Pillock Posted May 9, 2011 Posted May 9, 2011 In my line of work there's a definite difference in the thought going into design as you go up the price range. Notebooks, TVs, whatever - you buy the cheap stuff and it'll be a pig to work on. Plastic parts that are never designed to come apart, a dozen different types of screw, afterthoughts and bodges galore. Sometimes when you get cheap enough, they're just unrepairable - you know you're in trouble when a £230 laptop is a disposable item as nobody thought to make any spare parts.....Spend three times that, and you've got something with enough thought going into it to make it a pleasure. Screws marked so you know where they go, and all the same length too. Little hatches and covers to help you get into it. Expensive TVs have in-depth service manuals with schematics and datasheets, cheap ones have nothing. With cars, it seems to be as they get newer they get more disposable which is topsy-turvy - newer is more expensive, surely more profit means they can spend a bit more on decent design? But no, you've either got sealed black boxes that have no reference sheets or ways to test them, or you've got form over function that means you have to drop a subframe to lower the engine to change a sparkplug. An ECU is basically a licence to print money by a manufacturer - you've got the crazy fact that if they put any form of digital protection on to "make it secure", you legally can't decrypt it. So a "side effect" is nobody can run tests and diagnostics apart from the manufacturer, who won't bother - that'll be a new one for £800 please sir.
ashmicro Posted May 9, 2011 Posted May 9, 2011 Plastic parts that are never designed to come apart, a dozen different types of screw, afterthoughts and bodges galore.. Ditto. That's because the various stages of assembly are done in different places
garethj Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 I design stuff that’s manufactured and sadly your desire won’t be fulfilled. Whilst companies are making huge profits they won’t do something rash like working differently and cutting into those profits. The profits are made by focusing on cost above all else. You may think an access screw is easy, but that screw might cost 0.5p, plus you’ve got to fit it, the labour content might be another 5p (in the UK) plus it has to be bought, the price negotiated, stocked, opened from its packaging, the packaging removed, the screw delivered to the production line... much better to have none of that and eliminate the part. And that’s the method all over; an access cover might be a 10p piece of plastic but the tooling to make it is 10 grand, it has to be designed, managed, maintained, parts checked for quality... No. If one company started making things fixable willy-nilly the costs would go up and they’d be uncompetitive straight away. Sales would fall and the shareholders would demand the head of the CEO. The CEO will do everything to avoid this. It’s a very shortsighted view. It’s a way to gradually make things worse for some short term gain. But it won’t change unless legislation forces it, otherwise profit will demonstrate the path to take.
Rod/b Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Thing is, will consumers want to pay the extra money that the reintroduction of quality will inevitably cost? Stuff has never been cheaper to buy than it is now, and people have got used to (addicted to?) those prices. People want the latest kit and shit quality allows that kit to be made and punted in the mass market. An IRISH HALFWIT on MacD has this as his sig line: The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten Benjamin Franklin, apparently, and he died in 1790, so it's nothing new.
loserone Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Go on then,I'll make a vague attempt to be constructive. I've heard some good things about ISE washing machines, but not being in a position to buy one yet (there's a hoover one in the house) I can't vouch for them personally. Anyone put the (many, many)£$£$ into one? The only thing I've bought new recently (ish) is shoes - Meindl boots - they are definitely a well made pair. Two years old and look like new after a polish. I used to rate maglites, but now I have a LED lenser I wouldn't go back. Everything else is second hand - hifi (Rotel, Sansui, Castle &c, mostly 70s stuff); laptops (90's thinkpads), food mixer (Kenwood Chef) &c. My 'rents have a Sebo - same reason, recommendation from JL - but I picked up a Henry for £10 from a bootsale and it's perfectly serviceable. Parts are available, and replacing the motor brushes was a doddle. This could almost merge into the 'Shite in other areas of your life' thread topic wise, because the 'shite' we're still using, from TVs and VCRs to furniture, would have been fairly expensive when new and only really becomes shite when it's 10/20/30 years old.
