Studio 15 and 17

I was hoping to obtain some opinions on Dell laptops. This might sound odd but I encourage those who aren't particularly fond of Dells to reply. Why? Well, I don't necessarily want all biased opinions to be positive. If current Dells are poor, then I want to hear about it.

I was really interested in Latitudes but after going to the Dell site and customizing, it went up to $1800 which is way over my budget. I can maybe go up to $1200 but the specs/quality/battery better be A1!

I was intrigued by the Dell Studio 15 and 17 because they can be customized and the specs can be fairly decent but quality is what I am concerned about.

Honestly, I am leaning towards an Asus so just want a comparison and opinions on Dell quality. Is the Studio series way below Latitude in quality?

I would like a decent battery life but I also want a discrete graphics card so I can compromise. I wasn't happy to see there is only an ATI 4570 512MB card. But, oh well.

How is the rest? How is the screen? I watch movies on my computers so I need a good screen. I like a fairly high res so I was wondering how the res/screen compares to Asus. I need an Intel wifi card and Dell doesn't list what one it is so is the Intel option one any good? Anyone know which one it is? I dual boot Windows and Linux.

Anyway, thanks for any replies.

 

Yesterday I discovered that if you buy a Dell monitor for example, they won't repair its dead pixels unles there are more than 7. I also read about some guy who had hardware problems, and they refused to fix it eventhough he had the best warranty. The responds to his post told that its not a good idea to phone your problems (because you hold for like 20-30 mins and they will lie to you) but that you should rather use online support. I don't know about you but I'm pretty skeptical about a customer service that is bad via phone, and better via online support.
I was planning to get a dell because it is the only company that offers in home repair (within 6 days) in belgium. But now I have serious doubts since ive heard so many complaints about people who for example have a waranty and are told that they do not have one eventhough they payed for it. Dells current laptops, especialy the xps series overheat, and it becomes that bad that even the screen can get different colours due to this bad cooling.
I'm just going to order some kind of asus at a local pc store. Asus is currently the best brand (statiscly, see the link in my signature), but its G series tend to overheat, so i'm waiting for them to bring something decent. Personnaly I think its best to buy your laptop at a professional store which also does the repairs. Its harder to ripp you off face to face, unlike with dells phone service, they just 'accidently' hang up on you and don't fix anything unles you bring your lawyer into the game.

 

Thanks for your input. Yeah, I'm leaning towards Asus. I can go to a nearby computer store.... Canadians know them as Canada Computers since they have a few lines of Asus models so I can check some out and if there's a problem, they can help me deal with it.

Asus has a good rep so far with their most recent laptops. I've heard of the G51 operating with a high amount of heat so that's not good to hear. But, it might depend on other factors as well. I do want a good screen, discrete video card and probably a Nvidia card but I don't want to worry about heat either.

If Dell is not reliable then I probably won't take a chance on one. I know their Latitude line is pretty good but the Dell Studio consumer line seems to get to many complaints. It might be okay to take a chance on a $500 laptop but more money than that, I'd probably pass.