Excellent! The reason why I recommend an extended warranty is due to the portable nature of the system and the likely hood that things can go wrong due to that. I can't tell you how many times I've helped people with their personal laptops and they've only had a 1 year warranty and it's 2 years into the life of the machine. The warranty would have saved them a mint in replacement costs of the part. I know some parts can cost more than the machine is worth the minute you take your laptop out the door such as the motherboard or the LCD screen. Even buying a simple part like an internal hard drive can become an expensive venture if you don't know how to replace one and end up having a repair shop do so at cost. Keyboards can fail, video cards can go out, USB ports can go bad, and so on. So anyone that reads this, PLEASE go with the extended warranty! I do not represent a firm that sells hardware. I'm the person that fixes it.

If you do go into a Best Buy/Circuit City or similar store if you can check online first as sometimes they have different pricing online which most stores will honour if you can take a printout of the item and cost with you. Just a thought!

I would say Frys or Costco, and get a tv from brandsmart if you have one near you!!!!!! Actually buy everything in brandsmart!!!

It's depends on the value of the laptop surely. If you just want one to surf the net and email you can pick one up for a few hundred dollars. In which case the extended warranty is not necessary IMHO.

No it doesn't. I've seen all brands cross my desk and each has had their own issues. I've worked on IBM Thinkpads (now Lenovo), Sonys, HPs, Dells, Compaqs, Macs, Toshibas, and Fujitsus. They might have a brand name stamped onto them but the main thing they have in common is that they have third party equipment that is installed into the body. Most commonly these are memory sticks, hard drives, video cards, processors, LCD screens, and batteries. The money that you spend for a laptop is reflective of the performance and not necessarily the quality of the parts.

Of the personal laptops that I've serviced most have only used them to surf the internet, check email, or do research papers on them. Most don't use them to run powerful applications such as Photoshop or games (unless you have a laptop designed for gaming).

Most of those could have been fixed for free if they had been under a 3 year warranty. It's just a matter of me calling the manufacturer and giving them the serial number of the product and they send out a part no questions asked for me to swap out with. Otherwise my user-customer ends up with spending more than they should. Most likely my recommendation is that the will end up spending more than half for a new laptop when buying the part. I tell them the best thing for them to do is just buy a new one so that ALL the parts in the laptop are new. Otherwise when one part goes another one is likely to follow. It's a trend that I've noticed.

Lastly, because it is a laptop it's more likely to be moved frequently, banged up, or even dropped. All of this movement has a tendency to put wear and tear on the components inside and it ages your computer more that you'd like. Also, some users unintentionally age their laptops by not providing enough ventilation.

So the cost of 2-300 dollars of getting an extended warranty is the about the same cost of one repair at a shop. The initial diagnostic fee being around $60. You add the cost of the part(s), say a hard drive $70, then the hourly rate of $35 an hour it's easy to see that you'd be better off with the extended warranty.

Like I said, this is my professional opinion shared by many of those in my industry. All my equipment at home and at work has a 3 year.

Ouch...that post was a little long for me...I'm watching Desperate Housewives.

Like I said it all depends what the OP's requirements are. If it's staying in the home...only used for the internet...email etc then a lappy costing a few hundred dollars will fit the bill. The only reason the stores push the extended warranty is because they are making money on it. Much like betting on horses/casinos...you could be lucky but at the end of the day it's the bookies who win.

Usually just the basic manufacturer's warranty which is typically 12 months.

I effectively self-insure on this - in the 20+ years since I came to the US I have never bought an extended warranty for any consumer electronics and have never had anything fail in a way that would have been covered by an extended warranty. I am now definitely "ahead" and could stand several yet-to-happen failures and still be ahead.

Laptops are something I would not advise anyone to buy an extended warranty on. With the notable exception of IBM / Lenovo ThinkPads (which seem to last forever) almost all current laptops have a useful life of not much more than 2 years. The first year is covered by the manufacturer's warranty and if it dies sometime in the second year you just buy the replacement a little bit early. (btw I have been using laptop computers for 20 years now so I am not exactly new to this game ...)

Neither am I.

Understood - and your advice may well be the right thing for some people to do.

It really depends on what your expectations are.

I regard most consumer electronics, including laptops, to be essentially disposable (precisely because the cost of having one repaired is likely to be a substantial fraction of the cost of buying a replacement) so the strategy that works for me is to buy middle-of-the-road technology (neither last year's model or next month's bleeding edge model) for the lowest possible up-front cost and assume the risk of replacement myself.

So far that has worked very well for me.

Warranties suck! Just try a Google with your preferred supplier and sucks, and you'll find plenty of hits.

Never bothered with them myself, and never will. On a desktop, if anything other than the motherboard fries, just swap it out. On laptops, they're disposable anyway -- a few dozen demonstrations of Newton's law and it goes anyway. Tis the reason I always buy the cheapest one in the store.

How did I know you were going to show up, lol. All I can say is that it has benefited the wallet of my users that come in with laptops that have crapped out on them. Perhaps you are gentle with use and know the following that I mentioned before unlike some of my users who don't know how to take care of things. Makes me a bit upset because computers are my babies. I hate seeing one abused and dinged.

It's a working tool. Like a pen and paper, or book. If you don't use a laptop for what it's intended, it's a waste of money. If you do use it, it gets dinged. My only gripe with hardware manufacturers is having to shell out for a bloody operating system I neither need nor want. Well that and bloody VIA chipsets that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

Are you looking at the ASUS EEE line? I'm thinking the new larger version that's coming out that comes loaded with a 'nix flavor? Have you looked at the Dell Ubuntu lines to see if it was worth it to you? I know it's hard to find as they don't push it out on their main site but I know they are one of the few large mfg's that load it for you. Although I'm sure you like the control of loading it yourself (having it partitioned the way you like). I can fully understand that myself.

Absolutely.

The ASUS are interesting -- bit like the new Mac Air-whatsit. You can have them loaded with Linux or XP-lite. I think we are going to see a trend for these types of machines where the computer and OS are not really important since they are primarily web-access devices.

One of my pet hates with Windows machines is removing the crapware they preload on the system. It can take hours with a brand new machine to pull it all off. Was reading a blog from a guy with a new VAIO saying how he thought Vista was a pile of crap until he pulled all this off. Several hours later and it was actually running as fast as his old XP.