Laptop advice?

A month ago I got a Compaq/HP Evo N800v. It seems all right except I'm always getting kicked off of the Internet. (I blame that on Windows XP).

Of the Windows laptops, I haven't had any direct experience with them day to day myself, so I can only report on what other folks at work have to say. Your mileage can/will vary

IBM ThinkPads: They're ugly. They're kinda heavy. They take a lot of abuse. Couple of the departments on campus use them as portable classrooms and get the hell beaten out of them, but they can take the wear apparently.

Dell: We have three of them in the department and each one has either shed parts or needed parts replaced (dead keyboard, broken AC power jack, broken pcmcia card slot). It mostly been all warrantee work, but I personally wouldn't recommend them.

Sony Vaios: Slick looking. Terrific keyboards. Lightweight. Pretty expensive. If I had to get a Windows laptop, it would be one of these.

Sean, have a look at the headphone socket on your powerbook - is there crack running forwards towards the vent? And are there cracks running forwards in front of the hinges, expecially on the left? Now I no longer have one, I really have to say it really is a flawed design, having solid metal parts held together by a plastic middle. The casing was replaced twice on my old one and each time cracks appeared in those places wihtin a couple of weeks. My new 12" is metal right up to the hinges and it's infinitely better. iBooks really are indestuctable though.

I don't care much about looks or weight, I just want something reliable. I'd heard wonderful things about older Compaq laptops. But I wouldn't go near an HP again.

Dell seems much more reasonably priced than other major brands with similar components. But I don't want to buy one and regret it because it keeps breaking!

Although the iBooks look somewhat underpowered I have an even less powerful old powerbook and it does me proud for everything. Make sure you get a decent amount of RAM, I'm talking above 512Mb here. OSX has a bundle of little processes that gobble up the memory. Currently its cheaper to get your ram at places other than the apple store. Crucial are good in the UK for memory.

The 12" PBG4 looks good but it is limited to 640MB of ram see a good review at The Register.

As soon as I have the money I shall be after a 17" PBG4 unless something better has come along by then, which judging by my finances will have happened.

Steer clear of the 15" PBG4s they're due for a revamp soon and Titatnium doesn't appear to be the wonder material apple thought it was. Its too hard and brittle.

The new Toshibas are quite attractive, I think, though you still have to be very careful about one aspect: the company often uses desktop processors inside their notebooks, which means they might heat up and scale back on the performance when that happens. I had a Satellite 5000 series model on loan for a while and it was torture to have to give it back. It's hard to say what the longevity of the thing is, but I've had a Satellite 1750 for quite some time and there's only one physical issue with it (little sliver of plastic near the hinge has come off) that doesn't seem to be affecting it.

By the way, I disagree that IBM Thinkpads are ugly...I think they're actually pretty elegant (but I like the all-black look). But they definitely take a beating. You want ugly? Take a look at some o' those Compaq models from a couple of years ago. Yeesh. Those had looks that only an engineer could love.

(Also Sean can you e-mail me when you get a chance pls - I have a few Qs for you and I don't know yr work addy.)

As for the AMD models, I haven't seen too many of them to be honest, so can't say. That said, I'll be getting a look at one soon so may be able to report back.

It seems that Celeron processors are the slowest (a Celeron is not as fast as some Athlons, and much slower than pentium P3/P4, even with the same clock speed). I was told that a Celeron 2Gig processor wouldn't be much better than my current P2/266Meg. Athlons, though not as popular as Pentiums, can be quite good--depending on the speed. (for instance, an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ offers the same performance as a 2 Gig Pentium 4) It seems that certain Athlons can also be more efficient than P4 (they apparently perform more tasks per clock cycle).

As for P4 or P3 vs. P4M or P3M, the M means that they're processors specifically made for mobile systems. They've adapted desktop processors plenty well enough that they'll do just fine, however. The P3/P4 are supposed to be a bit faster than their M counterparts, though they run hotter.

Just to make things more complicated, there's a new kind of pentium processor for laptops as well--Centrino. As it's so new, I assume it's too expensive for me to consider, so I haven't read up on it. Here's some cnet info on it though: CNET article

It seems that 256 MB of RAM is fine for Win XP, which seems to be the widely offered operating system these days. I'm focusing on machines with DDR SDRAM, which is apparently dramatically faster than the PC133 SDRAM and the like.

Who knows why this fruitcake wrote such a long original post. What are some good PC laptop brands? I'm totally out of touch with the times.

