What laptop should I buy?

[Whiment]

I know HP is very good!
But acer prices are very cheap!
Dell is very durable!
Asus looks very beautiful!
I'm really confused. Although I know HP ranks first in the market!

[hewlpac]

HP Septre is very upgradable and nice design

[Jlouis]

Depends on your needs.

Buy an Alieware and you won't be disappointed.

MSI could be a cheaper option.

Go to this site, enter the forum and you will have all the information you need.

http://www.notebookreview.com

Cheers

[burkhard]

This is one of those threads that could go on forever, but one thing you might want to check --

We bought an HP laptop for my wife a year or two back, not because of any loyalty to HP, but because the price/performance ratio seemed a good match.

Only after we had it and she had used it for a month or two did we figure out that the battery is not user-serviceable. I never would have bought it if I had realized that. Obviously this is the trend for things that need to be especially tiny, like many smart phones and tablets. On a laptop, though, I consider it unforgivable and unfathomable. In all the many laptops I've "owned" (work machines) over the years, the batteries always crap out within a couple years, sometimes less. User-replaceable batteries are a must.

I didn't even think to look as I had never seen that in all the laptops I've used. I'm not sure if HP does this across their line or how many other companies do it as well now, but it would be a deal-breaker for me.

Yes, I can take it apart and it probably isn't that hard, but it's one more thing I need to deal with instead of my wife just easily exchanging a dicey one with a new one. The original one she has now has degraded down to a run capacity of under an hour, so it's going to need dealing with soon.

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(10-24-2018 07:20 AM)Whiment Wrote:  Dell is very durable!
Asus looks very beautiful!

If you want durable AND beautiful you need a MacBook Pro. I am a big fan of 17inch notebooks, because with one of them I don't need a desktop computer at home and they still fit in the rucksack I take along for work.

Unfortunately Apple stopped making 17in models in 2011 but those later ones still have specs comparable to current models from e.g. HP.

My latest 17in MacBook Pro has an i7 Quadcore processor, 16GB Ram and 1.5 TB of SSD hard disk space (I moved the optical drive to an external enclosure to make space for a second hard disk), two graphic cards and plenty of connectors. I bought it second hand for about 2/3 of the price of a current 17in Hp Pavillion. It is powerful enough to run Windows in a Virtual Box with decent speed (I have very few applications that require Windows anyway), alternatively one could boot Windows natively.

The latest 15in MacBook Pros with Retina display are of course very pretty as well, but insanely expensive and - what I dislike most - require special adapters for every third party peripherial device.

As I use mine in front of audiences sometimes I (partly) covered the maufacturer logo with a protective sticker that I got custom made from an online print shop. The rest of the thick aluminium housing (machined from solid metal) is duable enough to carry the thing in one's bag without an extra protective case.

Regards
Max



NB: And that was the one I used before, a dual-core with 8GB RAM. I wanted to sell it on eBay, but my son, who didn't care the least for Apple computers until recently, snatched it from me:

[EugeneNine]

Depends on how your going to use it. HP, Dell, etc have both consumer lines and business lines. if your buying a laptop just to sit on a desk and hook up a mouse and keyboard then the consumer line will probably suffice. However if your using the touchpad and keyboard in the laptop and/or not keeping it confined to a desk then you may want to get a business grade laptop.

I personally never buy new anymore, I usually buy a "refurbished" Dell business modle thats ~3 years old.

[Zaphod]

Quote:If you want durable AND beautiful you need a MacBook Pro. I am a big fan of 17inch notebooks, because with one of them I don't need a desktop computer at home and they still fit in the rucksack I take along for work.

My MacBook Pro 13inch has been used daily since I bought it new in 2010.

Admittedly the battery isn’t 100% now, but hey.

I did replace the mains adaptor about a year ago.... only because my cat had took to chewing the end near the computer ... I got a new MagSafe cable afterwards for about £4 , not fitted it yet though. I didn’t realise you could get the cable on its own.

I upgraded the harddrive to a larger 7200 version almost as soon as I got it , but that’s just my personal preference in getting top speed out of this usual bottleneck.
I tried dual booting/bootcamping it with windows for a while, but I’ve gone back to the latest single boot Mac OS.
I did buy a new keyboard also for it , only because I might need it some day - that day hasn’t arrived yet, although some keys are looking very shiny now

I guess I could upgrade to SSD now as prices have come down in eight years.

But the rest of it has been excellent.

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(10-24-2018 04:18 PM)Zaphod Wrote:  My MacBook Pro 13inch has been used daily since I bought it new in 2010.

I still have my first Apple Notebook, a 15inch Titanium PowerBook that I bought new in 2002. For 5 or 6 years I used it daily until I got a 17inch model. But I still take it along on trips occasionally. It works fine and is only on it's second battery which still lasts about two hours. After spilling coffee over it I had to replace the logic board (replacement board from eBay for ca. 50 Euros) but the keyboard survived. Like you I bought a replacement keyboard just in case... Unfortunately the latest web browser that was released for the latest Mac OS (10.4) that still runs on Motorola CPUs is totally incompatible with today's web contents. But for offline work it is still a good computer.

