NEO laptop fail & some tips on what laptop brands to avoid
It finally happened. After almost a year of random shutdowns and a failing fan, my best friend’s NEO GL31 laptop made one epic fail, refusing to either powerup or even charge from the AC adapter. It’s been almost a month since installing Windows Vista SP1 on this machine when it made another shutdown last night. It seemed to do well running Vista, with the power settings set to “Low” to prevent the CPU from going full throttle and trip the faulty CPU fan, which leads to overheating and the shutdowns. The NEO GL31 is now sitting on the technicians table at a trusted repair center at the Porta Vaga.
This whole experience with NEO and their sub-quality laptops had me Googling last night, only to find one horror story after another. NEO Manufacturing and Services appears to have a huge product quality issue problem. NEO’s laptops have only been growing in popularity in the country due to their sometimes ridiculously under-priced items, often being 10,000 pesos cheaper (or more) for the same spec laptop from Asus, Acer, or Compaq. While it’s easy to blame NEO for such badly designed notebooks, the products they sell are only “re-branded” items from a company named COMPAL. A little Googling around will show that Compal has other local companies in Asia and Europe that re-brand their laptops as their own. If you’ve got a complaint with the build quality of your NEO laptop, blame Compal. I just hope this isn’t the normal Chinese “quality standards” that Chinese companies set upon themselves.
For those of you in the market for a cheap laptop, here are my personal pointers on what to avoid:
- The brand/company name is placed on a sticker - reputable computer companies have their logos and branding either embossed or recessed on the plastic or metal casing of the laptop. Also check if the branding is balanced out or aligned. The GL31 unit my friend got had the “NEO” logo skewed on the cover. You can tell a lot about a company based on how they handle things aesthetically with their products.
- Can you Google the exact model? - If you can’t get the specific laptop via a simple Google search, chances are you’ll have a hard time looking for other people to help you out if problems arise in the future.
- No Company support pages and legacy downloads - a reputable brand will always have a fully searchable support website where you can download drivers and updates, even for out-of-production models. A good company should always provide a way for people to download their drivers from their site, not relying on the OEM driver CDs the units came with. Case in point: try searching for GL31 on NEO’s website.
- Flimsy plastic - NO, it’s not supposed to buckle or easily be depressed by finger pressure.
It’s simple to say “you get what you pay for”, but that isn’t always necessarily the case. There are several great laptops out there that you can get for almost the same price, if not slightly more expensive than a NEO, with great specifications. Just last year, I guided my brother-in-law to an Asus X80 with a great classy finish and commendable specs for under Php 28,000.
As always, and especially when you are considering a purchase worth tens of thousands of pesos, a little research on what models to consider will go a long way to giving you “peace of mind” when it comes to owning a laptop computer. DON’T go to store and buy the first thing you see, DON’T trust the sales-speak of the store personnel who may be wanting to offload some old inventory, bring a piece of paper to write model numbers on, or take photos of the models you are interested in with your cellphone for further research and comparison. And, DON’T buy NEO!
