Ok thats the card they encouraged me to sign up to when I switched the membership from UK to Canada. I think they said they'd reduce my membership by $30 if I applied for the card there and then but I couldn't be bothered at the time.

Is that the only credit card they accept?

I agree with your earlier comment about not going for the latest model of computer. The last two laptops I've bought were both Toshiba and were run of the mill and have done fine. They struggle a little bit with some games the children put on but we have a couple of 360s and a Wii for that type of thing. On the older one I upgraded the memory and now I think I'll have to put a larger capacity HD in. They seem reasonably robust.

They accept Amex. You can have a nice shiny Costco Amex, which incorporates your Costco card if you so wish.

oh oh!


(Typed by JonboyE on his HP notebook.)

I don't know that much about the technical side of PCs (does it show?) and I don't use a PC for gaming - just for business. I have a lot of business software on my machine.

Most of the software I use is updated annually and each update seems to have more features than the last and use more computing power. Sticking a bit more RAM in does help but generally I find the system performance starts to degrade markedly after a couple of years.

My colleague drives a 1965 MG so it is true to say that a car can last 45 years. Mine don't. I don't have the patience. Once a car is too much bother I sell it and get a new one. Much the same with computers.

That's because of all the garbage that accumulates on the HD. I do a full reformat every 12-18 months and can get 5+ years out of a PC. One of the other issues is the upgraded software can require more resources and contribute to the slowing down.

Old computer, old software = save money and computer runs for longer

Do you buy a new car every 6 months as well?

If yours really aren't lasting you more than two years then you should probably look at the way you are using them - getting through them that quickly is more than just not having the patience for it. The only people that can say they "need" to do this are PC gamers running the latest games at full spec on state of the art alienware kit. Normal business use should be 4/5 years.

If the machine stays still. When I travelled constantly on business I expected them to last no more than six months.

This PC has a 1.9GHz chip and 3 GB RAM.

Waiting for a program to load I clicked on to BE, saw your post, and so have lost another 10 minutes out of my day. I need things to fire up PDQ. As I said, I don't have the patience to stare at an egg timer or swirly blue thing while the PC rewinds its eleastic band.

The machine is 18 months old now and it is becoming difficult to listen to music while I work. The music just stops every now and again while it all gets too much to do at once. For example, when I refresh the screen browsing BE.com.

It could well be the way I use it. But until I work out how to make it better a new laptop is on my Christmas list.

We too are in the retail PC business and its true that the more you spend , the more you loose, we advise most of our customers to save there money and buy the machine they need rather than the machine they "think" they need, most laptops come with all the same stuff these days, card reader,dvd rw,bluetooth,wifi,infrared even on the budget $600 machines, keep away from the unbranded imports or self badged stuff, ask yourself what it has to do, if you a big games player then your going to want huge everything but if your a net surfer and do some MS office stuff then a basic machine with 2 or 4 gb ram and a modest hard drive 160gb is more than enough to run for a few years, remember the kids dont care how much you spent when they stand on the lid because you left it next to your feet at the sofa, or when the dog gets caught up in the power lead and tears it right out of the PCB ( our most common fault ) as soon as you walk out the store your laptop is out of date, ASUS are one of the backbone manufacturers of motherboards and make boards for just about everyone and offer a standard 2 yr worldwide warranty and there build quality is fairly good, as for smaller specialist stores being cheaper it just is not the case, we just dont have the huge buying power that the nationals do, we are main Acer dealers and I can buy laptops from Comet in the UK for about 5% cheaper than my UK buy in price.
we tell most of our customers to buy cheap and replace twice, a new laptop every 3 years rather than $1800 once, but then most of our customers are business people who understand that loading there machine with every download and share ware prog is a big mistake !!!

Interestingly I paid almost the same for my new laptop as I did for the one I bought when I landed in Canada in 2007, but the old one could barely play any games developed since 2000 whereas the new one plays every game I've tried with no problems; for the same price the CPU is about 5x faster and the GPU about 20x faster with hardware support for things the old GPU couldn't do at all.

They (Costco) accept debit cards and Amex cards, but not Visa cards, as I found out my first visit there with a checkout piled full of items and only a visa card to pay !
You wouldn't believe how fast they can get an Amex card preapproved.

To be fair there is a connection between latest games release and graphics cards these day, you tend to find that the game costs $50 but the new graphics card needed to run it costs $500, well its not so bad now but it used to be a bit like that the name of the game for gamer retailers is UPGRADES

thankxs guys

typo it was a i7 (I think) hehehehe

can read all replies, missus wants her laptop back now

errm will read and get back

how does TOSH vs HP stand up

laters taters

J44

Toshiba consumer vs HP, not much to choose between them. Go to the Toshiba Tecra or Portege and they streets ahead of HP.

Toshiba pretty well bullet proof. HP pretty good but not as good since they merged with Compaq.

i recently bought a laptop at costco..don't ask me the specs but it runs CAD no problem at all, 17" screen and it cost $950. (on sale from $1250) Go online Costco shopping because they don't put all that they have out on the floor. It was so secretive even the sales associate wasn't aware that they carried that machine, nor that it was on sale!