Thanks.

- burty

Lenovo, Dell.

The issue these days if every laptop packs more power than anyone realistically needs for the internet and a bit of word processing, so it's more about support, reliability and aesthetics.

unless you have specific needs, in which case let us know.

Has anyone encountered a problem where their laptop screen just goes crazy, which is to say, the image becomes scattered and jittery all over, usually which is fixed by moving the screen panel a bit? This is happening with my less than 2.5 year old laptop, and all of a sudden it got to the point where I couldn't fix it until after like 5 minutes of non stop craziness. Can this be fixed by taking it in? At this point I'm afraid to touch anything past the keyboard.

I bought a lead a while back to connect my laptop to my TV screen, to show eg iPlayer that way.

It worked in that the picture on the laptop showed up on the TV.

But the sound still came from the laptop's little speakers! Not good.

Any advice on getting sound rerouted to TV along with picture?

Depends on yr TV. It will likely have either a 2.5mm stereo input socket somewhere, or phono stereo input sockets (ie. red and white). Your laptop will have a 2.5mm headphone socket on it. So you need a stereo extender cable with either 2.5mm to 2.5mm jacks (ie. the same at each end) or 2.5mm to phono jacks. If you visit a Maplins, Clas Ohlson or any large electrical store they will be able to sell you this.

Failing that, you could buy a 2.1 stereo speaker set for your laptop, which will give much better sound than the built in speakers. Again, widely available.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the advice.
What I did was, plug the laptop into my hi-fi!
The sound was actually good!

The one problem was that the picture connection between TV and laptop sometimes went down and eventually would not return.

My Lenovo laptop appears to be having some start up problems.

4 out 5 times when I switch it on, it won't do anything. All the lights come on as if its working but black screen. I'll switch it off again and try again, eventually it will work.

I'm not sure it's anything to do with Windows, maybe more of a hardware thing because it's as soon as I press the On button.

Anyone familiar with this?

do you have any large external hard drives connected at the time?

i have an HP laptop that goes black right after the "loading windows" screen sometimes, everything else seeming to work.

it turns out to be a display driver issue. every time it happens i reinstall a certain display driver (supplied by my company's IT department, who i think get it by downloading from the HP website) and it gets fixed on restart, which lasts several months.

Nothing else attached no

When it works, there are no problems whatsoever whilst it's on.

i'm very proud of my bottom-of-the-line, refurbished, >5 years old acer for somehow still being alive despite everything, but unsurprisingly it's not in great shape. what are the good lower-end brands and other things to consider nowadays? (budget of ~£250.)

I have this same question tbh ...

My Asus was cheap (<£250) three years ago and is still going strong.

(came with a lot of crap pre-loaded though - I neither know nor want to know what the 'Asus Vibe Fun Center' is)

was told today that my 5-year-old macbook was "vintage" and thus i couldn't get replacement parts for it. i hate thi sinstant obsolesence stuff.

word of warning :

W10 vs preloaded crap = chaos.
i have a 4 year old sony laptop that came with W8.x
after the W10 upgrade arrived the laptop came to a standstill.
following weeks/months of performance related chaos i found the source.
sony had shipped a chunk of stuff that was embedded in the windows scheduler to help look after the laptop.
however W10 also had similar monitoring s/w.
hence both s/w apps were fighting for resources.
once i disabled all the sony shyte the laptop (and W10) sprung into action and it has been excellent ever since.

asus and acer both make p decent budget laptops. i'd try to get something w/ at least an i5 processor and >4 GB of RAM if possible. you may also want to consider a chromebook if yr just trying to stream shit and surf the web

W10 is great but I've seen it totally tank several diff laptops (incl my boyf's 5 year old top-of-the-line Alienware powerhouse). MS has projected metrics to meet and is thusly doing a very, very bad job at telling ppl "hey, your laptop is old and might not have updated drivers"

It needs to be said - an SSD transplant into a MacBook is shockingly effective as a rejuvenation. 480GB SATA SSD drive, an external SATA-USB enclosure to plug it in, Carbon Copy Cloner and half an hour with a screwdriver to put it in. Like a new machine for $200. I’ve done it about 6 times to various laptops, iMacs etc and it never fails to impress.

in case anyone is curious i ended up going w/ an EVO15-S - i7-7700HQ Quad-Core 2.80GHz, GTX 1070 graphics card Max-Q, 16GB DDR4, a 512GB Samsung SSD drive and a 2TB Seagate FireCuda flash-accelerated hard drive, display is FHD 1920 x 1080 15.6" 120Hz.

