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-   -   The Laptop Thread: Configs, deals & questions (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/67390-laptop-thread-configs-deals-questions-249.html)

Has any one compared Dell laptops prices in Dell India's online stores and retail stores? I would like to get an every day use laptop any suggestions from BHPians are welcomed.

I think you are confusing vostro with latitude. Latitudes are the better ones not vostros. They also have a line called precision which are supposed to be even better.

When I bought a Dell in 2011, they (online customer service rep) used to give 5% discount to eligible corporates. They were also happy to give names of eligible corp. Check on this. All you need to do is get that corp. employee to give a reference. Bill and everything remains in your name.

With Dell now having entirely useless online customisations (no upgrade of CPU, HDD, RAM, etc), I would be indifferent to online/retail if I could get a 5% off at retail too.

There is one more way of buying Dell Laptops, especially Laptops meant for Corporates (like Latitude, Precision, XPS and Vostro series), via phone.:thumbs up

This facility is available for individual customers also. Earlier this year in the month of January I bought a Latitude E6430 Premiere laptop, with SSD, Core i7 Quad core (basically top of the line) for 98000 INR which comes with 3 years of pro support. Initially when I called the lady told me the price to be 1,20,000 INR. After hard bargaining it came down to this price. This way you can customise virtually every component of a laptop. You could also extend the warranty by an extra 2 years at the end of standard 3 years warranty.

Before buying this I had approached Lenovo also for their ThinkPad L series, but they didn't bother to call me back.

Whom did you call up directly? Was it a retailer or a company person? Can you provide more details?

As you can see from this attached image, taken from Dell India website, on top left corner there are two phone numbers, you could call either number and place an order. You could pay by credit card or DD after the sales person sends you a quote (you can bargain like tomatoes after the initial quote), pay after the final bargaining is over.

You can bargain for like a week.

In case people have missed it, Samsung recently launched a consumer grade 1TB SSD (Samsung 840 Evo). As far my understanding goes, the previous record in consumer space was Crucial M5 960 GB. This is great news for laptop users as one SSD can replace the conventional notebook mechanical hard disk.

For desktop users, not much will change because of multiple hard disk ports where one can use perhaps a 60-120GB SSD and high capacity mechanical disks.

I dearly want to replace the Seagate Momentus 750GB on my laptop but so far prices for Crucial M500 960 GB are very high (35-40K). The Samsung EVO is being launched in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB. 750GB could be the one for me but pricing is not yet clear.

Announced pricing for the 840 EVO SSD is as follows:

• Samsung 840 EVO 120GB: $110
• Samsung 840 EVO 250GB: $190
• Samsung 840 EVO 500GB: $370
• Samsung 840 EVO 750GB: $530
• Samsung 840 EVO 1TB: $650

http://www.techradar.com/news/comput...vo-ssd-1166786

Thanks for the post.

Which one do you recommend I should go for. I am a newbie and hope you have understood my requirements.

I prefer to buy something from an established player who offers support, my local tech guy also gave me a quote for 50K, but his support is terrible.

Can you point me to one server and I will buy that?

Benny

Depends on how near is the service centre to your site.

Find out where the service support office is, for IBM, HP and Dell. Call their marketing person and discuss the configuration as well as support with each of them. Though I personally prefer IBM, their servers are more expensive but their support is excellent.

If you are outside the metros or far away from the nearest service support office, though the support may be free, but long distance travel cost by the personnel may not be.

Guys, need help!

I need to install winxp on an HCL netbook which obviously does not have a cd-rom drive. Hence, the only option is via USB. I am trying that since last 2 days but with no success. Had been using BartPE but not working.
Please let me know a simple process to install the OS.
Thanks,
Saket

@saket77; I have done USB CD/Video CD drive installations of the OS many times. Could be there is no OS so cannot access the USB drive. One other fly could be that you have a CD image and not the actual files on the CD. Then extract them onto another media and try.

Try and see if you can load the windows CD (files and not image) on the main drive and then run from there.

Thank you sir for the suggestion. However, I have made a bootable USB flash drive to initialise the installation process. Even the system goes upto the first stage where it copies the installation files to the hard drive. Then upon restart, (when the computer is supposed to use the files copied on its hard driver for further installation) it shows an error.

Don't have a USB CD ROM drive, else, the process could have been simpler probably.

Thanks,
Saket

Can you provide more details of the error?

OK, in the meanwhile, I used another method to install XP, everything went on fine, even it finished off well. But now the device uses SATA HDD (which I had changed to IDE controller for the installer to 'see' the drive) which means that again after the installation, the system cannot find any OS on the disk.
THis problem is due to the SATA driver which is not coupled in XP. Also, there is minimal support from HCL website.

Any ideas about how to give it Sata drivers?

You have to integrate SATA drivers by any of the WinPE methods. My favorite method is by using nLite, which is free and really good.

You can get it here : http://nliteos.pcrpg.org/nlite/nLite....installer.exe

Hope it helps.