Regards
Max

[badaze]

Anyway. Buy a laptop with SSD storage.

[EugeneNine]

I wouldn't make that a deal breaker because most laptops you can easily swap the drive out with your own ssd. I upgrade the drive every couple years.

[badaze]

(10-25-2018 10:31 PM)EugeneNine Wrote:  I wouldn't make that a deal breaker because most laptops you can easily swap the drive out with your own ssd. I upgrade the drive every couple years.

Sure. That’s what I did with mine. But if you want to save time, money and sometimes worries. Buying directly a laptop with a SSD is a good solution IMHO.

[Zaphod]

The hard drive (whether SSD or conventional) is almost without question the item the laptop manufacturers skimp on if they can get away with it ....
It'll undoubtedly be a slow version, a 5400 rpm or a low speed SSD (yes there are different flavours of SSD speed - speed costs money)

[hewlpac]

Have had nothing but trouble with Acer (crappy keyboards and track pads) and Asus (over heating and failing repeatedly without possibility of recovering data). My recommendation is to avoid at all cost.

[EugeneNine]

Acer and asus both only make consumer laptops, I've found that most any consumer laptop is crap compared to a business.

And BTW don't give Apple any free marketing using their Trackpad name, its a touchpad.

[rprosperi]

(10-26-2018 11:15 AM)EugeneNine Wrote:  Acer and asus both only make consumer laptops, I've found that most any consumer laptop is crap compared to a business.

Yes, consumer laptops, although cheaper, indeed are crap compared to business-class laptops, just like any other kind of equipment.

Acer does make Pro/Business laptops, the TravelMate series, which are still economical (for this class of equipment) but also solid and reliable. I've sold them for more than 10 years, and never had a problem. There are better machines, such as high-end ThinkPads and HP ProBook, but these are much more expensive.

[Thomas Okken]

(10-26-2018 11:15 AM)EugeneNine Wrote:  And BTW don't give Apple any free marketing using their Trackpad name, its a touchpad.

TrackPad (with or without a capital P) is a generic term, not specific to Apple.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/laptop...-trackpad/
Apple does have a registered trade mark for "Magic Trackpad," though.

More on topic, let me add my voice to those who are recommending not to go cheap when buying laptops. I've used Compaq (7792DMT), Lenovo (T61), and Apple (MacBook Air 13" and 11"), and no complaints about any of them; I've used Fujitsu (520D), Acer (forgot the model number), and Asus (eee) machines, all with various issues, mainly, but not limited to, flimsy bodies that flexed too much and ended up falling apart, intermittent failures caused by bad contacts, often caused by the aforementioned flimsy bodies, and lousy battery life. N.B. These are all machines that I've owned, not company-issued ones.

[3298]

(10-26-2018 12:01 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  the TravelMate series

It's funny that you mention those, because I've had a pretty bad time with one. It was a TravelMate B115, manufactured in September 2014, which I got in mid-2015. I put up with it for just over two years, then I abandoned it for the laptop I'm typing this on (Dell XPS 13), which almost instantly felt much more pleasant. (Well, I had to tinker with the libinput code to get the experience I wanted, but that's something I blame my distro for; the installation on the TravelMate B115 received the old Synaptics driver, but in late 2017 the default input driver was libinput.)
During those two years I got countless instances of missed or duplicate keystrokes (like two dozen for a text as long as this post) due to the distance between the point where a key feels like it's pressed and the point where it actually registers. The XPS 13 isn't perfect either, but I've yet to experience a missed or duplicate keystroke when I'm not actively trying to provoke it (by pushing down a key in ultra-slow motion).
The touchpad kept imagining a finger that jumped everywhere and clicked on things (everytime it happened, I quickly put a real finger on it to limit the damage to unwanted scroll movements instead of rapid cursor movement and clicking, then pushed Fn-F7 twice with the other hand to turn the touchpad off and on again). It was so bad that it got me into the habit of ALWAYS carrying an actual mouse everywhere, even when my bag was already overflowing, just for the ability to operate the laptop with the touchpad turned off. And it wasn't a false negative from the touchpad driver's palm rejection (as one might suspect initially), because on several occasions it happened when I had opened a text file or web page, wiped the touchpad with a piece of cloth, then leaned back to read the file or page while my hands were far away from the touchpad. Luckily this malfunction didn't cause data loss (Ctrl-Z to undo saved me more than a few times when it selected text while I was typing), but it managed to close some slow-starting programs on several occasions.
The laptop's shell cracked near the hinges a few months before I abandoned it. While it didn't fall apart entirely yet, this made the hinges very wobbly, and I had to press upper and lower halves together to line up a hole in the upper half with the socket mounted on a board resting on the lower half in order to insert the charging cable.
The TravelMate B115 can apparently come with several different wireless networking chips, and there's no indication from outside which one you get in a given laptop. My father's had an Intel chip, my identical-looking one got Broadcom, and another family member got yet another option (can't remember which). On Linux, the Broadcom driver has to be installed separately, and it depends on ndiswrapper (meaning it's a blob of the Windows driver, i.e. closed-source, which leaves some open-source-only distros out in the cold). Not what you expect from a device advertised as Linux-friendly - I took one without a Windows license for a reason.
The only things about this laptop I'm missing with my current one are a third USB port (shame on you, Dell - but many other manufacturers are doing the same in their current ultrabooks) and that it was passively cooled. With the spinning HDD it came with swapped for a SSD it became completely silent. To be fair, my new laptop has a bit more processing power too, so the presence of a fan is reasonable.

