El Wray

iTrader: (1)

^You first said "customer service" (attention to detail?), hence why I pointed that out. Never said anything about support.

Also I'd like to point out that I emphasized personal experience on the Sony. They never went after business use cases - their niche is consumer. Ordering them for corporate is just a bad move, like ordering a fleet of high performance cars for daily abuse. I've evaluated just about everything out there - Asus, Acer, Gateway, IBM, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Toshiba. Each has their merits, some are good for home use, some better for business. I treat each case differently. Was also focused on OP's specifics - specs+$800-$999 price range. I'm not putting down Dell in anyway, just saying your highly biased opinion is a bit misplaced. OP will likely never have to ghost the laptop or buy 100 of them and have 2-3 fail.

Quick recap -
OP: Hey guys, I'm looking at Asus, Lenovo and MSI. Suggestions welcome!
Wray: Of the models you listed, I suggest Lenovo.
wwrx: Hey, take a look at HP Elitebooks too.
Bear: Get a used Dell, they're cheap and they'll come to your house fix your laptop, make you coffee, dust the window blinds, etc. Lenovo sucks.
..
Wray: Sony, Lenovo, Dell or HP - you can't really go wrong. Don't do Asus/MSI.
Bear:

El Wray

iTrader: (1)

PS:
I didn't know they did on site service these days. Pretty cool. OS related issues are pretty obvious and anything hardware related can be troubleshot over the phone or email. I'd suggest it for family as my time is valuable and I hate being the family/friend IT guy. Personally, I would never use or care about on site service for home. (Geek Squad may work for some, but I'm not a fan.) In business, I think I'd still only care for server hardware.

All of this stuff is commodity and meant to be replaced. It isn't Sears/Maytag where you want it around for 5-10 years.

Overbear

Yea Dell has got pretty serious about it. So as a example the Alienware I have now (owned by Dell) has a 4 year on site service, with 4 year accidental damage coverage. I had the motherboard go sideways on me 2 nights ago, they are sending out a tech this morning to meet me at my work, and replace the MB, Video card, and Wireless card just to be safe, so that includes a new CPU and new ram. All at no cost to me what so ever.

pho_shizzle

iTrader: (17)

Wow huge debate..........


I love my Lenovo T520 (discontinued and replaced with new model which has the economy keyboard design which I dont really favor. But thats personal preference).


My lenovo business machines have always been pretty bullet proof. Even when I spilled water on it, it had liquid channels to route the water out and all I had to do was replace the keyboard and was good to go.

They are made to be modular and modded as they want you to be able to take it apart and replace things as needed. Its designed with that in mind. And you know that I only deal with quality Tim.

joltdudeuc

iTrader: (6)

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/c...als+LLC&NID=CJ

50% off with coupon code USPZ579416

So buy NOW!!

joltdudeuc

iTrader: (6)

Here is a short recap

Overbear

BTW

Woot dell deal

LxJLthr

iTrader: (12)

I would be concerned with warranty. It is not through Dell, but some third party provider that I have never seen before (Metro Business Systems?). Plus Woot does not take returns...absolutely under no circumstances...so you are SOL if the laptop is DOA.

eastbaysubaru

iTrader: (9)

Thanks for posting that Gagan! I'm in the market for a new laptop as well and have been perusing the Lenovos for a while now. I got one for my mom a while back and she's been happy with it.

-Brian

Overbear

Hum didn't make note of that, last set of 10 I got off woot, all had dell warranty on them.

EpsilonK

iTrader: (2)

I have the Asus...typing on it right now....

It is best described as "meh". The harddrive is very slow, I quickly replaced it with an SSD. The build quality is not great. The headphone jack doesn't work very well, I have to wiggle it to get it to work. Also the videocard appeared to go out on it already, but by the time I got the RMA it started working again and I was in the middle of finals and couldn't afford to be without it. I bought it last summer around August. I don't expect it to last an entire additional year.

I bought it because I have purchased ASUS motherboards for all the systems that I have built for the last several years and they seemed to make good gear....not so much for their laptops.

Silver Mojo

iTrader: (9)

My work laptop is a Dell 15.4 XPS and it's awesome. I re-imaged it Win7 because I can't stand Win8.

ViperThreat

I have a Lenovo y580 that I've used for the past couple years. I like to call it my sleeper laptop since it looks like any other generic business-class laptop you might find, but packs some serious horsepower. When I bought it, It was the most powerful PC in my entire office (even our server), and even today it's still outpacing $1000 laptops on the market.

Build quality is very good, and I've had no real issues with overheating.


keep in mind that Lenovo's come with quite a bit of bloat ware, not to mention silverfish which was revealed to be some pretty nasty malware. Make sure if you get the Lenovo to either do a complete fresh install with an OEM windows disk, or make sure you thoroughly remove all the bloatware. Do that, and you are golden.

LxJLthr

iTrader: (12)

I feel like almost any consumer laptops these days (especially bargain priced ones?) come with a metric crap-ton of bloatware...regardless of the brand...

pho_shizzle

iTrader: (17)

I usually wipe them clean and start Phoresh.