Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:

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Anyway, the HP (being an american company)

Is not IBM American too?

I was comparing with Lenovo not IBM. IBM quality was absolutely the tops

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has screwed up quality and the sub-terranian levels to which they have dropped, I will actually be willing to pay a premium for a Chinese brand if the alternate is to buy HP. so it is not whether you are american or chinese, it is quality v/s price. 5 years of having Florina as the CEO has moved Compaq / HP's laptops from being the most desired to the most shunned.

My Compaq Presario 2203AL will be turning 2 years this October, and till date I have had absolutely no issues whatsoever.

You have been lucky. My office still uses Compaq laptops that are 3-4 years old too. But we are seeing the new HP Compaq laptops giving all types of problems, CD Drives, modems, monitors going phutt 13 months from purchase even with pretty gentle users, battery quality dropping, the entire list goes on and on. I spoke to a die-hard Compaq fan 2 weeks ago when i was looking to add another laptop to my office, he said make sure you have a 3 year warrenty so that you can get the item replaced when it gives problem. I have some hardware dealers who are selling HP laptops with a clear warning that if something goes wrong, you need to deal directly with HP (For lenovo and toshiba they are offering to take it to the workshop and get it fixed on behalf of the customer).

It has survived 3 not-so-gentle falls and some pretty rigorous usage (downloads running for hours on end, fairly regular linux compilation, and so on). On the otherhand I have seen my room-mates' Acer Travelmate give some minor issues. One of his speakers went kaput, and until very recently he had trouble configuring ACPI in GNU/Linux.

We use 4 Acers in the office, no problems. One had a spring broken and stuck in the pcmci slot once, but that was fixed by the service center in 10 minutes.

Uhh, I dont know what ACPI does actually. But I am using Suse 9.3 on 3 of them and FC3 on another, so far no problems except that I could not work out how to use the wifi, but also didnt give it much of an effort either.

As I said in one of my previous mails, which laptop is better is a controversial topic. Each one has his own preferences. I used to be a compaq fan once upon a time.

Regards, Debarshi