price

a little under $2,500

yeesh

$2499.99

the fuck

My company is paying for it and it compares favorably to MacBooks it has purchased recently. I don’t have any discretionary funds atm

sorry man didnt mean to pry

company's paying for it? say no more

by all means, upgrade to the turtle beach 5.1 soundcard

Is it possible get a laptop these days that will do OK rudimentary CAD/3D design for ~$500? Mostly I want to use it for work, some modeling for 3D print, and light gaming. I'm guessing $500 is still basically a crap level price-point though. Willing to settle for PC/Windows, unfortunately Chromebook/etc is unlikely to run the applications I want.

I know you're not keen on a Chromebook but you could run Linux via Crouton and use a program like FreeCAD which is meant to be okay. The Asus C302 has good specs and within your budget.

i returned the laptop. i wasn't happy w/ it. the hardware was great but the display was washed out and less sharp than a 2012 macbook pro and the audio was tinny and distant. idgi are even top of the line PC laptops unable to compete w/ even older macbooks??

Interesting. Having sold my ageing 2010 MacbookPro was considering this Chromebook in particular. The other option is to get a refurbed Macbook Air for around £550.

yeah constant question for me. my '09 MB pro is on its way out soon and i LOVE the idea of getting a PC but just worry that with music (logic pro) it might not work for me. also i'm terrible at researching new hardware.

Is it possible get a laptop these days that will do OK rudimentary CAD/3D design for ~$500?
pretty sure a Lenovo W520 would get the job done

My 5 year old t430 think pad is still operating flawlessly, but my little brother needs a laptop so I'm going to give him my hand-me-down and have ordered a t440p off ebay. It's really similar to what I already have, but I'm going to go crazy upgrading it! 1080p panel, quad-core cpu (its the last upgradable generation, everything later will be soldered in), two ssds to dual boot Linux and win7--it's nothing fancy, and certainly can't compare to fully-kitted $3k Alienware beasts, but I'm all giddy at the chance to tinker around in the guts and get a really well-performing laptop for a little over $600 after all's said and done.

I was surprised to see how much of a commodity used thinkpads are! You can basically choose whatever price point you're comfortable with (all the way down to sub $100) and walk away with a solid and dependable laptop

indeed, it's basically the only models I'm looking at

I already have an X201. Windows 10 runs very well on it (having upgraded to an SSD). However, battery life is poor and the trackpad isn't great. Would they be an improvement on the t440p?

T440p trackpad notoriously sucks (like, it's basically unanimously agreed that it's by far the worst thing about that model), but it's easy-ish and cheap ($15) to get a T450 trackpad off ebay or whatever and pop that in instead.

impressed that the X201 is still going strong... I'd been looking at an X240, you can get it with dual batteries p cheap

it's easy-ish and cheap ($15) to get a T450 trackpad off ebay or whatever and pop that in instead.
― Dan I

Thanks, good to know.

The X201 is pretty indestructible as far as I can tell. Great piece of hardware but it is let down by a tiny track-pad and poor battery life. I ordered an Acer R11 Chromebook yesterday just because I'm intrigued by Chrome OS and its ability to run Android apps + Linux side by side. I will probably find performance a bit lacking but it will mainly be used for casual surfing on the sofa.

Now that I actually have the T440p in hand, the trackpad seems fine and I don't intend to replace it. I think it was just the clit-mouse fanatics who were fussing over the removal of distinct, independently clickable buttons at the top of the trackpad, but I don't use the clit-mouse.

Acer R11 looks cool! I might consider getting one too, would be nice if you'd report back when you've tried it out.

Unfortunately my foray into Chrome OS hasn't been great. The Acer R11 was actually quite nice to use but was a bit under-powered / laggy. I could see myself getting frustrated in the future. I also ordered the more expensive Asus C302. Much sleeker and quicker but let down by jittery trackpad. Moving the cursor around the screen was an unnecessarily painful experience. So they've both gone back. More hardware related than OS related - disappointing nonetheless.

So they've both gone back it's back to the drawing board. Considering a refurbed Lenov X250 or 11" Macbook Air.

yeah, those are two great models, think I'd probably go with the 13" Macbook

thanks for the responses above (forgot to bookmark)

Is that trackpad issue on the C302 common? I got one for my son when Amazon had a big pre-Christmas discount and it's been a joy to use -- no trackpad issues that I've noticed. I've been pretty much Mac-only for 20+ years and I've been surprised at how nice this thing is.

