Time to buy a new laptop - which is best for around £1K

[stek]

advantage with one of these is that fitting a second internal hard disk is a doddle, then you can read from one HDD, process and write to the other

Two disks on one controller gives you nothing, or very little, two or more scsi controllers is the way, but never going to happen on a lappy.....

[doodab]

Two disks on one controller gives you nothing, or very little, two or more scsi controllers is the way, but never going to happen on a lappy.....

A modern PC with SATA effectively has a controller per port. The days of disks sharing an IDE bus are long gone.

[Ignis Fatuus]

Don't get a Sony. In my experience they're badly put together and not very resilient.

Also, after seeing how they put rootkits on people's PCs when they played a Sony CD on them, and then refused to apologise for stealthily making people's PCs vulnerable to hackers, I'd be reluctant to get the whole PC from Sony, lord knows what they might have put on there.

[Support Monkey]

Don't get a Sony. In my experience they're badly put together and not very resilient.

I bought a Vaio and regretted it completely, bits of it falling off after a few months and having to be glued back on....And I really look after my stuff so it wasnt me being heavy handed,

Same here, Sony are a steaming pile of poo, make good tellies but laptops very poor never seen a good one, lenovo not bad but no good in a corporate environment, acer and HP just cheap, go for the Dell everytime

[chef]

Why are lenovo no good in a corp environment? That's their target market!

[Support Monkey]

Why are lenovo no good in a corp environment? That's their target market!

out the box They span the boot sector over 4 partitions, causes issues when imaging especially using Ghost, seen issues with them when their encrypted, if you get the build right there fine, oh and there loaded with all sorts of weird and wonderfull lenovo software, im not a fan, they never seem as stable has a Dell, as IBM they were fine but seem to have gone off the boil since lenovo took them over, mind you their cheap enough thats why the corporate love them

[doodab]

The Lenovo Thinkpads & HP EliteBooks are both solid machines with not much to choose between them. Dell Precision I would say are on a par, I haven't seen one of the latest generation ones yet but the last ones were alright. They are the only three I would spend my own money on. Fujitsus are pretty crappy, and having shelled out £1700 for a top of the range Sony once in my life I will never do it again. They simply aren't targeted at professional users.

out the box They span the boot sector over 4 partitions, causes issues when imaging especially using Ghost, seen issues with them when their encrypted, if you get the build right there fine, oh and there loaded with all sorts of weird and wonderfull lenovo software, im not a fan, they never seem as stable has a Dell, as IBM they were fine but seem to have gone off the boil since lenovo took them over, mind you their cheap enough thats why the corporate love them

All the laptops that I have seen in a corporate environment have had a standard build that nukes any existing partitions & preinstalled software (inevitably replacing it with some other piles of bloated crap) and I've seen plenty of places using Thinkpads, so I doubt they are that bad, unless you're actually trying to preserve the existing partition structure for some reason?

[eek]

Surely the first thing you do is to take a laptop and reinstall windows to remove all the crap the manufacturer has being paid to dump on you.

[ThomasSoerensen]

out the box They span the boot sector over 4 partitions, causes issues when imaging especially using Ghost, seen issues with them when their encrypted, if you get the build right there fine, oh and there loaded with all sorts of weird and wonderfull lenovo software, im not a fan, they never seem as stable has a Dell, as IBM they were fine but seem to have gone off the boil since lenovo took them over, mind you their cheap enough thats why the corporate love them

And their spell checker is crap too, right ;-)

[Spacecadet]

And their spell checker is crap too, right ;-)

As far as I can see every word in his post was spelt correctly.