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Dear Friends: We are getting ready to purchase a laptop to bring to Costa Rica this summer. Could those of you who are LIVING in Costa Rica comment on the brand of laptop you are using, the access to repair and technical advice for same, etc? We have land in the Central Valley–below the fog line.
We are open to a MAC (which would be a learning curve for us), HP or Dell….any thoughts?
Thx! Sue
I switched to Mac… learning curve easy and then you will love it. Service no prob here. IBM/Lenovo has great rep too!
Have a nice trip!
In May 2007 as you can see from [ https://www.welovecostarica.com/members/1478.cfm ] I bought my first Apple computer and I very much doubt I will ever buy a PC again…
Scott
We brought 2 HP Pavilion laptops with us when we moved here last Feb……Only had 1 small problem….but HP has a service
center here…very fast on the repair and reasonable on the price….HP also has their world wide call center her.Bob
San RamonI am also researching for the best laptop, for our CR home. I read a Yahoo Tech article, dated November 18, 2009; which stated: The most reliable brands, Toshiba and Asus, with below a 16 percent failure rate. The least reliable, Acer, Gateway and HP, with failure rates at 25 percent. Also, one in three laptops die in the first three years. Hope this helps.
Largely based upon Scott’s experience, we bought our first Apple, an iMac, last April. It is the love of my life. (Don’t nobody tell Marcia!) Now we’re considering either a MacBook or one of the new Apple iPads for her.
There is almost no learning curve in the conversion from Windows to Apple’s operating system. Basically, the two do the same things and they do them in much the same ways. Microsoft Office is available for the Macs, and you can get an “interpreter” (don’t know the right term) that will permit you to run any Windows application on the Mac.
Smart money says to bring your Apple from the U.S. You won’t have a warranty here (unless maybe Apple’s extended warranty is international), but service is available and the computers here are much, much more expensive. And, of course, the Apples are very reliable.
We, too, have 2, HP Pavilions and are pleased with them.
We had a problem with one, and when back in Canada, HP did everything we requested plus more, even though it was out of warranty, at no cost to us, and was returned in 4 days, including pick up/delivery, from the other side of Canada, over a weekend.I owned Macs since 1998 and I at present, I own several, one of which is a MacBook. I also own an HP for business apps which Apple OS cannot handle, HOWEVER, you can always load a Windows app into any Mac and have the use of both which is what I did with the MacBook. The best of both worlds.
For photos, music and all the artsy-craftsy stuff, Mac rules and I remain an aficionado.
Sprite: Are you, too, finding that you can run lots of things at the same time AND listen to music on your Mac? Also, I understand that the whole issue of viruses is greatly (if not completely) eliminated on the Mac. Is this true? Thx.
I have many applications running simultaneously on the MAC as well as the HP. All computers today are big enough to do this. On the HP, I run market trading software with live data feed which uses a lot of memory as well as watching movies and TV programs simultaneously…I never experienced any lag at all or other problems.I felt I had to buy Norton virus protection for the HP, though, just in case.
But in the 12 years I have used Macs without any virus protection, I never once got a virus. I suspect, though, as Apple continues to garner market share, there will be more hackers out there to work on ways to attack Macs.
What you are paying for when you buy an Apple computer is the software and, to some extent, the cache of an iconic brand name. The hardware is pretty much the same quality with all the big players. Apple software is more intuitive and slightly easier to use but, then again, Windows has made efforts to make their OS easier. Reliability is the only remaining difference between the two with Mac the winner but my sense is that even that gap has been closed a bit lately.
Macs cost more than PC’s. Play with both and you will probably like the Mac better. Then you have to weight the price differences.
Because my application needs are fairly simple, I opted for the iMac simply to get away from Windows. Compared to Windows XP, the Apple os is much more stable. Windows Vista has a well-deserved bad reputation and, frankly, I was not about to give Microsoft a chance to make it worse with the new Windows 7. Microsoft keeps saying that things are better but they seem not to be.
It all depends on what you are looking for in a laptop. What will it be used for? will you be running a lot of programs on it? Will it be mostly for business or pleasure?
I’ve had good experiences with both Dell and HP. But again, it all depends on what the laptop will be used for.
Well, my computer is used for both business and pleasure. We don’t run any video games, but do access other kinds of creative material on the web. Obviously, lots of email activity and we would like to use the laptop for more media in Costa Rica such as streaming movies and other content to the TV, etc. I use the computer for business activities which are related to my consultation work with developers and design work for private clients. It appears that I will be keeping a significant percentage of clients, so would really like the new laptop to perform well with proprietary design programs, including CAD. I guess those are our needs.
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