I have no idea, if you firgure out your questions pass along the answers because my 2001 Vaio is on it last legs.

And I really haven't had any problems with mine (knock wood), which was awesome because I had just had a total lemon of a PC laptop before I bought it. (It was not the company's problem per se, I just got a lemon. I accept that it happens...especially now that it's no longer my problem.) One of the things that had me on the fence between another PC or a Mac was the cost. Macs really aren't cheap. I have to say though, that I don't find my Mac nearly as frustrating as I found my previous PCs or even the fake husband's desktop PC. Faster on start up. Less viruses. No major meltdowns after a software upgrade (unlike the other week when his PC did an upgrade in the middle of the night and woke us up because it didn't work). I don't have to restart a gazillion times. And I didn't have to spend as much on software immediately like I have with PCs in the past. The downside of a Mac is that not everything I like to use is Mac-compatible, though things are getting much better. Sony even came out with a Mac version of the software for my Sony Reader last week. (YAY!!!)

I don't think I'll be switching back to a PC anytime soon.

Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.

with Macs either and tho they're shiny and seem to have really cool tools that my artsy side might enjoy....I love the familiarity of my pcs...great experience with hps, growing to love a baby sony vaio...I HAVE to have lots of memory and speed to run the programs I work with - that's one drawback with the sony, great speed for surfing and office aps, but no way could I run photoshop on it much less the entire suite....bottom line, I'm a size queen, big screen, big memory and lots of options for expansion are must haves for an everyday laptop imo....but the sony is reallllllllly cute....tablets are cute too...

hurry up and decide!!! :)

Birthday present to self last month was the Asus Eee PC - the blue one with the 10.5 hours of batterly life and Windows XP.  I think netbooks are about the only thing you can still get with XP on them.  I didn't want to be a guinea pig for Windows 7 and I definitely didn't want Vista, either.  So since those were two of your areas of concern, you might want to reconsider a netbook.

Here, this is the one I got -

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002DYIXMS/ref=ox_ya_oh_product

And by the way, I fully sympathize with the love you have for your tablet.  I feel that way about my phone!

Erin

My Mobile Advetures *~*~* - Mobile/photo blog | @BellTinkR

The Single Rider - The fine line between "alone" and "free" | @TheSingleRider

because my 2 year old Mac book was full to the brim and data was dripping down the sides. I talked to a guy at the Genius Bar in the local Apple store and he suggested that the computer was really solid and a new and bigger hard drive might solve my problems. With Apple's help, my new hard drive was formatted and my old system with all my apps and documents was recreated from a time machine backup. Now I have room to grow. I don't know if something like that would solve your problem (or if you have a backup system like that) but it cost less than $100 as compared with the price of a new MacBook.

Virginia DeBolt

BlogHer CE

Web Teacher

First 50 Words

...because I'm pretty adamant about not choosing between PC and Mac, or in fact, between anything.

My current laptops:

Sony VAIO VGN-CS290JER (bought in 2009, 4GB RAM, 250MB HD, 2GHz Intel Core Duo T6400, Win Vista Home Premium)

Apple G4 iBook (bought in 2004, 1.5GB RAM, 60GB HD, 1.33GHz PPC, OS X 10.4.11)

I don't think I could give up either one. With Apple's and Adobe's announcement that support for PPC Macs will be fading into the sunset, I'm hoping to replace the iBook with a MacBook Pro sometime next year.

It's too soon to say whether or not the VAIO is reliable. The one hardware issue I had was self-inflicted: dog hair caught in the trackpad buttons. Bad dogs, Axel and Freya! Use your OWN laptops! It is my first, but the third VAIO in our household, with the oldest one being about three years old. We like Sony products, but in general they are somewhat overpriced. Part of that might be paying for style, at least for me: my laptop is Sangria Red with a color-matched Bluetooth wireless mouse.