Maybe not - I might just have had a dud. If it wasn't for the trackpad I would have been very happy.

So in the end I plumped for a refurbished ThinkPad X250 for £350. It's in great nick, 8gb ram, SSD and an IPS screen. I originally stuck Linux Mint on it but I was getting trackpad issues every time I suspended the laptop. Isn't Linux great sometimes!

Anyway, I've installed Manajaro KDE on it instead (which is an Arch derivative) and all is fine. It's a beautiful looking distro and runs very nicely on the X250.

was looking for an X240 but couldn't find the money for it... instead opted for a used Acer C720 chromebook for 80 euros - seemed the cheapest way to get a very lightweight machine with 8 hours of battery and I wanted to test the Chrome OS

will probably only be using it for writing, browsing, email, so far so good

i got a new macbook Pro at work and... it's pretty great? the touchbar is pointless and the dongle situation is embarrassing but otherwise it's extremely competent at being a mac. what is killing me is how quickly it boots. like 4 or 5 seconds maybe? crazy times.

lol keep in mind i am coming from a (home) 2011 mini and (work) hp elitebook from 2013

How do y’all feel about the AMD Ryzen processors? Should I go out of my way to get one?

I've really got to get a new laptop, the one I use for my various project is on its last legs. Can't afford something that's not refurbished, but am entering the world of SSD storage for the first time and want/need at least 1TB in there. if needed I can buy a new HD. Don't want to spend more than £400 if I can help it, maybe £500 tops. Has anyone been laptop shopping in the UK in the last couple of years and able to offer any advice? Bought my current laptop from an online refurb place in 2017 and it has given me no end of trouble since, so bit hesitant now.

Bringing thread back: I have a work Lenovo Idea Pad but I need a computer that my employer doesn't own.

I think I want to buy used & refurbished and I stare at backmarket.com ads on the subway 3 days a week. Has anyone used them and are they legit? Where else should I be looking?

I don't know how much storage or memory anything represents. My 2011 Macbook Air kept running out of both but it was old. If I want to have a music library and back up my iphone and normal stuff, what are my actual system requirements?

laptop or would desktop meet needs

bumped a thread for you with a lot of recent discussion

My MacBook screen is toast. Its totally useable with a monitor but I was going to get the screen fixed at some point, till I saw some older refurbed MacBooks in a local store, and wondered about getting a backup MacBook instead. They got a job lot of 2016 MacBooks 12 inches in. 250gb HD, 8gb ram, m3.

Is a machine this old a bad idea for a second laptop, if not whats a reasonable price. I can run some terminal commands on it to ascertain its health, they still have a bunch of them left

I’d try and get 16gigs of ram, but I think any MacBook with a M processor is fine, maybe avoid an M1 at this point as they are getting on a bit. I wouldn’t get an intel one, despite the fact that my 2018 intel MacBook Pro is still going OK.

my Intel Mini is fine for the pedestrian uses I have for it. The most I ever ask of it is live transcoding 1080p movies from Plex which it still does fine (even if the fan does spin up..)

do 2016 Macbooks really have M3 chips?

probably a typo m3/i3, the M3 is 2023 and later

I ran the gift card trade in number for my Intel MBP and it was too low to bother - for e-mail, browsing, basic office work, watching TV, etc. it's still working fine.

It can run audio programs but the fan starts spinning up quick.

There are apparently new M2 MacBook airs with 16gig ram in the US for $669 so you ought to be able to do better for used or refurbished.

Apple sucks

probably a typo m3/i3, the M3 is 2023 and later

1.1ghz Dual-Core Intel core m3 (2016)

As for price, they're €300

my mid-2015 work mbp won't update to the newest operating system, so i think the end is nigh (even though it's still solid in all other ways). so I'd look for something considerably newer.

(i hate that they can do this, just render perfectly good hardware obsolete)

OCLP will sort that for you. I’m running Ventura on my mid 2012 MacBook Pro with no issues at all, Ableton 12 works perfectly for example.

It’s not too much of a faff to get set up, just note that it’s only worth doing if you have 16gb memory minimum. Saved dropping £2k on a new laptop for a couple of years anyway:

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

(it's a work laptop and they'd send me a new one if i asked but...)