scooters Posted May 10, 2011 Author Posted May 10, 2011 some interesting thoughts. Obviously, nothing will change whilst we have cmpanies rewarded for selling the cheapest costing products for the most profit to customers. There is no motivation for them to focus on qality and thus reduce consumptiom. I was reading in the New Scientist that the current legislation around corporate carbon emissions doesn't even scratch the surface and also hides a morepressing issue. Whether or not you agree with carbon emissions being related to global warming (I'm undecided on this as a trained climate anthoropoligist there is evidence of global warmoing and global cooling, often rapidly, throughout this planet's history without any logical explaination and often quite rapidly - for instance it has been known that for the last 10,000 we are still emerging form the last great ice age and things will get naturaly warmer whether we burn carbon or not) there is a broader issu4 around the consumption of resourses and raw materials. Last week there was a push to highlight the terrible war in the Congo wich has claimed millions of lives andis driven by the scramble for the metals required to make out laptops and I phones....there is a resource cost ad blood price to be aid. The article went on to say how if makind is serious about wanting to slow down consumption then there is no point in tagrgeting the front end - ie carbon emissions -what is needed is a system of rewarding companies for creating products that don't fall to bits and that last and that can be repaired. As this fies in the face of Smithsonian economic theory at a time when China and India are emerging then there's about as much chance of this happenening than there is Torsten buying a new BMW instead of a Maxi. I'm no tree hugger but the whole subject is flippin depressing so I'm going to go and look at some pictures of 1970's jap tin to cheer me up!
Rhythm Thief Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Go on then,I'll make a vague attempt to be constructive. I've heard some good things about ISE washing machines, but not being in a position to buy one yet (there's a hoover one in the house) I can't vouch for them personally. Anyone put the (many, many)£$£$ into one? ISE washing machines are very good. We couldn't stretch to the £1000 Volvo-truck-bearing model but we bought the next model down which seems to have been designed with a similar ethos, viz. serviceable by any competent repairer using standard, easy to find parts (unlike those expensive German things whose name I forget, which have to be serviced by a dedicated company repairer).
scooters Posted May 10, 2011 Author Posted May 10, 2011 best white goods thing I have bought recenty was a Zanussi condensing tumble dryer - it was very expenive - came in at 500 sheets but it paid for itself in leccy bills in the first 2 years. With toddlers and living in Edinburgh where you can hang your washing our for approx 2 hours a year it is on pretty much 2-3 times a day - only rus till the clthes are dry and is easy to fix, maintain. I've got wone of theseleccy use monitors and it uses less than the microwave. Compared to our last one which cost a fortune to run, baked the clothes and only cost £110 at comet. I can't claim the honours as Mrs Scooters bought it from Lewises and put up with my "how much???" rant ...but hats off and humble pie et... I am delusionally hoping that my ex torsten ex bickle Zastava will be a cunning - fix it yerself, cost effective buy... However, I think that I'll have to follow Chrchill's capitalist example yet again - don't cut back your expenditure - earn more money instead!....allright for him the talented, intelligent aristocrat....mumble rumble etc....
gtd2000 Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 The truth these days (as mentioned already) is that kit has never been cheaper. You can buy very decent kit for not a lot of money - I'd also say that cheap kit today is far better quality than it was back in the day - remember all that Amstrad or Sinclair crap? Our first VCR was purchased around 1983 for the princely sum of 250 quid - that's probably around 1000 quid today and that was the cheapest VCR you could buy that was on offer at ASDA. When you think about the price of a cheapo DVD player these days the mind boggles- of course you can still fix them when you feel the need but it's simply not an economical fix. Would you rather we paid 1000 pounds for a well built DVD player so you can fiddle with it when it goes on the fritz? The other side of the equation in recent years is planned obsolescence/product life cycle...the kit still works perfectly well but is no longer the in thing or better options are available (e.g. DVD or Hard Drive Recorders). How many people still use VCR's? I still have a great quality (working) Sharp MD player but I can carry around a truckload of music in an MP3 player. What we should be looking at is effective ways to recycle all the stuff when it's broken and not worth fixing. Don't get me wrong - I'm the first person to try to fix kit when it does fail but we've really never had it so good!
nigel bickle Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Mate -everything on the Yugo's fixable with a roll of gaffer, 2 screwdrivers, 3 spanners & a hammer. Says so in the Haynes you're going to inherit. Official. Even tells you how!
