well im a newbie to photography and just wanna put my 2 cents in. i bought a sony vio about 8 months ago and had about 6000 pics on it and the hard drive just went out.
[URL="javascript:openAnyWindow('/global/products/imageviewer.asp?model=wdfPassport_Portable_2&filter=1047604¤timage=frnt&lang=en','image',440,505);"][/URL]
are great for backing up laptops and keeping your pics safe. I got one in California, and still use it to move large quantities of data around.
I also got hit with a HD failure :puke1 , but fortunately it happened about 8 days after I got the unit, before I left on my trip, so I was able to get it swapped with a replacement unit :ivar , but not before I'd spent a week getting the original unit all setup and configured. :fish
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well im a newbie to photography and just wanna put my 2 cents in. i bought a sony vio about 8 months ago and had about 6000 pics on it and the hard drive just went out. it come with a 1 yr warranty and sony said they would replace the hard drive but couldnt do anything bout recovering any of my pics or other info. after numerous calls to sony now they have said that they wouldnt even cover the harddrive and so now im stuck with a 2200 dollar pos lol just my 2 cents i will never buy another sony product
Any hard drive will fail. It's not a matter of if it will fail, only when.
Backup and backup often.
Sony is truly not to blame in the hard drive failure. Not honoring the warranty, well, not sure on that one.
well im a newbie to photography and just wanna put my 2 cents in. i bought a sony vio about 8 months ago and had about 6000 pics on it and the hard drive just went out. it come with a 1 yr warranty and sony said they would replace the hard drive but couldnt do anything bout recovering any of my pics or other info. after numerous calls to sony now they have said that they wouldnt even cover the harddrive and so now im stuck with a 2200 dollar pos lol just my 2 cents i will never buy another sony product
hard drives are cheap, buy another, stick it in and call it good. Depending on how your old drive failed it may be pretty easy to recover the data. The data is totally recoverable, its just a matter of how much time and money it would cost. The quick and dirty way of doing it is to buy an external enclosure (not expensive), put the drive in the enclosure, put the enclosure in a plastic bag and put it all in the freezer, then take it out once its good and cold, plug it in and move as much data as you can before it warms up. A typical failed hard drive (won't spinn) will work for a short while if you get them good and cold.
if you really don't wanna mess with the vio anymore send it to me
good luck
For backup, I back my laptops up to my desktop which runs a RAID-I array and then I back that up to an external drive (WD mybook prem). I then have my really critical stuff (wedding pics, papers I've written and am proud of etc) backed up to a second external drive and burned the info to CD's and sent it to my parents in FL (just in case the house burns down or something).
PS, toshebia is awesome when it comes to warranty work (I've used it once before) and a couple friends at school have had really good luck with lenovo's service as well (I've not used it personally, but a classmate had a soda spilled on his laptop and they sent a box for it, he stuck it in the box, they picked it up, fixed it and had it back inside of a week - all at no charge to him). Now the school's officially recommended brand is lenovo and I'm sure that gets lenovo a lot of biz so they may be a bit more helpful to us than people not affiliated with a similar organization, but I kinda doubt it.
Josh
Sony DSC-S85 (point and shoot)
Panasonic LX1
Olympus 770SW
experience
yeah im chalking it up as experience and moving on i back up everything now twice and also keep a copy at my parents house. Thanks for all the replys and thanks for dgrin. i know by signing up on here i will become a better photographer in 2008.
laptop survivor
Hi, I would like to reply to the laptops.
I own many sony, (4, one every 18 months) but with pictures feel limited by the gig's and video cards. the begining of Jan 08, I purchased an IBUYPOWER laptop.
it was from costco( which I recommend getting any computer from them to use for 3 months instead of 15 days). I dont recommend them but they did claim the biggest, ram, gigs and speed.
i found it slow, clunkly and doesnt do what i thought it would, from just the touch pad,(which doesnt always work with one tap or many taps(mind of it's own at times), the loading of app's was slower, but then lighting speed for others app's., perhaps it is a Vista thing, so I would stay with XP. I was looking at the differnce of the dell (not a dell fan, except for the onsite service for 3 years inculding software issues) 4300 series or ( alienware), I wanted at least a 250 gig, 7500 or higher CPU, great graphics card, so either amdus, Nvidia, ETI. at higher graphics optimization and speed. (let me know if you need more on the graphics cards). so the toshbia SLi3 looks really good, sony is a bit higher, and possibly not worth it, but perhaps. Go to costco's website, since they dont sell that type of speed at the stores, it took 3 weeks to deliver. I am returning the Ibuy's, I will go with a toshiba for my son who is the gamer and me, the photo , and app's "nut" will try the sony... unless i see a special. i used to build my own, desktops and know what you need is cpu speed, graphics card for your programs to run well, and storage.
