UPDATE: July 2013 That Vostro is now starting to fail. A few sticky broken keys, RAM damaged, GPU failing and hard drive errors. Already replaced battery once since Dell engineer came (they don’t last long, batteries, not Dell engineers!) Mistake or not, latest Dell Vostro on the way i7 chip, but 15″ not 17″ save a few quid!
As regular visitors to Sciencebase know, our individual posts are entirely independent of advertisers. However, for a time the site had its own coupons and discounts section, which helped support us financially; back then we were getting 20000 unique visitors every single day! At the time of writing, I was using a Dell Vostro 3700 (chosen primarily because it was one of the only laptops around at the time with a matte screen) and although I had to have it serviced at about 18 months because of a faulty fan, it’s been fine. The service engineer replaced the fan, the motherboard and the battery all under warranty and in my own home within an hour or two.
My previous working machine was a 17″ HP Pavilion, for those who care about knowing such things! Before that I’d had another Dell Inspiron, a Gateway desktop, an Evesham Micros desktop, an Acer laptop before that and a homebuilt desktop. My first home office machine was from local company Solidisk who changed their name years ago to World of Computers, that machine had a 40 megabyte hard drive, can you imagine that? Space for two or three RAW file photos from my Canon 20D digital SLR!