After a laptop that forced me to constantly monitor it for misbehavior (wonky keyboard, phantom finger on the touchpad), used hardware which is poorly supported on one of the operating systems it's built and sold for, and started falling apart after less than two years of use, that's going to be the first and last Acer laptop in my possession.

[Sukiari]

Thinkpad X220. Don’t bother with any of the nu-pads with chicklet keyboards. They are extremely uncomfortable to use.

[rprosperi]

(10-26-2018 03:42 PM)3298 Wrote:  

(10-26-2018 12:01 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  the TravelMate series

It's funny that you mention those, because I've had a pretty bad time with one. It was a TravelMate B115, manufactured in September 2014, which I got in mid-2015. I put up with it for just over two years, then I abandoned it for the laptop I'm typing this on (Dell XPS 13)...

Hmph. Never heard of the model B115. Why such a long lag between mfg. date and when got it - did you get it used?

Anyhow, stuff can happen with any manufacturer's line, or even a single machine, it doesn't mean every TravelMate Acer made would have similar issues, and I get you're not saying that, just worth pointing it out. As I noted, I've sold well over 100 TM's over many years, and never had a complaint, other than some upgrades from HD -> SSD, add RAM, upgrade to Win-10, etc.

Of course ThinkPad is virtually always one's best option, unless you are looking for gaming or other 'special purpose' uses. But they come at a notably higher cost, though also generally worth it IMHO.

[3298]

(10-27-2018 09:04 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Hmph. Never heard of the model B115. Why such a long lag between mfg. date and when got it - did you get it used?

No, it was new. Perhaps some leftover stock of an older model - the XPS 13 is definitely one such case, as it's a 9343 (the end-of-2016 model) when the 9350 was already out.
The stickers on the back have text like "TravelMate B115 series" and "TMB115-M-41RQ" on them. Another text I (re-?)discovered is definitely a lie: "This device contains WLAN+Bluetooth module INTEL 7260 HMW AN", I know there's a Broadcom chip inside.

(10-27-2018 09:04 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Anyhow, stuff can happen with any manufacturer's line, or even a single machine, it doesn't mean every TravelMate Acer made would have similar issues, and I get you're not saying that, just worth pointing it out. As I noted, I've sold well over 100 TM's over many years, and never had a complaint, other than some upgrades from HD -> SSD, add RAM, upgrade to Win-10, etc.

The other two B115's in my family as well as two Aspire-branded ones (V3-111P-P06A) with what seems to be the same hardware other than a touchscreen and a differently colored shell (silver instead of black) all had the same touchpad issues. The keyboard problem might be more pronounced for me because I tap the keys pretty lightly (meaning they bounce more), but when I had to troubleshoot some unrelated software issues on one of the other machines, the keyboard felt the same, so it's not limited to this particular machine. The cracked shell was limited to my device, but it appears one of the others was on its way there too, as one screw broke out (mine has lost three, and a fourth looks suspiciously tilted in its hole).
After pulling it out of storage to read the labels, I found out that I misremembered one thing: it wasn't the power cable that was hard to insert after the shell broke, but the audio jack (it's in the back of the left edge, right were the power cable in the XPS 13 goes). I use headphones quite often, so that port got a cable inserted about as often as the power supply. Anyway, that's unimportant, but I felt like mentioning it in case someone wonders how the power cable hole can be blocked like that (it's in the center of the back edge).

Sure, there may be devices that aren't as bad. If your customers are happy with their TravelMates, then that's just fine. And I get what you're hinting at, namely that there are plenty of people who don't complain because they have nothing to complain about. All you can see online are the complaints by people who do have problems. On the other hand, those complaints can serve as data points in issue probability (needs an estimate of the number of satisfied customers) / issue severity statistics, which can be a useful guide for buying a new device. So this report boils down to: 5 people close to me (myself included) had trouble with the input hardware on Acer laptops produced about 4 years ago (though it's possible that some of these come from the same batch).