Comments on Profile Post by imackler

I always advise people to look at the business models of HP, DELL, and Lenovo. I’ve had my brother and father on Lenovo Thinkpads for years for work and they’ve been solid, and the warranty was easy to confirm as being international.

Business oriented stuff tends to have better hardware, drivers, and support.

for $11, get an abacus, hands down.

Dell XPS 13. No bezel = much goodness. Super light, very portable.

@Elnrik my other half had one from work for awhile. It’s pretty swish, but there’re far too many complaints of hardware issues online for comfort.

Huh, that's odd. Haven't had many problems deploying a few hundred of them at work.

^Listen to this guy, hands on experience at that scale is more valuable than anything I can offer.

@Elnrik How long have they been in action?

=) If you want a more traditional laptop that's a bit bigger, we also deploy the 14" Dell 3490. Keyboard is solid on both models. If I'm traveling, I'll take the XPS anyday. Both have been reliable.

The HP Spectre 13" thin is also very nice, but we only bought a few for some executives who travel way too much. It's real light on connection ports though. Dock required.

'Gaming' laptops tend to have fairly decent keyboards as far as laptops go due to their intended use, but I'm not sure any/many would fall in your pricing range outside of them being on sale.

Elnrik's experience at scale trumps my personal experience as far as input on reliability goes though.

Love my Dell XPS 13 as well. It’s a couple years old and works perfect. Small, fast, light, solid, decent keyboard, matte screen (at least my version) - would buy again.

@BenjaminBore - we are about 1 year 4 months since initial deployment of those.

@Elnrik I’d be very interested to hear any broader observations of yours on competing brands.

100s... Poor you, man. You should start a thread with some IT horror/too-damn-funny stories.

It's a small company. 2000+ user endpoints. We switched from HP to Dell about 2 years ago. HP does really strange things design wise on the internals of their systems. Their driver packs are goofy AF too. This is all from an enterprise admin perspective though.

I've had my Lenovo Y50-70 for 4 years and it's been awesome. I always recommend Lenovo or Dell. XPS 13 is a great choice for your size and price range.

Congrats. That’s close to the budget for Chromebook replacements where I work. 3000 “employees”.
But congrats on the new comp. Wish I could give you more suggestions but I’m strictly on a low budget.

If you go for an XPS 13 keep in mind that Dell are still selling the previous model alongside the new one and that it also got the upgrade to the 8th gen CPUs. The main difference is that the new model ditches USB A ports for Thunderbolt 3. It also has a smaller battery and better cooling with two fans instead of one. The old one wins on battery life and dongle-free compatibility.

@Elnrik: Damn... my experience between Dell and HP has been the complete opposite. I’ve seen rampant issues with hardware quality on Dell business laptops between the Latitude 7270, 7470, 7290, 7490, and the Precision 5510 and 5520.

The latitude series has been seeing issues with battery swelling, touch screen failures, and poor design of of how the motherboard holds the RAM in place.

The Precision series is currently full of driver and firmware issues if you want to use Dell’s thunderbolt docks. The 5510 is prone frequent Bitlocker lockouts based on a poor BIOS implementation. Between the 5510 and 5520, I have personally gone through four motherboard failures on my work laptop in the past three months.

I hope not. We have close to 500 latitudes out there.

Thank you, everyone! Much better than i could have hoped!

I have a < 2 yr old 5510 at work, various parts failed already, drivers suck, dock sucks. A shame because the bezel-less design is really nice.

As an ex-employee, I vote for hp to go f*ck themselves. Lenovo keyboards are hard to beat, imho. Do these thin laptops still have screaming fans under even moderate loads or have they nailed the hardware designs by now?

Might be useful to know what you're needing to DO with it. And any pet peeves. I hate fans, for example, and I don't care about having crushing CPU power, so a fanless i5 Surface Pro rocks for me.

@pedalhead The older single fan XPS 13 makes noise under semi-heavy loads and large Windows updates. My 9360 spins up the fan for Design Spark Mechanical but runs Blender without any fuss. Uninstalling McAffee nearly silences it.

McAffee is a virus. :)

I don't think I'm picky besides wanting a great keyboard. Major reason why Lenovo is in the mix; that, and there is a good sale currently. Basically, a few chrome tabs, a couple microsoft docs, foobar2000 and another program (Bible software). I'm at my laptop all day, but bring it home and out enough to justify a smaller screen. I'm getting mixed recommendations of i5/8ram and i7/16-24ram.

Long battery life is of course great but I think I'd probably take cool over battery. I've given up on using my current laptop as a laptop its so hot.

There is very little reason to go over 8GB of RAM, unless you are hosting virtual machines, running a database, or doing other extremely large data tasks. (Or games) The i5 vs i7 debate would be weighing the video and processor speed needs -vs- battery life.

If ram was more reasonably priced I would say go for 16. I upgraded to 16 in my Lenovo a few years ago because I kept getting memory allocation errors/crashes trying to run Chrome and illustrator/photoshop with only 8GB. Based on what you are running 8 GB should be fine. Make sure you get something with an SSD as well.

Agreed. SSD is the single largest performance improvement one can make on any computer.

An SSD will ruin you for spinning disks. But if you go cheap for some reason make sure to avoid eMMC. It has more in common with an SD card than anything genuinely high end. It is not what people mean when they wax lyrical about the performance benefits of solid state.