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OrangeOrbit posted:Ok, based on all the advice I called up and changed the screen. I guess if I'm going to be looking at it for (hopefully!) 3-4 years then it should be pretty.
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Jun 11, 2015 00:56
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Flipperwaldt posted:It's not even about pretty. It's about looking through a window instead of a peephole. 1366x768 just sucks. It sucked back when laptops went to 16:9 screens, and it sucks even more now. What's really sad is that even my first laptop I bought in 2004 had a beautiful matte 1920x1200 16:10 display and we're finally at the point where we can get really nice screens in laptops again. Get a FHD display (or higher if you desire), get an IPS one too if you can. You'll thank yourself everyday.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:05
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SouthLAnd posted:The 640m LE is a pretty old chip (figuratively speaking, I think it came out in '11 or '12). It will have trouble playing modern games without keeping the resolution low and the details very low as well. Interesting. He said the computer was less than a year old, so I expected more from the video card. The games she talks about playing are the new Sims game, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect and Prototype 2. I have no idea how demanding those games would be. I'm guessing those games would suck to play on that computer. Like I said, haven't done serious gaming in a long time and am just looking to get her something she can use the way she wants. She got herself a scholarship overseas, so a desktop is impractical, but she's definitely earned herself whatever computer she wants. Ideally, I won't spend over $1000 and it'll be new. Outside of an independent video card, what should I be looking for that would be letting her play those games without frying her computer? Sorry if I'm just asking dumb questions. None of my friends do any gaming anymore, and I always just deferred to them on what to look for. I know enough about this to know I don't know poo poo about it.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:27
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I think you can pick up a Y50 for about a grand, it's a pretty solid gaming laptop and well liked around these parts.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:31
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Hadlock posted:I think you can pick up a Y50 for about a grand, it's a pretty solid gaming laptop and well liked around these parts. What about the Y70? I assume if the Y50 is good, that would be better. I ask because I saw one on sale for under $1000.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:44
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Sataere posted:What about the Y70? I assume if the Y50 is good, that would be better. I ask because I saw one on sale for under $1000. This laptop weighs almost 8 lbs without the power brick. I would get something smaller unless you really need a large screen. The y40-80 has a 5th gen Intel cpu and there are more 15" laptops with Broadwell from many manufacturers coming out now.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:55
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Realistically you want a laptop she can actually take with her to class and take notes on. That means 13.3" or smaller. You don't want to be going in the opposite direction, 15" is already too big to lug around daily. You can always ship her a 24" 1080p display from newegg for like $120 which she can keep with a friend over the summer. I would ask her what games she plays and see if she can get away with an HD4700 GPU and work around that, maybe go smaller with something like the XPS 13. It's easy to lose sight and order some monstrosity but also keep in mind it's barely a laptop after a certain point and stops being an educational tool.
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Jun 11, 2015 02:33
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Hope this is the right place to post this, but does anyone have a coupon code that I can use for Lenovo's website?
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Jun 11, 2015 04:31
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OrangeOrbit posted:I think I have pretty much the same screen on my old Lenovo Ideapad Y560p, is the screen really that bad? I could probably call in and change the order and go the next level up which is the "15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080), with WWAN" for around $90 dollars if it is really worth. I am not interested in spending over $250 more for a screen for the IPS one since I have a desktop monitor that I can plug it into at home. FHD is definitely worth it. FHD IPS is probably also worth it.
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Jun 11, 2015 11:17
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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So I've been trying to narrow down my options in the sub $1000 range, which seems to give me a few options I'm vaguely comfortable with. The Acer Aspire V15 Nitro (VN7-591G-70RT) has an i7 4720HQ, 960M 4 GB, 8 GB RAM, and 1920 x 1080 IPS display. $900-$1000. Though I'm having a bit of difficulty telling it apart from all the other Aspie V15 whatevers. The 960M 4 GB version seems to be cheaper than the 860M 2 GB version, but I don't understand why. Isn't it newer and (very slightly) quicker? Is anyone familiar with Acer? It might be between that a similarly priced and screened Y50. e: Notebookcheck seems to compare it favorably against versus both the Y50 and the MSI GE60. ee: This is harder than I thought. Now all I see are comments saying how you should swap out the HD for a SSD in the V15, and the antenna might be poo poo. Oh boy. Whereas something like the HP Omen 15 comes with a 256 GB SSD, but has soldered-in 8 GB RAM that cannot be upgraded, a metal body, and an Nvidia 860M 2GB. Ashrik fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jun 11, 2015 |
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Jun 11, 2015 12:09
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Thanks for all the great info, guys!
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Jun 11, 2015 15:44
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http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-15-p245sa-15-6-laptop-with-beats-audio-white-10108688-pdt.html Does that machine have a good build quality? The spec looks decent.