Guest Leonard Hatred Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Hey Pillock, what laptop would you recommend? I'm looking to spend less than £200 on a used one. There are parallels with the industry I work in, some professionals I know have bought 'agricultural' grade chainsaws which are alright for occasional but not professional use. The plastic parts break regularly and are a pig to replace, the structure of the saw means they need a lot of dismantling to replace minor parts, and they're uncomfortable, clunky and heavy to use every day. I bought the best professional saw I could afford and it's been grand, even though I've put it through a lot of abuse. Sadly newer saws are starting to go the way of cars, getting heavier and less efficient and even having to be plugged into a laptop to set the carb.
gtd2000 Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Hey Pillock, what laptop would you recommend? I'm looking to spend less than £200 on a used one. Buying a used laptop isn't like buying a used car - older technology is far less effective in this market. You're generally better off buying a new generation "cheap" laptop than a used older generation laptop - unless it is for a specific purpose i.e. gaming or other intensive operations. With computer technology, as the price drops the performance also increases over time (cue Moores law) - so it's not simply buying into a new laptop of the same performance level - it's very likely that a new cheap laptop outperforms an older more expensive laptop. Of course if you can get a 6 month old laptop for a fraction of the new price then that's a good idea
Guest Leonard Hatred Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 I don't think I could buy a decent new laptop for £200. I don't mind netbooks, but I already have one and would like something with a bigger screen.No intensive use apart from photo editing.
gtd2000 Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 I don't think I could buy a decent new laptop for £200. I don't mind netbooks, but I already have one and would like something with a bigger screen.No intensive use apart from photo editing. http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/lenovo-thinkpad-sl510-laptop-intel-pentium-dual-core-t4500-processor-15-6-hd-scr/931733 Lenovo ThinkPad SL510 Laptop Intel® Pentium® Dual Core T4500 Processor, 15.6" HD Screen, Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD Rewriter, Integrated Graphics - £279.97 @ Save On Laptops http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/eMachines_eME732_1017508.html 372G16Mnkk, Intel® Core™ i3-370M Dual Core Processor, 15.6" HD Screen, Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD Rewriter, Integrated Graphics, Webcam & HDMI, £289.97 Bit above 200 I know but brand new with a warranty which has to be worth something.
Guest Leonard Hatred Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 That's quite a good deal, although £279.99 is a fair distance from £200 for me I could stretch to it, ta.
gtd2000 Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 That's quite a good deal, although £279.99 is a fair distance from £200 for me I could stretch to it, ta. Cheaper... http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/acer-aspire-5742z-laptop-pentium-p6100-2-0ghz-3gb-ram-269-99-delivered-ebay-ebuy/924500 Acer Aspire 5742Z Laptop, Pentium P6100 2.0GHz, 3GB RAM - £269.99 delivered @ eBay Ebuyer Express Outlet Just keep looking at HUKD http://www.hotukdeals.com/ and see what the best deals are when you really need to buy one
scooters Posted May 10, 2011 Author Posted May 10, 2011 Hey Pillock, what laptop would you recommend? I'm looking to spend less than £200 on a used one. There are parallels with the industry I work in, some professionals I know have bought 'agricultural' grade chainsaws which are alright for occasional but not professional use. The plastic parts break regularly and are a pig to replace, the structure of the saw means they need a lot of dismantling to replace minor parts, and they're uncomfortable, clunky and heavy to use every day. I bought the best professional saw I could afford and it's been grand, even though I've put it through a lot of abuse. Sadly newer saws are starting to go the way of cars, getting heavier and less efficient and even having to be plugged into a laptop to set the carb. I worked in forestry in Argyll in the early 90's the saws we used were big 20 year old things that were very reliable and very dangerous - white finger was an issue - stil get it these days in me pinky.... having to use a laptop to set up a carb on a chainsaw really shows how mad the world has gone....this is almost as insane as my particular pet hate....the electronic handbrake,...what is the fecking point in that!
