Are you SURE you want a laptop instead of a desktop?
Dec 22 '00
I'm a computer science major, and thus I'm generally one of the first people my friends turn to when their computer suddenly stops working, and I'm usually pretty good when it comes to fixing computers when they break. However, one of the things that will generally get me to throw up my hands every single time is when the distressed person in question has a laptop.
Now, at first it seems perfectly reasonable to want a laptop instead of a desktop, especially at college. After all, you don't need a U-Haul and several boxes to take your computer from home to school and back; all you need is a case. Besides, laptops are basically just desktops, only smaller, right?
Wrong. There are a number of reasons that desktops are a better choice than a laptop if you're planning on using it as a desktop. First of all, laptop hardware is always a few steps behind desktop hardware, simply because it takes longer to shrink down the size of the components. As a result, you pay a lot more for less. My parents shelled out a small fortune for a 333mhz laptop last summer; that same summer, I built a system around a 550mhz Celeron for under $1000.
However, the real problem with laptops is that if something goes wrong with the hardware, you're going to have to send it back to the company to fix. This is nearly guaranteed, unless it's something really minor. The reason for this is that all the hardware is proprietary (meaning specifically made for that system). Thus, it's very difficult for anyone, even someone who knows what they're doing, to fix what's wrong in there, especially if they need to replace a part. For example, if I came into contact with a computer which wasn't turning on, I'd open it up, check all the connections, and if they were all OK, I'd replace the power supply. If that happened in a laptop, I wouldn't know where to start, let alone to get a new power supply if I had to.
I've seen this happen all to often. My girlfriend (before she was going out with me) purchased a Compaq laptop for school, since she lives in California and transporting a desktop cross-country is no easy task. This was a perfectly reasonable solution at the time. However, by the end of her freshman year she was referring to the computer as "The Beast". Eventually, the floppy drive died outright and the ethernet connection was iffy at best, leaving us with no way to get files on or off the computer save for CD-Rom. Basically, she now has a very expensive paperweight. If she had a desktop, I could have just gotten a floppy drive for $10 and installed it in 15 minutes, but since it's a laptop there's nothing I can do.
One of the people who I lived with this past semester had a more serious problem. She had bought a Sony Vaio before the semester had started, mainly because she was going abroad to London in the Spring and wanted something she could easily transport overseas. However, the problems began very quickly. About midway through the semester, her screen started freaking out on her. There was static all over the screen, basically. She had to send the computer back to Sony and wait a couple of weeks to get it back. The problem was apparently a faulty connecter to the LCD display.
If that was the end of her problems, however, that wouldn't be such a big deal. In early November, her computer just plain refused to boot up. (This happened the day before a big paper was due, of course.) She spent the day on hold with Sony tech support, who solved the problem temporarily; she was able to get her computer to stay on long enough to be able to get her paper off the computer and on to a floppy disk. However, this problem once again required the computer to be shipped back to Sony. As of the time we left school for semester in mid-December, Sony still had her computer with no guarantee of when it would be back to her. As it stands, she may have no computer to take to England with her in January.
Does this mean that every laptop is bound to break down eventually? No, of course not. My parents' aforementioned laptop hasn't had any major problems that I've heard of. I'm using it right now, in fact. The harsh reality, though, even though the computer will hopefully serve them quite well for several years (especially since my mother uses it to teach computer classes, so she needs a laptop for that), it will eventually become a paperweight also, since, even if it doesn't break down fatally, it can't be upgraded at all.
Laptops do indeed have their uses, and they are quite useful for people who travel constantly or need a computer with them in several different places. However, when choosing a computer specifically for home use, one is simply better off with a desktop. They're upgradeable, they're much easier to fix, and they're generally cheaper than their laptop equivalents.
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Member: Steve
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