We own a company that provides IT support for small and medium sized businesses. I always carry a Dell Latitude laptop because they have proven so reliable. My partner finally gave up his attachment to Toshibas because he was buying two laptops for every one of mine.
Lately Lenovo has developed a good reputation for some parts of their product line, i.e., the traditional laptops are garnering good reviews by users along the lines of what it was when it was IBM. I haven’t seen anything either good or bad about the IdeaPad.
My experience with the newer “tablet/combo” technology is that they are not nearly as robust as laptops and ultra-books. The technology is too new. All of my customers who have invested in this technology have had some issue. This is typical with new technology.
The Inspirion is Dell’s consumer laptop designed for home use and not quite as expensive as the business models.
A note on hard drives. Last year there was heavy flooding in Thailand that took out most of the hard drive manufacturing facilities in the world. Once the immediate stock of “good” hard drives was used up, then what was/is on the market could be classified as “B” grade. There is still a lot of that in the pipeline, because it was many weeks before they could even go in and start a clean up and repair of the manufacturing facilities. There are still certain types of hard drives that are back ordered and delay shipment of your computer.
Also hard drive replacements in laptops are fairly common. Especially if the laptop does NOT have the “shock resistant” technology. A laptop is subject to a lot of “drop” stress even if it is not actually bounced off the floor.
I stick to Dell for my business clients for the simple reason that they have a robust support structure in the area in which we live and their online support and phone call support is much easier to navigate than for other brands.
I am also a Lenovo vendor, they simply do not have the purchase and after purchase support of Dell in this part of the south.
Not sure this is helpful. For the type of device you are talking about, I’d say it is a matter of personal preference and which vendor has the most local support options for you.
The flooding occurred during July 2011 which showed a lot of impact on hard drive industry in between 2011 to early 2013, and caused HDD prices to increase 72.7% from $0.055 per GB, but HDDs have returned to Pre-Flood Prices. - Tom's Hardware. I doubt that you have to worry about B hard drives anymore. However, solid-state drives (SSD) are much faster, and, of course, much more expensive per gigabyte, and the prices have not come down as fast as we'd like them. They are the drive of the future (though the future will be troublesome on this earth).