as his own G5 for his video editing and photography business. I believe the Macs are worthy of consideration when replacing a PC laptop.
Yeesh, you don't want to hear about my 3 year relationship with the
only Mac computer I own. Other than browsing the internet and operating programs that are somehow loaded on the Mac itself, I find it useless and despise Macs. I love my iPhone now and own 3 of them. As I've mentioned before, I've sent my MacBook Pro off to college with my son thinking there would be some Macheads there who could help him. Back it came after only one month. He spent his own money to buy another laptop to get rid of that Mac.
In the 10 to 15 hours I've spend on tech support with Mac, they admit that they have compatibility issues with several business websites and they admit that there is a known problem networking them with a home network system. Of course, they tell me that these bugs will be addressed in their new OS system that will be coming out soon. Hmm, visions of Microsoft! Even our local school system went from being completely Mac to being completely windows based in the last 5 years.
When I'm out of town and want to listen to my local high school football team play on Friday nights, it's no problem on a PC. It's impossible with a Mac. In order to be able to carry on a conversation with several of my business clients, I started watching NASCAR. It is interesting to listen to the in-car scanners during the race. Forget it if you have a Mac. Just type in NASCAR and in-car scanners in any search engine and you'll get thousands of pages describing the problems with some listing 'work-arounds' that take hours to do and I've yet to see one work. Since my only laptop is a MacBook Pro (my kids have all tried it and returned it to me), it's my only option to try to listen to some radio channels on the net and to listen to NASCAR's in car scanners. Again, Mac admits that they have a problem but promise it will be addressed in their new upgrade. Um, those were the same promises I was given when I upgraded to whatever their freaking latest system is about 2 weeks after getting the Mac and being pissed as hell that it wouldn't work with most things.
My hope of Mac computers getting fixed like the iPhone has is fading fast. Believe me, I'd LOVE to say that I like Mac computers and go with them. The problem is that I absolutely HATE Mac computers and will very likely never blow money on another one. I just can't see myself blowing a few thousand dollars more on another big silver turd anytime soon.