Hey guys, I've been a desktop PC user my whole life but now with my work life taking a different direction I am in dire need of a laptop to do my business. The thing is that I don't know what to look for and what not to look for. Obviously I do not need a laptop capable of running games but I also don't want a machine where its warp speed is that of a frantic sloth's pace. The work loads that I will be doing will probably be mainly along the lines of word processing and spreadsheets. Multitasking, email, blah blah blah, all that boring stuff to earn a wage. Wireless is a must. A reasonable price. Preferably an SSD since I won't have gigabytes worth of data. A DVD or multifunction ROM drive is probably still a required. Obviously I am not looking to build my own laptop so I guess it's going to boil down to mass produced branded laptops. I need reliability and ease of use. If I can stay under a thousands dollars I am a happy camper. I don't see the need in spending more than that but I also understand that you get what you pay for and if I pay less I'm not going to get much. So basically I need some brand reccomendations... Asus, Lenovo, HP (ewwwww), MSI, Gigabyte, etc... What kind of processor? Single? Duo, Quad? I like my Intel cores so I have that much narrowed down though is an i3 enough ooomph and is the i7 too much (no such thing!)... Hammer a way! I'm looking to buy from the site www.canadacomputers.com
Well yeah considering you basically can't build laptops the same way you can just go and build a desktop Shame really. ASUS, steer clear. Alienware, out of scope but steer clear. Dell aren't that great. People have told me that HP's are crap but mine has been absolutely fine. Toshiba I only have experience with the satellite lineup, steer clear, especially if its a business machine and going to be moved around, it will just fall apart. Lenovo I have never heard anything bad about, supposedly solidly built machines. If there is no gaming involved, a simple i3 dual core should suffice, maybe a quad if you want, but you don't need to worry about a 3ghz i7 or anything like that. THe mobile i3's mostly have hyperthreading anyway, 2 cores acting as 4 on a dual core model should be plenty for web + office. Christ even intel atom can do that.
Lenovo laptops are great, and they are indeed very well built IMO. We use a combination of Fujistus and Lenovos across our student body at my school, and my class uses the X230 tablet in my signature. I have seen them take a beating from my rowdy friends, and others, and it's still running great. They are a little pricey, but they are indeed great laptops. The X230 would be something I could recommend, other than the main battery pack being slapped on the back, looking ridiculous. With a second battery pack, mine lasts for up to 14 hours of school. Something I can also add is that it is able to run BeamNG reasonably well with lowest lighting and no PostFX. (40-55 FPS usually on Gridmap.)
How much is a reasonable price? For one it might be 400$, for others it's 1500$. And SSD Laptops are starting around 700-900$ i think.
Why steer clear of ASUS? The few laptops of theirs which I've seen come my way have been fantastic machines, both the RoG and consumer arms. The Transformer Flip Book Pro I've been using to try and get my main gaming rig back on its feet has been absolutely fine for $700. Lenovo laptops also tend to be very good for the price, or possibly a low end Sager. HPs are generally considered crap because they have poor cooling and mediocre build quality. My family and I do local computer repair and we have a pile of 5 overheated HP laptops from customers who we had to tell it would be cheaper to buy a new laptop and have us do data recovery they were so supremely busted. Every component under the keyboard aside from the HDD and in one case the SODIMMs was unrecoverable. We keep them around because the displays seem fairly common and the cases provide nice protection for the displays. Toshibas also have mediocre build quality in my experience, but I've never seen one overheat. Usually the ones we get for repair are because the customer was clumsy with it and broke the plastic housing internally which leads to other problems. E: This is the one I've been using. Solid all-metal build quality and very snappy, despite having only an HDD. It's passively cooled which made me nervous at first, but it's proven to be a nonissue. Plus this means it shouldn't get all clogged up with dust over time. My assumption is that ASUS somehow used the metal case as a massive heatsink. Very functional as a laptop but a bit clumsy in tablet mode.
I've seen more than a few failed ASUS laptops and their customer service when one does go wrong is possibly worse then them coming over and slapping you around the face with a wet fish. They even got in trouble with industry regulators in the UK because their support was so terrible. Devices sent in under warranty going missing without refund, being returned without being repaired or worse still with further damage, 6 month+ waiting times for device return and in many cases flat refusing to honour warranties in the first place. Frankly appalling. I've come across a few ASUS machine that just repeatedly BSOD from the box. Local PCWorld (themselves not known for best customer service) even acknowledge support issues from ASUS. Their motherboards and GPU's seem to be fine (although heaven forbid something actually go wrong), but laptops are terrible, I don't actually know anyone that has had their ASUS laptop last the full 1 year manufacturer warranty (which itself is not allowed in the EU which requires 2 year warranties). Dells fall apart and overheat. Toshiba, parents had 2 satellites, grandparents had one, got mates that have had them, school had them, flimsy as fuck. My HP has never breached 60C whenever I've run HW Monitor and the only physical damage is one of the rubber feet falling off. I had 1 bluescreen so far, 3rd party driver related. From what I've heard (although limited experience with them hands on), lenovo are nokia of the laptop world. As reliable as you can get and tough as nails.
