Is there any reason to buy a name brand vs a no name if the processor is the same and the other specs are the same?
Is there any reason to buy a name brand vs a no name if the processor is the same and the other specs are the same?
there definitely is a difference; I bought a eMachine computer and a Sony Vaio computer at around the same time, same specs. The eMachine motherboard fried within a year and a half, but I still have the Sony which has lasted for 3 years.
yes. ALWAYS buy a computer from multi$B computer company. Mac/Win are lemons, pieces of shit, that cost $95-$200 each time to fix at the computer store without a GOOD warranty. Laptops are shoddily built and break often. The bigger the company the better they are about warranty repair. My company only buys notebooks from Fujitsu, HP, Toshiba since they have to least friction and horseshow hoops to go through for warranty repair.
I've had an e mchine for 5 years with no problems. Some of it is just luck. PC's are only made by 3 or so companies in China.
May be best to get a low to mid-priced PC and replace every 3-5 years. Oh, and back up your hard drive. They fail more often than CPUs or mother boards. And while you can recover from a working HD if the mbo fails if the hard drive fails you may be out of luck.
If you want to check out in more depth, try a forum like this
http://www.notebookforums.com/forumindex.php
Just be aware that a lot of the postings are by geeks who are into faster, bigger, better and you may just be looking for reliable internet and basic MS office tool performance. So you can follow their reliability suggestions but you may not need a $2000 laptop!