Pillock Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Hey Pillock, what laptop would you recommend? I'm looking to spend less than £200 on a used one. Used I'd look for a Sony Vaio, or an IBM Thinkpad as being examples of things screwed together well that are likely to still be roughly the right shape after a few years. Anything that was budget to start with will be scrap after 4 or 5 years. Some old Toshibas are OK too, the rule is the 15 volt models are good and the 19 volt models are poor. You can get a new one for not much more, as said. I'm tapping this out on a Compaq CQ56, retail price is £269 I think. It's pretty good, it's basic but well screwed together and it seems faster than it should. I've just bought 60 of them with another 240 to follow, they're that good!
loserone Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Used I'd look for a Sony Vaio, or an IBM Thinkpad as being examples of things screwed together well that are likely to still be roughly the right shape after a few years. Anything that was budget to start with will be scrap after 4 or 5 years. I have a BRAND NEW D701SWL HP core i5 whatsamathingie from work. I even went to the trouble of sorting a reasonable USB booting linux build so I could actually use it. When I get home, it stays in the bag, and I use this Thinkpad (a very early 1200 X40, ~8 years old) because it's just as fast for most things and it's a much more comfortable experience. The graphics card is a little dated now, and the drivers are not ideal anymore, so I am thinking of upgrading to an X61/X61s, which are mostly still less than £200. Better screen, keyboard, and build quality than any netbook (or cheap laptop, really) I've ever seen. Still, it depends what you want to use it for.
gtd2000 Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Hey Pillock, what laptop would you recommend? I'm looking to spend less than £200 on a used one. Used I'd look for a Sony Vaio, or an IBM Thinkpad as being examples of things screwed together well that are likely to still be roughly the right shape after a few years. Anything that was budget to start with will be scrap after 4 or 5 years. Some old Toshibas are OK too, the rule is the 15 volt models are good and the 19 volt models are poor. You can get a new one for not much more, as said. I'm tapping this out on a Compaq CQ56, retail price is £269 I think. It's pretty good, it's basic but well screwed together and it seems faster than it should. I've just bought 60 of them with another 240 to follow, they're that good! To be honest though - after 4 or 5 years, it's an antique in computer terms, and likely to be struggling with then contemporary software and applications that can bog down even current machines. I had to change our trusty old ECS K7S5A based desktop (read as cheap a motherboard as you could buy in the early 21st Century) a year ago as it really was becoming too slow for most stuff - even although it still plodded along happily. I've even found now that you need to think more about multicore CPUs as well...upgraded the GPU in one of our desktops thinking it would give it a new lease of life in the graphics department just to discover that the CPU was holding it back and made next to no difference - a dual core AMD CPU gave it a 50% performance boost... A lot of these cheap Windows 7 based laptops are very snappy performers indeed - much more so than you'd expect at the price point too!
Guest Leonard Hatred Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 I'm running a pretty old office-grade IBM desktop at the moment, it has 1GB of RAM and the processor is 3GHZ, it's plenty quick for me. Could probably do with a bit more RAM sometimes, but rarely. What are people doing with their computers if they need something much faster?
Luxobarges_Are_Us Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 I kinda agree with people saying "go for a cheap new laptop", but if you aren't bothered about the performance and want a sturdy used one that will take incredible amounts of abuse without noticing, look for a Fujitsu-Siemens. Had mine fall from the bed to a marble floor (while turned on and running stuff in windows), the hard disk obviously got lunched, but the chassis didn't even crack, and the screen is working perfectly a year later!