I think I'm done with ASUS, all around. I'm actually contemplating returning the ASUS GTX 770 that I bought for my desktop because I'm getting serious stuttering while watching videos and playing some games. ASUS is the perfect example of a company that was once great but has now cheapened out to achieve higher profits while relying on its past reputation to keep making its sales. I too have noticed the increase in consumer complaints related to ASUS. Lenovo certainly seems like the best bet. I appreciate the fast replies. I will look into it some more and potentially make a purchase by tomorrow so keep up the discussion. In fact, if it hasn't been 30 days since I purchased by ASUS GPU then I will remove it this evening and take it back with me for an exchange at the same time that I make my laptop purchase. I tried different NVidia drivers as well as updated my BIOS but to no avail. A faulty card perhaps or just an overrated and overpriced Chinese made hunk of garbage. -edit I think I may be limited, budget wise, if I'm going to go with a Lenovo that has an SSD... For under a $1000 there's not much to chose from (IdeaPad Flex2; Miix 2) which the user reviews seem to be indicating that they are flimsy/cheaply built. After that there's nothing until the price hits over $1500 which is an i7 gaming laptop. I could spend that much but why? It's nonsensical and rather uneconomical. It looks as if I will have to discard the idea of having an SSD..
Trust me, if you want to stay safe for the next, say, ten years I guess, get that frikkin Lenovo. They are awesome.
Im not super familiar with SSD, as in, I have never actually OWNED/PAYED for one in any of my machines. But I really don't see why you would need one, especially for simple multi-tasking. My brother put a SSD in his gigantic gaming rig (for his OS and backup photos/videos/movies/games) and compared to running similar games/videos off of my HDD or his second HDD, there is not much of a speed increase, and honestly, they seem to be much more expensive than a standard HDD whereas you could get 1 or 2 TB for the same price as a low-capacity SSD. 6677, care to elaborate? Whats the big deal, anyway?? I know they "run faster/load faster" but in this application, it seems to not make much sense.
as cardinal799 said, get the lenovo, they are amazing pc's IMO, a SSD probably isn't going to be necessary, especially if you don't mind running windows 8/8.1 (improved boot times over previous versions of windows, i myself usually get 5-15 second boot times (if you don't like the start screen you can just get classic shell or something like that))
A hard disk has to spin around to find the correct sector of the disk to read from at any 1 time, solid state drives just flip a few transistors and its done instantaneously. All it lets you do is read large amounts of data faster because you dont have to wait for the hard disk to spin into the correct location on an SSD, its just done already. One bonus besides speed for an SSD though. Drop a hard disk, its a set of metal platters which have to spin on ultra precise shafts with ultra precise read/write heads that slide back and forth across them, it is not going to like being dropped. Drop an SSD, its a solid lump of silicon, whooped-dee-doo. Shocks, drops and vibrations kill hard disks. SSDs keep on going. If data being stored on the machine is critical to the business, well, drop a laptop and its generally fucked, but if it uses an SSD you have a much better chance at recovering the data from that dropped laptop. I wouldn't let that sway the decision though, critical data should be backed up and the laptop shouldnt be dropped in the first place. My laptop actually has an SSD and HDD in RAID. Quite handy, appears as 1 drive and I believe the RAID controller decides whether to cache data onto the SSD or store it on the hard disk long term.
I bought a cheap $350 ASUS laptop a few years ago. 4GB ram, i3, and 320GB hdd. Great machine. Great build quality and works wonderfully. It's always running 24/7 and is very reliable. My only complaint is that the battery life isn't good, but otherwise it's a great laptop. Lenovo would be your best bet though. Steer clear of hp.
invest in a macbook pro. osx is very productive on a mobile device compared to windows. solid battery life, best trackpad on the market (you won't even feel like you need a mouse, unlike with windows), gesture controls + window management blows every other OS out of the water, unix toolset is available if you're into that, etc. don't fall into the trap of buying a cheap ass plastic piece of shit laptop if you're going to be using it for work. a mechanic is nothing without his tools tools - your tool will be a laptop - get a good tool.
he did say he wanted UNDER $1000 you know, the macbook pro is OVER $1000 (and lenovo's are far from a cheap ass plastic piece of shit)
I'm no laptop expert, but afaik Lenovo is the best manufacturer. Never buy HP, they heat up and start throttling in no time. For an office PC you should be fine with an i3 and 3GB RAM, but if you want something faster that an i5 and 4GB RAM is the way to go. Remember laptop CPUs are almost always massively underclocked. Also, you should always buy something with more storage than you need. Files stack up incredibly quickly and a <500GB HDD gets completely full in no time. I never thought I'd use 1TB, now it's 90% full :|
I have an HP (see specs in signature) laptop, and I haven't found anything wrong with it. It's somewhat cheap (I got mine for $600, now the best I can find is this, which is $680), and it runs most stuff pretty well (BeamNG on mid settings with no Post-FX, no problems with anything else). I don't see what everyone has against HP (no cooling problems here).
