Please advise which laptops to get for our school

[zshadar]

We have been using Acer laptops across the school, and there are a few things I like about Acer:
1. Hard disk is partitioned to C: D: which let you save your private files to D: and if you need to do a restore you will not lose them.
2. Come with an easy system restore option that lets you restore to factory condition but ALSO unable you to create your on backup on top of it.

But there are a few things I really don’t like about Acer.
1. It comes loaded with all kind of unnecessary software, like Office 2007 evaluation pre installed, SQL Server, Norton AV Evaluation and lots more, so I have to spend more than an hour to uninstall all of them.
2. The support and service from Acer is a nightmare.

So if you could give me your advise regarding which laptops you prefer, I’ll be grateful. I wouldn’t like to miss the benefit I specified in Acer.

One more thing, we use XP Pro across the school not Vista.

Many thanks

[contink]

Talk to Novatech... We've got 65 laptops due from them and the way it's been done involved an initial machine being sent out, I set it up and then they clone it to the other machines.

Granted I'm still going to need to do more as the software is missing for a lot of stuff but you get to choose OS, and more besides... Very handy.

[srochford]

The things you like about Acer are not that much to do with Acer - you could easily enough build your own image which had 2 partitions and then if you have to restore you just restore the Windows partition. You can do this with Ghost (costs money!) or ImageX (free!) and other apps.

Similarly, the problem with having eval Office 2007 etc gets sorted when you put your own image on the machine.

We're now buying from Viglen and I'm very pleased with them.

[ScottStevinson]

We've used the Dell Latitude D6xx series ever since it first came out with the D600. I've just had anoher 18 D630s delivered today - very impressed.

I did dip into the world of HP laptops a while back, although only briefly. I bought a couple of NX6310s when they were practically being given away and I immediatley saw why! I buy HP desktops and servers, and their ProCurve switches, etc, all the time but I wouldn't touch their laptops again.

Always be wary of Dell's pricing though -you can get huge discounts with not a lot of effort. I got the D630s reduced by over a hundred pounds per unit with just a little haggling!

Scott

[SYNACK]

We have been using Acer laptops across the school, and there are a few things I like about Acer:
1. Hard disk is partitioned to C: D: which let you save your private files to D: and if you need to do a restore you will not lose them.

easy enough to repartition them yourself when you get them without loosing any data.

2. Come with an easy system restore option that lets you restore to factory condition but ALSO unable you to create your on backup on top of it.

hp laptops come with a similar tool and I'm sure that something like that is bundled with most big brand laptops at this stage

But there are a few things I really don’t like about Acer.
1. It comes loaded with all kind of unnecessary software, like Office 2007 evaluation pre installed, SQL Server, Norton AV Evaluation and lots more, so I have to spend more than an hour to uninstall all of them.

All of the laptops that I have dealt with come packed with all this rubbish, the best Idea is to do a clean install with just the tools that you want and reimage it onto all of the laptops that you buy. If your order is large enough your supplier may even do this for you.

2. The support and service from Acer is a nightmare.

So if you could give me your advise regarding which laptops you prefer, I’ll be grateful. I wouldn’t like to miss the benefit I specified in Acer.

One more thing, we use XP Pro across the school not Vista.

You should be able to chat to a reasonable supplier and get them to supply the machines with XP on them, even if - preferably - they come with a Vista business CAL and then use downgrade rights to install XP. This gives you future proofing.

Personally I prefer hp stuff at the moment and that is the only type of laptop that we buy now, they are quite robust and usually pretty quick in comparison to some of the other brands (cough, Toshiba, cough, cough).