My wife needs a new laptop, the 5 yr old Sony Vaio is starting to become too slow for her needs (Mail, netsurfing, some Photoshop and a lot of Adobe InDesign, a fairly powerhungry graphic design progrmme. No gaming. To date little or no video editing.

Sony was OK, but seems a bit expensive. Heard good things about Asus and Acer.

Distrust HP (they refused to send me a new driver for my HP printer a few years ago when I was living in Laos "Because Laos was an enemy country." Silly twits!) .

Dell seems to only do online sales, and we kind of like dealing with a person in real life when needing service.

Apple Mac is out, I'm a Mac user myself, but She doesn't like it, and all her existing software is Windows based.

I could read overseas reports and comparisons, but they don't relate to what's available here. I have myself been too long out of Win to know what PC laptop right now is reliable and value for money.

Any suggestions?

I quite like using IT City because they have branches all over and warranty will be honoured all around Thailand, but are they more expensive? I prefer a shop that is likely to still be there in a year or two. I also like Apple's concept of buying an extended warranty.

13 or 14 inch screen, to cope with weight when travelling, most of the time at home she uses an outside 20" screen.

I'm sure you're going to have all kinds of contradictory bits of advice, but I'll tell you my ideas anyway. I'm an IT guy deadling with a lot of laptops at my company. This is based on my experience. Your mileage may, and will, vary.

- Asus: yes, good stuff most of the time

- Acer: no, most of them really are poorly built and have a high failure rate

- HP: they make a lot of excellent models and some crap too. Kind of hard to tell sometimes. If you hold a grudge against them I can understand that you're not willing to buy from HP anyway (note that they might only have been following the stupid US export regulations at that time!)

- I still like Lenovo. Not as robust as the old Thinkpads were, but still good stuff IMO and competitive prices

- no significant experience with DELL

As for the place where to buy it, why not considering Tesco? last time I've checked, the one close to my vacation place was selling Asus notebooks at a fairly competitive price.

Edited January 1, 201214 yr by Lannig

Im no expert but I have looked into this subject many times....

Acer;;; Stay far away from them.

ASUS; I have had many good reports about their computers.

LENOVO; I own two of them so this is my choice.

Hope that helps.

I'm sure you're going to have all kinds of contradictory bits of advice, but I'll tell you my ideas anyway. I'm an IT guy deadling with a lot of laptops at my company. This is based on my experience. Your mileage may, and will, vary.

- Asus: yes, good stuff most of the time

- Acer: no, most of them really are poorly built and have a high failure rate

- HP: they make a lot of excellent models and some crap too. Kind of hard to tell sometimes. If you hold a grudge against them I can understand that you're not willing to buy from HP anyway (note that they might only have been following the stupid US export regulations at that time!)

- I still like Lenovo. Not as robust as the old Thinkpads were, but still good stuff IMO and competitive prices

- no significant experience with DELL

As for the place where to buy it, why not considering Tesco? last time I've checked, the one close to my vacation place was selling Asus notebooks at a fairly competitive price.

Ditto to all of the above. I'm brand-loyal to Asus, have owned several laptops and motherboards from them over the years, and always had no troubles. All of the laptops are still working; I give them to the up-country family whenever I upgrade. Whenever I've needed service (because I have broken something, not because the laptop failed) I have found the main Asus service center on Rama 4 to be really excellent.

Acer- best avoided as mentioned above.

Lenovo- agree that they are robust / well built computers, but something about them just leaves me feeling kinda "meh". Nothing really sexy / attractive about them.

Agree with the other poster who suggested Tesco. I've seen lots of great deals there.

Dell's consumer series are widely available 'physically' in town, by many retailers and Dell concept stores also by retailers. the consumer series have many models and configurations, pricing in between HP and ASUS.

I use the Latitude and Precision notebooks ( business series, online only ) with extended paid services. depends on the service plan, the service engineer ( with spare parts in his bag ) could be at door in next business day. good if you need such protection on the flow of work.

share the idea from other too :

- ACER, no

- ASUS, yes

- Lenovo, may be

- HP, may be not

- Sony, yes, but $$$

Big-C recently had some great deals on Lenovos but they were lower end consumer models, maybe not powerful enough for your wife's graphic programs but still worth checking out. A friend bought one there with an Intel duo-core processor, 4meg Ram and a 500G HD for under B12,000. The sales people at Big-C know zilch so IT City might be a better place to shop, their prices usually seem competitive.

I have a new HP Pavillion dv6 with core i7 processor, 8Gb RAM

1Tb hard disk running Windows 7 64bit

Excellent machine

Currently using 3.5Gb of the available memory, so do recommend 6 or 8Gb

if you do graphic design.

Toshiba. I've got two Toshiba A100/A105 Series laptops that are approx 4 years old. The only problem I've had is one developed a minor keyboard issue a few months ago in that the "s" key had to be pressed harder than normal. I didn't really need to replace the keyboard but I did anyway...I was able to buy a new keyboard (off Ebay) and replace the keyboard myself for less than 500 baht.

Worth noting that when computer shopping here, be aware that many are sold WITHOUT an operating system factory installed. They will almost always offer to have one such as WINDOWS-7 installed for you for anywhere from B300 to B2000 but no matter what they say; it won't be genuine.

I have a Dell Inspiron (bought in a Dell concept store) with next business day guaranteed service. Great product and service call to replace a broken screen (my fault!) handled promptly and efficiently.

I have two Acer laptops.

One was bought in 2004 and the other in 2009.

I haven't had any problems with either of them. The older model is still being used on a daily basis for Internet and word processing.

The newer one is used every day for all my computing needs. Ok I don't do heavy graphics.

My friend bought an HP Pavilion a few months ago and he has already had two major problems with his machine.

I think it's the luck of the draw.

Toshiba. I've got two Toshiba A100/A105 Series laptops that are approx 4 years old. The only problem I've had is one developed a minor keyboard issue a few months ago in that the "s" key had to be pressed harder than normal. I didn't really need to replace the keyboard but I did anyway...I was able to buy a new keyboard (off Ebay) and replace the keyboard myself for less than 500 baht.

Oh yes I forgot Toshiba. They used to be built like soviet tanks. Actually I knew a guy who was the IT shopper for a large NGO. The notebooks he was buying would travel around a lot and have a rough life. He was only buying Toshibas because according to him, they were the only ones that lasted. However that was 10 years ago. We don't have Toshibas where I work but based on some experience collected from friends, they're not trouble-free these days. Disks especially seem to have a rather short lifespan, mostly because they use their own brand.

Edited January 3, 201214 yr by Lannig