>In another thread people are talking about their favorite brands of computers. Thought it would be good to put this in it's own thread.
>
>Here are my votes:
>
>Laptops : Lenovo

Among the wider family, we got two HPs, two sub-sized Acers, a Toshiba and a Lenovo, plus at least one employer-owned. They all work; one HP had a recall worthy hardware bug but it generally took about 18 months for the wireless piece to do sufficient damage to the motherboard, so HP chose to just ignore the issue, assuming there wouldn't be a class suite (don't know whether they were right). I like my HP and generally hate HP's sales force (I blogged them to death four years ago, no need to repeat). Yes, it came with a gigabyte of crapware and the awful Vista, but that's easily cured with Ubuntu.

As far as laptops go, I somehow miss the Sony Vaio I had eight years ago, courtesy of Siriusware. Great machine for the time, and one of the few where the keyboard layout was just right.

I also tried a couple of Dells on other jobs, and didn't like them, simply because of the keyboard layout. I just couldn't get used to the funny way I had to surf for my arrows, insert-delete-backspace-pageup/down.

>Desktops : Systemax

I bought exactly three desktops in the last 20 years, all of them in the first year in the US, and it seems they were by CompUSA (are these guys still alive?). I still use the tall tower case, and I guess it contains its fourth motherboard. Before that, I had office machines (which would vanish off my desk all of a sudden, after a phone call saying "backup what you need, we sold your machine, you'll get a new one on Monday"); after that, I rolled my own.

As for the servers... I did do some work standing by the rack (I think it was a dozen Dell blades), but that's about all experience I had with them. Maybe I actually do have a lot of experience with stacked & racked machines, but only via remote control, where they choose to show me a virtual desktop instead of their internals :).