I also had a hard drive failure on Sony (the others it is just the gig's,) You should, send it back to them, even if the warrently isnt good. You be surprised how good they are. I did and was. They replaced it. However, I did have to pay a company to get the information, after the idiots at BESTBUY'S best of the best geeks caused the already WORKING BUT FAILING hard drive to fail permently, when i went in to get the files transfered. After claiming to find someone to fix it, then they lost the whole computer, which they found three weeks later after I had a tissy fit and had to keep the demanding they find it. police and all.... beware of Best Buy and the Geek squad. ask a simple question like how would You, email files and it will show if they know what they are doing.
hope this helps and forgive me i couldnt find spl cek(it is my first reply and response.
noreen
You really shouldn't have any problem finding a pretty decent laptop at fairly low prices these days. One recommendation I would make is that when you buy any laptop, before you do anything and install any programs, is to go through and remove any of the programs installed by the manufacturer that you don't need - which means most of them. I've seen Dell, Sony and HP machines run like garbage even though they were fairly high end machines simply due to the amount of useless programs that the manufacturers load on them. If the laptop is running Vista you'll definately want 2 GB of ram and if you can find one in your price range go for a Core 2 Duo based laptop over an AMD based laptop. While I was once a big AMD fan they've simply fallen too far behind for me to recommend them at this point. As for video cards, a discrete video card is always better than a card that uses shared memory however for most photo editing this really shouldn't make that large a difference as long as you have enough ram.
Comments
[URL="javascript:openAnyWindow('/global/products/imageviewer.asp?model=wdfPassport_Portable_2&filter=1047604¤timage=frnt&lang=en','image',440,505);"]
are great for backing up laptops and keeping your pics safe. I got one in California, and still use it to move large quantities of data around.
I also got hit with a HD failure :puke1 , but fortunately it happened about 8 days after I got the unit, before I left on my trip, so I was able to get it swapped with a replacement unit :ivar , but not before I'd spent a week getting the original unit all setup and configured.
Any hard drive will fail. It's not a matter of if it will fail, only when.
Backup and backup often.
Sony is truly not to blame in the hard drive failure. Not honoring the warranty, well, not sure on that one.
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
hard drives are cheap, buy another, stick it in and call it good. Depending on how your old drive failed it may be pretty easy to recover the data. The data is totally recoverable, its just a matter of how much time and money it would cost. The quick and dirty way of doing it is to buy an external enclosure (not expensive), put the drive in the enclosure, put the enclosure in a plastic bag and put it all in the freezer, then take it out once its good and cold, plug it in and move as much data as you can before it warms up. A typical failed hard drive (won't spinn) will work for a short while if you get them good and cold.
if you really don't wanna mess with the vio anymore send it to me
good luck
For backup, I back my laptops up to my desktop which runs a RAID-I array and then I back that up to an external drive (WD mybook prem). I then have my really critical stuff (wedding pics, papers I've written and am proud of etc) backed up to a second external drive and burned the info to CD's and sent it to my parents in FL (just in case the house burns down or something).
PS, toshebia is awesome when it comes to warranty work (I've used it once before) and a couple friends at school have had really good luck with lenovo's service as well (I've not used it personally, but a classmate had a soda spilled on his laptop and they sent a box for it, he stuck it in the box, they picked it up, fixed it and had it back inside of a week - all at no charge to him). Now the school's officially recommended brand is lenovo and I'm sure that gets lenovo a lot of biz so they may be a bit more helpful to us than people not affiliated with a similar organization, but I kinda doubt it.
Sony DSC-S85 (point and shoot)
Panasonic LX1
Olympus 770SW
In the market for a dslr
yeah im chalking it up as experience and moving on i back up everything now twice and also keep a copy at my parents house. Thanks for all the replys and thanks for dgrin. i know by signing up on here i will become a better photographer in 2008.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8648118&productCategoryId=abcat0502001&type=product&tab=7&id=1195598868093#productdetail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834117606 [this one has 2 gigs of ram]
And at best buy they are the same price: 699.
I, too, am wondering about a good laptop to purchase. Macbooks and macbook pros are way out of my price range.
www.tednghiem.com
Hi, I would like to reply to the laptops.
I own many sony, (4, one every 18 months) but with pictures feel limited by the gig's and video cards. the begining of Jan 08, I purchased an IBUYPOWER laptop.
it was from costco( which I recommend getting any computer from them to use for 3 months instead of 15 days). I dont recommend them but they did claim the biggest, ram, gigs and speed.
i found it slow, clunkly and doesnt do what i thought it would, from just the touch pad,(which doesnt always work with one tap or many taps(mind of it's own at times), the loading of app's was slower, but then lighting speed for others app's., perhaps it is a Vista thing, so I would stay with XP. I was looking at the differnce of the dell (not a dell fan, except for the onsite service for 3 years inculding software issues) 4300 series or ( alienware), I wanted at least a 250 gig, 7500 or higher CPU, great graphics card, so either amdus, Nvidia, ETI. at higher graphics optimization and speed. (let me know if you need more on the graphics cards). so the toshbia SLi3 looks really good, sony is a bit higher, and possibly not worth it, but perhaps. Go to costco's website, since they dont sell that type of speed at the stores, it took 3 weeks to deliver. I am returning the Ibuy's, I will go with a toshiba for my son who is the gamer and me, the photo , and app's "nut" will try the sony... unless i see a special. i used to build my own, desktops and know what you need is cpu speed, graphics card for your programs to run well, and storage.
I also had a hard drive failure on Sony (the others it is just the gig's,) You should, send it back to them, even if the warrently isnt good. You be surprised how good they are. I did and was. They replaced it. However, I did have to pay a company to get the information, after the idiots at BESTBUY'S best of the best geeks caused the already WORKING BUT FAILING hard drive to fail permently, when i went in to get the files transfered. After claiming to find someone to fix it, then they lost the whole computer, which they found three weeks later after I had a tissy fit and had to keep the demanding they find it. police and all.... beware of Best Buy and the Geek squad. ask a simple question like how would You, email files and it will show if they know what they are doing.
hope this helps and forgive me i couldnt find spl cek(it is my first reply and response.
noreen
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