Customer Service

ProPortable has excellent customer service. I bought my ASUS S5N from them and don't have a single complaint -- only praise.

Look them up on resellerratings.com.

They have a 9.97 out 10 lifetime rating. Compartively, Dell has a 4.48 and a 3.20 in the past 6 months.

There are a few others with great lifetime ratings.
Powernotebooks.com = 9.99
VoodooPC = 9.78 (wildly overpriced and geared towards gamers though).
PCTorque = 9.93 (great for Sagers - which also tend to be gaming notebooks and are actually some of the same ones Voodoo sells)
Discountlaptops.com = 10.00

If you're in the market for an ASUS (great laptops) though, I'd just go with ProPortable. They know more about ASUS notebooks that probably most of the people than work for ASUS.

I wouldn't trust Dell's Indian tech support one bit - all they have is databases with pre-made questions and answers. Oh, and they can barely speak English, of course.

IBM apparently has very good tech support. Their most affordable line is probably the G series.

How much more did it end up costing than if you'd got the S5N from somewhere like discountlaptops? I have indeed heard very good things about the custormer service at proportable, but their prices are correspondingly increased. I'm just wondering whether it is worth it.

Well considering that discountlaptops doesn't sell the S5N... I don't know what they'd charge for it...

I shopped around a bit, and just now did a search on Froogle and the lowest price I am showing for the S5N is 1541 from a company I have never heard of. Some people have it for as high has 1700-1800. The average seems to be 1599.

ProPortable sells it for 1599.

I had a couple of things done to it that I'm not sure other companies would do. I had 512 RAM added and, because it is a micro-dimm it was a little pricy - but basically the same as anywhere else.

There are a few brands of micro-dimm out there and I know some moron (not you) is going to post and say I got ripped off because they found a Kingmax or some brand for less money, but there is a variable to consider. The S5N is a tiny notebook and to put a regular micro-dimm in it requires case modification. However, Kingston (not to be confused with Kingmax) makes a 512mb Micro-Dimm that is smaller than others height-wise and thus fits in without having to modify the case.

I also had a Hitachi 60/5400 rpm HDD added for like 130 something. If you shop around you can find it as cheap as 110, so I paid $20 more for something to have it all bundled together, so what?

In the end of you get what you pay for and if getting great service means paying a few dollars more, I'm all for it. All totaled the total price difference between ProPortable and other less reputable companies was probably far less than $100 (being generous to other companies) - so for less than the price of one ritzy meal out with my girlfriend, I've got to ask myself, in the long run, would I rather save a few bucks and not know if the company I'm going with is going to cheat me (as was the case the the previous reseller I went with, ibuypower) or would I rather fork over the extra $ and have a great notebook from a great reseller?

Also, as a side note, I should add that ProPortable's website also says "all systems are checked for abnormal pixels prior to shipping and will not ship any system that is not free any sort of pixel imperfections for your piece of mind." (they still say there is a small risk you can get a dead pixel if it were damaged or came about after they checked, but I have it on very good authority that they do indeed check before they send it out). And they include a 3yr warranty standard on all of the systems that they build (so figure that into their slightly higher prices as well).

XMELD NOTEBOOKS!! definitely some great service. I am about to buy msi m510 barebones from them. each time I send them email question, it has been answered within a couple of hours.