Originally Posted by AC110
To follow up, I bought the Dell, a Latitude D820. Pretty happy with it, a couple of small problems to call about but no biggie.
Here's a tip for anyone buying a new machine. My laptop, like most machines with an operating system installed, came with only one drive partition, meaning I had a whacking great 100gb C: drive. That is a really boneheaded way to run a computer for a couple of reasons (1. data organization 2. inability to format and reinstall a corrupted operating system without blowing away everything on the machine).
I've never really understood the whole partitioning of the hard drive thing. Do you really reinstall your OS that frequently? I use XP at work and OS X at home, and haven't reinstalled in years.
As far as data organization, now that there's good search tools available, I've really stopped worrying about it. Computers are much better at organizing/finding than people are. Let the computer do its job.
Originally Posted by ScottC
Are you doing an OS reinstall when you notice these problems? Machines don't degrade, but the OS most certainly will. If you use your machine daily it's almost something you need to do every 4-6 months.
Are you serious? What are you doing to your machines?