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lampey
Mar 27, 2012

That is a 17 in consumer grade laptop with a slow hard drive (you are replacing)and a dedicated video card. The battery life sucks. All 17 in laptops are relatively flimsy due to the size. If you have poor eyesight and do not plan on moving the computer this would be a good fit. Asus and dell both have laptops with IPs screens in smaller sizes. Hp elitebooks have IPs options but they are around 2k.

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lampey
Mar 27, 2012

BlackMK4 posted:

http://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/3920441198.html

Decent deal on a T400? Usage being a little headless 24/7 linux box that doesn't require me to have an external monitor/keyboard/mouse laying around when I need a head on it.
Its not a bad laptop, but I dont think it would be best for your use case. Thinkpads have better keyboards, build quality, available replacement parts. If you were using it somewhere the extra durability mattered it would be a great buy. Otherwise I would try for something with a newer cpu.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

If you are in Australia, the macbook air 13 starts at $1250. That's a lot better than 2000+ for a dell/thinkpad.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

Optiquest posted:

Guess I'll go with the non touch xps 13. 8.1 or 8.1 pro? 256gb an okay value for the extra $100 or should I just install a bigger ssd myself?

Are both displays IPS?

Guess everyone is about out till the 23rd anyway
Pro will give you hyper-v and bitlocker encryption along with being able to join to a domain. I would get the larger SSD from Dell, especially if you are getting a longer than usual warranty. The m2 sized SSD are not substantially cheaper.
The microsoft store is showing the 256gb sdd, 8gb ram, touch screen version for $1300 but out of stock.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

I have an XPS 13, scrolling, panning, and pinch to zoom work fine in firefox and IE. The app switch gesture only works with metro windows. There is a setting under mouse and touchpad that allows changing the delay so that switching between typing and gestures works faster. It works great with a short delay, with no delay it was moving the mouse accidentally while typing.

I would try using the default windows drivers, or installing the newest drivers if you are on a synaptics touchpad that is sluggish.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

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.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

mind the walrus posted:

Myself in a home, library, cafe, or office environment. Possible travel use. I'd give myself a realistic B- in terms of how well I'd care for the machine.


Yeah I know this. I've considered it but the hard fact is that I need a no-interest payment plan set-up because I'm poor as gently caress. That is why I'm looking exclusively at Amazon options.


That's good to know. I'm not married to an i7 but in my limited experience wouldn't the processor be the biggest long-term bottleneck in terms of performance, and thus the element most worth considering? I'm not taken in by the idea that "i7>i5 because 7>5" but the benchmark website I used to cross-reference the CPU in various potential models seems to indicate that an i7 offers better basic marks. I would be happy to be wrong about this.


This I had no idea about. That is a very valid concern.

It is more realistic to use the computer for 3 years and then get a replacement. The hard drive is absolutely the bottleneck on that computer. Are you planning on upgrading that yourself?

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

Zodack posted:

They're that bad? I don't know a lot about laptop resellers but MSI doesn't have their own group and someone in the thread mentioned XoticPC, so I checked them out. My old man likes PowerNotebooks and XoticPC seemed essentially the same but minus a lot of weird ranting about PayPal. XoticPC was offering a free mouse and some other poo poo on purchase so I just figured I'd check them out.

I guess I can always looks at Newegg or something.


My wife uses a giant MSI laptop from powernotebooks.com with a color changing keyboard and a power cable the size of a brick. I would really reconsider getting a huge gaming computer unless you are working on an oil rig or deploying overseas. We went with them because of the Canadian warranty support and good reviews and support. All of these computers are impractical to use, have loud fans, very short battery life, and weigh a ton. If you really need a computer like this and want to customize it powernotebooks.com is pretty good.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

Zodack posted:

I've been read the riot act on "gaming" laptops before but the one I currently have I bought four years ago when I was much dumber (it's an Alienware) and it has served me very well for the last four years while I was in college. Granted it had an HDMI Input port as well as an output which was very convenient for particular things. It's a love hate relationship but the thing is almost done.

It's good to know Powernotebooks is a reliable site. Buying from Alienware directly last time was surprisingly okay (again, I was very dumb and am the laughingstock of the internet).

