I'm considering buying one of these Lenovo laptops given I should be able to write the expense off in a few months. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/y-series/y50-uhd/ Any thoughts?
I think these are the sweet spot for high-end laptops in terms of spec to price. They have a reputation for dubious build quality on SD. Alt config/price: http://tinyurl.com/p6zpb4d
Makes me laugh that one years support is an added extra. In the UK it's the law that you get the first year on all electrical goods and in Europe it is two years. Most mobile phone manufacturers give 2 years as standard in the UK these days which is nice. There is also the sale of goods act which gives you 6 years if you can prove the item had a flaw when sold.
In the U.S., legally requiring corporations to provide basic consumer protections like that is considered sociofascist communist tyranny...or something.
Unfortunately, at that price point anything spec'd this good is probably going to be wrapped in cheap plastic. The alloy shells tended to be spec'd with i5/8gb/IntelGMA for the same price. If you take care of your stuff, it probably won't be as bad as the complaints. SD'ers are notoriously finicky. Not sure what Grim was looking at, but these come with 1 year warranties... I've never seen new computers NOT come with a 1 year warranty.
On my phone there was an option to choose if you wanted to add a warranty, the 1 year had a $100+ value.
1 year for over $100? sounds closer to the price of insurance that also covers lost/stolen and accidental rather than a standard warranty
It figures that a few days after I pass on a laptop deal due to concerns about quality control the laptop I currently use has a HDD failure and croaks. I will have to buy something right away as a result, albeit at a higher price now that those sales are over. I really can't wait until after Christmas given I have tons of appointments the days following my return from vacation. Ugh.
Why don't you just replace the failed HDD with an SSD? If the CPU in the laptop is Sandy Bridge or better, there's really no point in upgrading. Haswell isn't that much faster than Sandy Bridge. It just gets better battery life. The main thing you would be getting with a new laptop would be an SSD instead of a slow mechanical HDD, but you can add one yourself for cheap. If you do get a new notebook, you should probably just go with a retina macbook. No one is really making anything as nice as Apple these days on the Windows side of the fence, and you can dual boot into Windows if needed. I had a ton of issues with the Thinkpad I bought. And while Lenovo made it right in the end, I think your average person is going to have a much better experience just walking into an Apple store and walking out with a retina macbook that will probably be perfect for what they need. I like Macs, but my body rejects them. I have an allergy to the metal alloy they use on their notebooks, otherwise I'd be using one.