Recommend company/shop for laptop/printer sales and support

fago

I was going to recommend to someone buying a laptop online with dell but they now only sell them installed with Vista. The general consensus seems to be that Vista will be flaky for the first year or so, and it needs alot of CPU and memory. Hence I'd prefer to get laptop with windows XP.

Anyone have direct experience of any shop/company in Galway that you'd recommend?

thanks.

sgthighway

I would have recommended Dell too but not if it comes with Vista. In my opinion just get them to buy off the shelve in PC World. Don't bother with the extended warranty. I know people hate PC World but they would have to be better than Currys.

If you were anyway handy with PCs you could buy off Dell and install XP afterwards from scratch. You will have to download all the drivers again but it would be worth it.

forbairt

sgthighway wrote:

I would have recommended Dell too but not if it comes with Vista. In my opinion just get them to buy off the shelve in PC World. Don't bother with the extended warranty. I know people hate PC World but they would have to be better than Currys.

If you were anyway handy with PCs you could buy off Dell and install XP afterwards from scratch. You will have to download all the drivers again but it would be worth it.

but you'd also have to buy a copy of XP ... on top of the laptop ... maybe you could sell on vista .. but I'll guess its an OEM copy ... so that'd be a no no ...

Hmmm most shops .. are going to be a fair bit pricier ... but PC World do have some semi decent offers .. and its got to be nice to be able to just walk into them if there's a problem .. and have them fix it .. (that said I'd never buy a machine from them ... but have bought external drives .. which later died on me ... and walked in and they gave me a replacement .. )

kippy

I would have recommended Dell too but not if it comes with Vista. In my opinion just get them to buy off the shelve in PC World. Don't bother with the extended warranty. I know people hate PC World but they would have to be better than Currys.

If you were anyway handy with PCs you could buy off Dell and install XP afterwards from scratch. You will have to download all the drivers again but it would be worth it.

PC world and Currys are one and the same - Owned by the same parent and with the same types of offers. Not much difference in staff either.
As also mentioned you'd need to buy a copy of XP adding an extra 100 or more euro to the cost.
I doubt the do anything with XP unless it is end of line either.
Normally I would recommend Dell also.

I see Komplett are still selling laptops with XP on them:
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=325966
Theres a couple more on their site also.
I'd recommend something like that (well maybe not acer [although you would probably buy something like it from PC world anyway] - HP maybe)but it does work out slightly dearer than a system on Dell but by the time you factor in the OS cost its not much different.

I'd concur with those thinking that Vista is a pile of horse manure at the moment. Bought a relatively high speced machine from Dell with it pre installed. Very very slow evenafter I had stripped out the fancy stuff.
Ended up putting XP on it. Its zipping along and much easier to work with now.I'd hate to have actually been doing any work on Vista, all I was doing was navagiting menus etc.

paconnors

There's a place on eyre st called laptec they sell new and reconditioned laptops at reasonable prices,