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Jun 11, 2015 19:36
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WattsvilleBlues posted:http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-15-p245sa-15-6-laptop-with-beats-audio-white-10108688-pdt.html HP Pavilion is their consumer line.
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Jun 11, 2015 19:49
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Laptop has arrived, spending three days traveling from China.  ...SSD, meanwhile, has spent two days traveling from LA to Vancouver, and is still 4000km away from me. 
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Jun 11, 2015 20:05
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Dr. Jamming posted:Hope this is the right place to post this, but does anyone have a coupon code that I can use for Lenovo's website? Is the one in the OP not working for you?
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Jun 12, 2015 01:03
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Just pulled the trigger on a touchscreen XPS13. Cost be just shy of 2000AUD on sale because the Aussie dollar is so awful right now, so here's hoping it lives up to expectations.
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Jun 12, 2015 02:43
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Hoping somebody could help me with a recommendation. Looking for something to do all sorts of coding on. Ability for some light gaming would be nice (Heroes of the Storm/DOTA2 being the most taxing). I've been looking the Surface Pro 3, mostly because the touchscreen would be pretty nice for notetaking. I'd probably be will to spend ~$1000. I'm also in Canada if anybody knows of any good deals.
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Jun 12, 2015 02:51
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Sataere posted:Interesting. He said the computer was less than a year old, so I expected more from the video card. What you could do is build her a desktop and get her a cheap windows laptop for notes and the like. Alternatively the Y50 is her best bet, though it'll struggle on the newest games with only a 860 or a 960m. Still for under $1000 it's your best bet, especially since it's trivial to install a SSD for cheap as well. Ashrik posted:So I've been trying to narrow down my options in the sub $1000 range, which seems to give me a few options I'm vaguely comfortable with. I don't know about the antenna, but swapping the HD in any laptop for a SSD is always (99% of the time) a cheaper bet than buying a laptop with its own SSD. The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jun 12, 2015 |
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Jun 12, 2015 03:54
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Cat Army 
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Would something like this work for someone who is just doing some mild gaming? Mainly just play Civilization, Football Manager, maybe some other less intensive games on it. Not looking to play Witcher 3 on the best settings or anything. http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-VN7-591G-70RT-15-6-Inch-Gaming/dp/B00WJSQRNK/ Would this be overkill?
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Jun 12, 2015 04:09
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Niwrad posted:Would something like this work for someone who is just doing some mild gaming? Mainly just play Civilization, Football Manager, maybe some other less intensive games on it. Not looking to play Witcher 3 on the best settings or anything. That's be perfectly appropriate for mild gaming. Grab a $100 250 gig Samsung 850 EVO and install it aftermarket and you're set. Or a $170 500 gig EVO and be really really set. For Witcher 3 a 960 will be fine, but you'd really want a 965 to play at more than 1080p@30 on low-medium.
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Jun 12, 2015 04:25
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I think the only bad thing I've read about the Acer Nitro is that the fans get pretty loud under heavy loads. But all thin gaming oriented laptops seem to suffer from this (just an inherent drawback of putting high end parts in a thinnish laptop). Now that MSI is putting out Broadwell GE62's (which seem to be shipping with GTX960m's in North America as far as I've seen), I wonder if the price on the Haswell/GTX965m will drop any more. If it hits an even $1000 it would be a hell of a buy.
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Jun 12, 2015 05:18
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The Iron Rose posted:That's be perfectly appropriate for mild gaming. Grab a $100 250 gig Samsung 850 EVO and install it aftermarket and you're set. Or a $170 500 gig EVO and be really really set. Thanks, my biggest problem with it is some sketchy reviews. I also really hate those style of touchpads (supposedly a lot of people are having issues with them as well). And as lame as it sounds, those ultra-thin laptops make me nervous when I have to swap out a hard drive or some RAM. Pretty sure you have to go under the keyboard directly to access anything. Just hate doing that on a brand new laptop The other I've liked is this. http://www.amazon.com/MSI-GE60-Pro-867-15-6-Inch-Aluminum/dp/B00TI6TFHQ/ Seems a little more durable and the reviews are much better. But the specs seem a little lower and it's $100 more. Will there be a huge difference performance wise between the two? I'm still mainly just using it for work and playing some low end games like Civilization that I don't want to come to a crawl at the end of games.
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Jun 12, 2015 05:36
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Niwrad posted:Thanks, my biggest problem with it is some sketchy reviews. I also really hate those style of touchpads (supposedly a lot of people are having issues with them as well). And as lame as it sounds, those ultra-thin laptops make me nervous when I have to swap out a hard drive or some RAM. Pretty sure you have to go under the keyboard directly to access anything. Just hate doing that on a brand new laptop The original laptop you linked is cheaper and has better specs so i don't see why you'd spend more for (slightly) less. Durability is important yeah but so long as you treat your laptop right and don't throw it everywhere you ought to be fine, really. Swapping parts in ultra-think laptops can be a pain in the rear end but there's usually youtube videos for just about every model out there.