Pillock Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Be very careful. Fujitsus, like Toshibas, come in two flavours. Enterprise-class stuff and domestic. With Toshiba, as I said earlier it's easy to spot - business models (i.e. the well built stuff) runs on a 15 volt power supply, the domestic stuff which is rebranded far-eastern OEM crap is 19 volts. At one point they released a "Toshiba" which was the same chassis as a Packard Bell, and the same as an Advent - you could swap parts between them. Fujis are harder to tell apart. Some are really well built, however some are utter utter shite. Not shite as in an Austin Maxi in babypoo green, but shite as in you'll regret it. Plastics will crumble if you look at them wrong, LCD covers split at the hinges, touchpad buttons just fall off and the cooling system is terrible. It's one of the few makes that makes me shudder, and mentally add a couple of hours to any repair job purely for the fact it'll just have way more issues than the reported fault and most of them will be crap plastics.
Luxobarges_Are_Us Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Fujis are harder to tell apart. Some are really well built, however some are utter utter shite. Not shite as in an Austin Maxi in babypoo green, but shite as in you'll regret it. Plastics will crumble if you look at them wrong, LCD covers split at the hinges, touchpad buttons just fall off and the cooling system is terrible. Wow! I've owned a couple, and my dad had one at some point, too, and they've all been excellent, if a bit salty in terms of purchase price and with so-so battery life. Is the shite stuff also made in Germany (all the ones I've had were made there)?
Pillock Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 Wow! I've owned a couple, and my dad had one at some point, too, and they've all been excellent, if a bit salty in terms of purchase price and with so-so battery life. Is the shite stuff also made in Germany (all the ones I've had were made there)? No, the rubbish ones have a feeling of far-easterness about them. At one point we were seeing a lot of a particular model (7820 rings a bell) that was the same chassis as a Packard Bell and a Medion, anything that gets punted out to more than one manufacturer is typically Taiwanese. There's only something like 12 different factories producing notebooks, and half of those account for a massive proportion. For example, heard of Compal? Nope? Well... Compal Electronics (Chinese: ä»Â寶電腦股份有é™Âå…¬å¸) is a Taiwanese original design manufacturer (ODM), handling the production of notebook computers and monitors for a variety of clients around the world, including Acer Inc., Dell, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers. It is the second-largest contract laptop manufacturer in the world and shipped over 48 million notebooks in 2010
CreepingJesus Posted May 10, 2011 Posted May 10, 2011 There's my other half's old FSC Amilo Pro, hiding beside my computer desk here: one of the industrial-grade cased ones. It survived a few falls with no ill effects, until the time it fell, and the charging jack punched the socket back into the case. There's a tiny wee transformer right behind the socket, which got wiped out, so it doesn't charge. I'll need to rig something up, 'cos she misses it dearly. Even so, I'd recommend one, if you can bag a good 'un: I replaced it with a Compaq CQ61, on a deal from 3, which works out ok pricewise over the term.I'll have a shout for Kirby vacuums too; when I used to service them, I'd regularly come across 20+ year old ones. They aren't cheap by any means, but are infinitely rebuildable. Pick one up out of second hand shops, or t'bay; that's a much better bet. The only teeth drying moment will be if the electronics pack on the G-series turns up its' toes, which is an extremely rare occurrence, and anyway the pack was about £80 at the last count iirc.When I worked for them, the sales staff had a large collection of vacs they'd taken in part-ex. All makes and models, even those Sebos, and some other German make I'd never heard of, which were apparently liberated from hospitals... 'Not built to be fixed' I was told. 'Aye right', said I, and proceeded to strip and rebuild a fair few, to prove my point. A dead Electrolux even came back to life, with a strip and clean! But the quality of parts and method of manufacture actually proved the salesman's point. Dyson are shite. Not the good kind of shite. Definitely not worth the price.
gtd2000 Posted May 11, 2011 Posted May 11, 2011 Draw your own conclusions: http://smidgenpc.com/2010/05/07/laptop-reliability-ratings-which-laptop-is-really-most-reliable/
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now