If I wasn't in school I definitely would 100% get a desktop. The graduate school I'm headed to has some interesting requirements on laptop specs and a) I don't want to try and figure out what small laptop / big desktop combo I want and b) I like having just one portable device for gaming and play that is moderately powerful given that I do comp. sci.


Thanks for the heads up. Sounds like a nightmare.

For grad school could you get a workstation like a Dell precision or lenovo W series? Do you need a large video card or just a quad core cpu and 16+gb of ram?

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

The huge gaming laptops are still expensive relative to their performance for gaming. There are middleground laptops like the y40-80 that have 4+ hour battery life and decent portability, but a 5th gen cpu and a dedicated video card. I would see if the games you want to play would run well on a computer like this first.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

El Jebus posted:

My wife's company has been gifted a $1,500 grant for the purchase of a laptop. I have been given the husbandly duty as her personal tech support to recommend a laptop that she should buy. I have asked if it can be two laptops as $1500 is a decent amount of money, and I have been told no. This is for general office use, mostly workstation/MS Office/note taking. I'm more of an Apple guy so I don't know much about the Windows laptop market. Is the T550 and W550 still the ~$1000 recommended laptop? I'm hoping they can get 3-4 years out of it with regular office use with occasional trips out of the office for focus groups and that sort of thing. The W550s looks like it might fit all of the requirements. Is the warranty worth picking up through Lenovo? Thanks for any and all help you guys can give!

E7450 is nice and xps13 is amazing if you do not need an ethernet port or use a dock.

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

Killer_B posted:

Which brand rates well so far as used for running Linux, and is more semi-recent?

I have taken a look on Ebay at both Dells and Lenovos, it seems as though the T470/480 models, and the T570 models seem to tick off enough boxes for what I want, possibly with the exception of 4 cores, which would require the x80 refreshes.

Was really looking at the $350-550 range for used, might or might not require a HDD/OS, which I'm comfortable enough installing myself.

Kinda aware that Intel video is preferred lately, as Nvidia is still pretty twitchy so far as driver support without issues; M.2 slots would be nice, but 2.5" for SSDs will work well enough.

I've thought about Ryzen as well, but there's likely few/no choices at the price points I've been looking at.

You can get XPS 13 with Ubuntu preloaded

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

LibCrusher posted:

Is there a performance hit if I have my external monitors connected to USB-C dock with HDMI instead of directly to the back of the laptop? I’d like to do the whole “one cable goes to laptop, a million cables to hub” thing but I think I’m seeing hitching and weirdness.

Is it a usb-c dock with a video card? Or a port replicator?

lampey
Mar 27, 2012

Woebin posted:

A friend just asked me what machine to get for video and audio editing, figuring since I'm a programmer I'll obviously know this stuff.

Well, I don't, of course. Last I heard, years ago probably, MacBooks were the preferred laptops for that kind of work, is that still true in any meaningful way or is it up to personal preference at this point? Any crystal clear "this is the media editor's laptop" answer (I assume not)?

Adobe Premier pro and Avid are the main two for video editing professional work. Both are on mac and PC. Final Cut Pro is Mac only and is used as well A desktop would be much more powerful than a laptop, video editing goes much faster on better hardware. Something like a Thinkstation P620 or a Mac Pro tower. Lenovo p1 or Dell Precision would be a better option than a mac, just much more powerful processors with a 45w limit instead of 10w. But if you need a lightweight portable laptop. A MacBook Air or Pro 13, or XPS 13, or Lenovo x1 Carbon are all fine. Macs are nice if you live very close to an apple store, but Dell and Lenovo both have onsite warranty options that are a better fit for most businesses.

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lampey
Mar 27, 2012

General_Failure posted:

I'll preface I live in Australia. My daughter needs a notebook for her school's BYOD policy. Fuckers.
Anyway pretty much anything in her possession gets wrecked. So I'm looking on eBay at the Panasonic Toughbook CF-19 Mk5 notebooks second hand. Are these things usable? Are there better things out there at an affordable price?

Sadly I can't see myself finding an industrial / military toughbook so I'm just exploring my options.

Samsung chromebook 3 is durable and cheap. There are other good options for chromebooks. If everything happens in a browser it should be fine

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