Quote:
Originally Posted by jenlindseys
I think waranties are BS if you know anything at all about computers. I have bought them and had countless problems getting things fixed. sorry for the negativity, I just don't think its worth the money. If you are buying a laptop for 500$ DO NOT spend 300$ for a 3 year warranty. You might as well buy a new lap top.
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Jenn, I see your point. For what it's worth, the repair done by Best Buy on my Gateway went flawlessly within the promised time frame. But I acknowledge that computer repair doesn't always go so well.
You make a valid point regarding price of a laptop versus price of a warranty, and it's well worth considering. Here's why I decided to get the warranty anyway:
If you buy a new laptop, you might not be able to use some of your old applications that worked perfectly on the old one. For example, my machine used Sygate as its firewall, which I liked a lot. It is no longer possible to obtain and install Sygate because Symantec bought it and killed the product. Sygate's install process looked to a remote computer to find out whether your product key was valid, and when Symantec killed Sygate they also killed that remote server. So even though I have the original installation files and entitlement information for Sygate, I can not reinstall it. (Grrr.) That really bit me when one of my computers needed a new hard disk, and I had to reinstall all of my applications. There are other applications, such as music and video CD/DVD burners, which might not know how to talk to newer hardware, and you'd have to purchase an upgrade in order to get them to work on a new laptop.
Another issue is transferring product licenses from an old, retiring machine to a new one. Some software companies, such as Microsoft, require you to connect to their servers to complete your registration, and they check whether your product key is already in use on a different machine. If it is, they won't let you complete the install. Some software companies will let you transfer the license from one machine to another, but that tends to be a tedious, painful process.
I did buy a new laptop in April, and I've been bit really hard by the fact that it came with Vista as its operating system. At a time when I was stressed out (from the failure of 2 other computers AND being pressed for time), the LAST thing I needed was to learn all the ins and outs of a VERY buggy unfamiliar operating system. Some of the applications I relied on for my video work, including freeware such as DVDx, wouldn't run under Vista at all. I still can't fully do everything (video-wise) on Vista that I could do on my older XP machines.