I will say that Vista was not the hell I expected it to be. I have had only two issues between February and now. One was due to a prematurely released patch, and the automatic diagnostics following the blue stop screen led me to the correct solution in the MS Knowledge Base, which took all of a couple of minutes to apply. The other was due to Acrobat 7 Professional not working at all under Vista, forcing me to upgrade from CS2 to CS4 before I really wanted to. This problem was solved quickly also, but sadly by throwing $600 at it, so... RIGHT HERE, Adobe and Microsoft (insert rude gesture here). I didn't feel the need to downgrade to XP and I'm not sure whether I'll be an early adopter of Windows 7 either.

As for the iBook, I can honestly say it has given me no problems to speak of in the almost five years I've owned it. I'm not saying that as an Apple fangirl, because I'm not one and squee-ing fangirls and fanboys just make me want to stab them. I'm saying it as a happy owner of a virtually trouble-free product.

Probably not as much help as you hoped for, except maybe for the part about Vista not killing all my stuff... or my spirit?

vomviersen :: Kathi Wilson
http://rottweilers.brilliant-disguise.net/

You do NOT need a new computer, you need a secretary.

Any computer will give the ghost the way you work it, 18 hours ........ Denise !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope this is helpful :)


Wilma Ham

www.wilmasblog.com

I've been using Windows 7 since it was released to the public, what, a week or two ago? Lousy memory here. What I can tell you about it, in my opinion, is that it's pretty decent. I skipped Vista - went from XP to Windows 7. Windows 7 is a huge improvement - boots up far far faster. On my computer, boot time is about 1/4 or 1/5th the time that it took to boot XP. Performance all the way around is improved. It's stable - haven't had a single crash.

I usually wait until the first service pack release to upgrade operating systems, but I had a problem that couldn't be resolved in XP. Unfortunately, it's still not resolved, but it's because Apple doesn't provide Windows drivers for their USB keyboards. Longer story there which I won't get into.

Laurie in Sri Lanka

Chilli & Chocolate | A Canadian in King Parakramabahu's Court | LMAshton on Twitter

and like you, I'm on it for a huge amount of hours in the day--like 12-14. I've been a Mac user since college in the late '80s--though have used lots of desktop PCs at various jobs over the years.

On paying the Mac price versus the much cheaper PC laptops that are available--this is my theory: if I spent 12 hours a day in a car, I would not buy the cheapest car. I would buy the most comfortable car. If I'm going to spend 12 hours a day on the computer, I want a computer that is not going to crash and is a pleasure for me to use--so I am willing to pay the extra money to have a Mac--which meets that criteria for me.

I have many co-workers that are also heavy computer users--and they are mostly Dell users--who constantly complain about their computers falling apart, failing to work, and generally being pieces of crap. I don't understand why one would spend 12 hours a day on a computer that they hate.

was not actually that you should buy a Mac (although I'm very happy with mine)--it was that you might want to adopt a "penny-wise/pound-foolish" attitude when looking at laptops, given how much time you spend on them.

I just came across this post today, so apologies if you've already solved this particular tech problem. I know just where you are as I have a laptop I love and do not want to give it up, though I know I may have to someday.

I do reviews for a tech magazine and I've used Win7 and like it a lot. It ran just find on my netbook, which tells me that it's a far sight better than Vista in many ways. I would say don't be afraid to get a Win 7 laptop, because you're not going to have the same issues as with Vista.

Long battery life often comes with a price of weight. But I just reviewed a computer that lasted almost 10 hours on our tests and is 4 pounds, which is pretty awesome. It also costs just $800. the drawback is that it' a CULV system, which means it's powerful enough to handle low to medium power applications and tasks but will be slow for higher level tasks. If you don't encode video or do heavy-duty image editing or want to play MMORPGs, you're good.

The system is called the ASUS UL30. It's 13.3 inches, but there are other sizes in the UL line, including 15.6, I believe.

Honestly, I could go on about laptops all day if you let me! But I'll leave it there since you seem to have gotten a lot of good advice upthread.

K. T. Bradford

Laptop Blog | Twitter

Girl + Tech = eee!