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Jun 12, 2015 05:40
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The Iron Rose posted:The original laptop you linked is cheaper and has better specs so i don't see why you'd spend more for (slightly) less. Durability is important yeah but so long as you treat your laptop right and don't throw it everywhere you ought to be fine, really. The reviews just scare me. Seems like a ton of people have issues with the trackpad and Wifi. Also not a huge fan of the ultra-thin laptops but the value seems too good to pass up. I'm just overthinking it.
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Jun 12, 2015 06:16
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Bob Morales posted:HP Pavilion is their consumer line. Is it not even half decent these days?
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Jun 12, 2015 13:07
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T550 setup trip report: haven't opened it up yet, not going to bother until the SSD arrives and I can do all the upgrades in one go. BIOS is UEFI but has that old-school curses UI. Booting from USB is easy, Secure Boot did not interfere at all with installing and booting SUSE. Trackpoint buttons and screen brightness were kind of hosed up in SUSE 13.2 but work fine in Tumbleweed (and will thus probably be fixed in SUSE 13.3/14.0 too). "Swap ctrl and fn" BIOS option is still there, thankfully. Hardware-wise, the screen is gorgeous, the keyboard is fantastic. The offset touchpad/keyboard to make room for the numpad don't bother me at all because it's the same layout as my old machine. It's a bit wider and deeper than the old laptop (maybe 10mm wider and 5mm deeper?) but lighter and thinner. The F-keys are now Fn-keys -- as in, you have to hold down Fn to get them to behave as F-keys rather than adjusting the volume and brightness -- but there's a Fn-Lock key combo that inverts this. I let it run on battery for a while while installing updates and afterwards it was estimating 7h30 to drain the first battery, at which point it would still have the internal battery to fall back on.  A huge improvement from the 20-30 minutes my old laptop gets!The biggest issue so far is that X11 isn't properly detecting the screen DPI; it thinks I have a ~32" screen with 96dpi rather than a 15" screen with 210dpi. Manually overriding the DPI setting in the KDE font configurator has fixed this and everything looks great except Steam, but Steam is completely hosed on high-DPI displays no matter what your OS.
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Jun 12, 2015 13:58
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'New age' monolithic trackpads that can't track with 2 fingers touching (thumb + index) can gently caress off. Laptops and dedicated. Because resting my thumb on the left click button 'area' is now a crime.
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Jun 12, 2015 20:42
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Got my T450s today. So far, I'm really impressed by the screen brightness and the keyboard. I mean, drat this blows other laptop keyboards out of the water. My previous Asus Zenbook's keyboard feels so mushy and terrible in comparison. The touchpad isn't great, though. It's notably less accurate and responsive than my Zenbook's, which is a shame. That said, I'm already getting used to the trackpoint, which I didn't really think I'd like as much as I'm liking it. Maybe I just need to get used to this thing's touchpad, but right now it ignores my gestures more often than I'm comfortable with.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:09
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Going to buy an Macbook Air. I noticed that there's a $200 price difference between the models with 128GB flash memory and 256GB. In an age of cloud storage and external hard drives, how is this justified? Yet this appears to be the only difference between these models. Am I missing something? Also of interest to this thread - the reason I'm buying a Macbook Air is because the screen on the Toshiba Chromebook 2 I had for broke for exactly no reason. I closed it, moved it to another room, opened it, and half the screen was black and the other half looked like a modern art piece. If I had been completely satisfied with it beforehand, I might try to get it repaired, but I wasn't. Large spreadsheets loaded extremely slow or were unopenable. Facebook and other multimedia pages locked up or got choppy. And, even though in my mind I was expecting a "Chromebook", distinct from a "laptop", after the fact I did end up missing having one machine for things I ended up needing, like video editing software or a computer that can actually open large spreadsheets. Bottom line, unless you're extremely pressed for money, really think about buying a Chromebook.
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Jun 13, 2015 03:59
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So I'm looking at the Lenovo Z70-80 - 80FG005BUS that they have listed here for $909 ($879 on the B&N version of the page). Does anyone have any opinions on it?
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Jun 13, 2015 05:19
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Going to buy an Macbook Air. I noticed that there's a $200 price difference between the models with 128GB flash memory and 256GB. In an age of cloud storage and external hard drives, how is this justified? Yet this appears to be the only difference between these models. Am I missing something? Cloud storage is slow, and external hard disk are inconvenient. If you can get away with 128GB then good for you, but a lot of people need more (especially on systems where there is no practical way of upgrading)
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Jun 13, 2015 06:01
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Going to buy an Macbook Air. I noticed that there's a $200 price difference between the models with 128GB flash memory and 256GB. In an age of cloud storage and external hard drives, how is this justified? Yet this appears to be the only difference between these models. Am I missing something? Why should there be a justification?
