Free Advice to the remaining PC makers

This isn't free advice, it's free whining. And if it was re-worded as advice, it would still be a terrible article.<p>Points like "don't make hardware that breaks", "don't make batteries that run down fast", "don't make noisy laptops", does he really imagine that Dell, Sony et al are sat reading and muttering to themselves "holy cow, why didn't we think of these ideas"?<p>Not to mention that half of the feedback isn't even about PC manufacturers, is about Windows.

To be honest, this guy sounds like he's just horrible at buying and using laptops;<p>... "This reached absurd levels when I bought a netbook that had a full C drive right from the purchase"<p>Sorry what? I bough a netbook a year and a half ago, and it had a 250GB HD then, are you sure you're not looking at the recovery partition?<p>Some of the points stand, but they're hardly consistent across all "Windows" laptops (whatever that is...).

The author seems to be generalising on a massive scale. The reason there's so much crap in the PC laptop market is because there's a lot of demand for cheap hardware.<p>Many of his negative points about windows are flat out wrong, and are either because he bought a shitty 5400rpm hard drive or hasn't adjusted his power settings. It's easy to tell windows to shutdown/hibernate when you close the lid.<p>In terms of looks, there are a couple of manufacturers that 'get it', and I think Lenovo lately with their edge series and some others are starting to really stand out in terms of design. The author seems to miss the point that there's a trade-off between price/quality and size/quality in terms of price. There are cheap small laptops, and good, expensive small laptops. There are cheap big laptops, and good expensive big laptops (not nearly as useful.)<p>I think this is one of the major causes of consumer confusion these days, since most people jump on the shitty cheap stuff and complain when it breaks in 3 months. If you spend the same amount on a high end lenovo/sony you'll get a lot more power than a mac, and better battery life too.

Our friend here should first buy a laptop that is worth the same that of a MacBook Air and then compare it.<p>"I cannot escape hardware failures no matter what brand I buy" - That includes Apple sir!<p>"Built-in mics/cameras don’t work, batteries don’t charge, hard disks crash, motherboards die" - sounds like a $100 laptop. What else can you expect?<p>"I still have laptops that take 15 minutes to start." - My Windows 7 Dell XPS laptop starts in under 1 minute or sometimes max 2 mins.<p>"Shut Down Time and the 255 Different Ways Of Doing It" - takes lesser than starting up. I have set it to hibernate if i close my lid and to shut down if i press the power button.<p>"Battery Life" - I have a 9 cell lithium battery which gives me no less than 6 hours of usage. None of the Macs can give that.<p>"Performance" - If you are ranting so much about a "cheap" laptop which you bought ages ago and not the modern high-config (like the Macs) laptops, then I have no idea what "performance" you are talking about.<p>"Portability" and "Noise" again a sign that you bought a cheap laptop and not a good, configured laptop.<p>You seriously need to get a life my friend. Buy a good laptop (which will cost you money, but still less than that of any of Apple's laptops) and then compare it with a Mac.<p>Over 90% of the world is just using Windows for bullshit reasons like that of your's.<p>If you buy a cheap laptop you will get cheap features.

Geez guys...Slow down for a minute. :-). Give me the benefit of the doubt, will you. :-)<p>Most comments indicate that all my complaints are fixable by tweaking settings. But please look at the problem from a regular users perspective. The settings that we think easy to adjust are just impossible for regular people.<p>I mostly bought HP, and expensive HP's. I bought Toshiba and Sony laptops as well.<p>I also bought low end notebooks that cost as much as an iPad or more. My reasonable expectation was that they should perform at a similar level for simple tasks like...I don't know word processing. They did not.<p>There is really something terribly wrong the PC industry has done. They've built crappy products that are eye sores. I am not trying to day that Macs are perfect. They are not. But they are better...way better.

It's a strange article for THIS audience, in that we are power users of technology. We don't buy the cheapest machines on the market - we tweak the best ones on the market.<p>That said, Apple is succeeding with folks less like us. Folks like our parents, who never heard of disk defragmenting. Uber-Cheap Windows machines do indeed fail this market. The buyers do get what they pay for, but it's also because they don't know better. Those folks are who this guy is writing for.

Flame-bait junk, save yourself the time and skip this.