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Jun 13, 2015 08:50
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I can't believe the MBA still has only 4 gigs of RAM by default. Even the one that costs over $1,000. At this point I would pony up just a little more for the 13" Retina.
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Jun 13, 2015 09:48
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Good god, if I could get an HP Omen 15 with a 970M in it, I'd buy it yesterday. e: I settled for a slightly used Clevo/Sager NP8651 with an IPS screen, 970M 3 GB, and i7-4710HQ processor for $1280. Ashrik fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 14:12
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Going to buy an Macbook Air. I noticed that there's a $200 price difference between the models with 128GB flash memory and 256GB. In an age of cloud storage and external hard drives, how is this justified? Yet this appears to be the only difference between these models. Am I missing something? Apple has always overcharged for storage and RAM.
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Jun 13, 2015 16:13
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Harrow posted:Got my T450s today. So far, I'm really impressed by the screen brightness and the keyboard. I mean, drat this blows other laptop keyboards out of the water. My previous Asus Zenbook's keyboard feels so mushy and terrible in comparison. How would you compare the T450s to the old T420? They seem to be double or triple the price for used models. I'm back on the market after a bad experience with Dell. Bought a refurbished 6410 with 40% off for Memorial Day. Came to about $240 with shipping. Got it, booted it, and the fan sounded like a 747 taking off. Ordered a new fan, installed it: cured the noise, but Windows became sluggish. Sending it back. loving Dell.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:10
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I've been really contemplating picking up a ASUS Zenbook UX305FA-USM1. Microsoft store still has the 100$ off coupon, coming in at $599. I have my PC rig for gaming and such, and would really love a laptop I can dedicate purely to my school work. I'll be at UC Davis later this year, and would love something fast and portable to be able to work in cafes and bars. For $599, is it a solid bet? I won't need it until September, and the only sales between now and then may be 4th of July and Labor Day. Should I just pull the trigger?
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Jun 13, 2015 21:25
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Ashrik posted:Good god, if I could get an HP Omen 15 with a 970M in it, I'd buy it yesterday. As an aside, I remember posting when I got my Asus ROG G751 and how much I loved it, but then it's such a ridiculous beastly thing I needed some in-between device - I'm giving away my Y410P and my Nexus 7 was too small and useless after getting a new phone. I got a refurb but current model Transformer T100 for $150 and it's ridiculous how much computer it is for that price and weight. It's a sub-1080p screen which everyone hates but that's a fine dpi for 10", and it looks good. Have to get used to the key placement and it's too bad it's stuck with 2GB RAM instead of 4GB, to me that's what differentiates a tablet/small notebook more than anything at this point, I want my 40 tabs left open and in memory while I play games. Obviously if you're at a desk and not concerned about palming the thing a full keyboard and bigger screen is nice but I think it would totally fill the needs of 90% of computer users at this point, that's kind of crazy.
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Jun 13, 2015 21:57
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Straker posted:I got a refurb but current model Transformer T100 for $150 and it's ridiculous how much computer it is for that price and weight. It's a sub-1080p screen which everyone hates but that's a fine dpi for 10", and it looks good. Have to get used to the key placement and it's too bad it's stuck with 2GB RAM instead of 4GB, to me that's what differentiates a tablet/small notebook more than anything at this point, I want my 40 tabs left open and in memory while I play games. Obviously if you're at a desk and not concerned about palming the thing a full keyboard and bigger screen is nice but I think it would totally fill the needs of 90% of computer users at this point, that's kind of crazy. I totally forgot about those. As a budget-conscious consumer, I'm really thinking about picking up one of those sorts. Right now the Zenbook is at the top of my list, but just below would be a Transformer.
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Jun 13, 2015 22:33
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Straker posted:Is there some context I'm missing? I mean maybe the Omen isn't as terrible as most HP laptops but why would you buy one on purpose? There are a ton of amazing laptops with 970 and 980Ms in them. Some are thin and light like the Omen but they tend to be hot and loud, you have to compromise somehow (laptop size, GPU speed, fan speed/heat). When I was searching for a laptop that fit what I wanted, the HP Omen seemed to work pretty well. It was compact, light, metal body with pleasing aesthetics. The truth is, I just wanted something light and cool-looking that could easily fill in as my daily web/youtube browser long after its use for mediocre gaming fizzled up. If it had a 970M or 980M, it could have lasted as a mediocre gaming box just a wee bit longer. Reviews I had read put its heat and loudness within something I could deal with. I don't have any experience or knowledge about HP or its reputation, so I didn't have that to go on.
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Jun 13, 2015 22:50
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