Need a new laptop - suggestions please

DoaM

So when you say "work during my commute", you mean "'work on my homer, private web design projects which are nothing to do with my day job' during my commute"?

AndyPix

I would get a refurb Dell latitude 7280 (12.5 inch - 8GB ram and 256 SSD) and stick an extra memory stick in to bring it up to 16GB.


A quick google produces this :-


https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B06WVY9SD8/ref=dp_olp_refurbished?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished


You could probly find cheaper if you look around

WaywardDriver

So is this new laptop purely for personal use?
For both walking and non-walking parts of commute then smaller is better. If money-saving not great priority then Dell XPS with 13in screen and good graphics. Or for same price HP Envy plus monitor for home use.

Shoxt3r

WaywardDriver wrote: »

Dell XPS laptop is a Which Best Buy, comes with 256Gb SSD upgradeable to 1Tb (expensive). Maybe external hard drive better option?

Good to know about the Which Best Buy, thanks!
I think at most I would get the 512GB SSD version.

AndyPix wrote: »

I would get a refurb Dell latitude 7280 (12.5 inch - 8GB ram and 256 SSD) and stick an extra memory stick in to bring it up to 16GB.

A quick google produces this :-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B06WVY9SD8/ref=dp_olp_refurbished?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished

You could probly find cheaper if you look around

Good idea, I'll look into a refurbished version. What are the warranties and returns policies like on refurbished items though? I wouldn't want anything less than a year's cover.

That particular laptop seems to have the same screen and potentially the same problems as my last Dell though...

WaywardDriver wrote: »

So is this new laptop purely for personal use?
For both walking and non-walking parts of commute then smaller is better. If money-saving not great priority then Dell XPS with 13in screen and good graphics. Or for same price HP Envy plus monitor for home use.

It would be purely for personal use, yes. Agreed, a 13" or 15" would be best for me I think - the last Dell was nice but heavy to carry (around 2.7Kg from memory). I obviously still want to get a good deal, so £1,200 would be my maximum but at the same time I don't want to compromise and run into problems like I did before...or have to go out and buy something else in 4-5 years because it's either slow or simply doesn't work. I'll look into the HP Envy but from my current research it seems common for most of those models to only come with 8GB RAM - how much would RAM upgrades be to bump it to 16GB (on average anyway)?

Thanks all for your replies - giving me plenty of ideas and help!

WaywardDriver

Shoxt3r wrote: »

I'll look into the HP Envy but from my current research it seems common for most of those models to only come with 8GB RAM

This one https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-envy-13-3-intel-core-i7-laptop-512-gb-ssd-silver-10180998-pdt.html meets your requirements. Actually, even if no intention of buying from Currys, their website has filters to home in on laptops meeting your reqs.

AndyPix

Shoxt3r wrote: »

That particular laptop seems to have the same screen and potentially the same problems as my last Dell though... !

I currently have around 40 of them in use around site and havent come accross that problem atall ..
In fact I have been administering Dell laptops for a long long time and have never seen that problem on any of them - not sure if that helps or not

DoaM

Which would suggest that the original problem wasn't necessarily with the screen itself but either a connection issue or a screen driver chip fault?

Shoxt3r

AndyPix wrote: »

I currently have around 40 of them in use around site and havent come accross that problem atall ..
In fact I have been administering Dell laptops for a long long time and have never seen that problem on any of them - not sure if that helps or not

Interesting. When I Google the fault I had there are hundreds of forum threads related to the same problem. It doesn't seem to be specific to my old laptop's model either.

DoaM wrote: »

Which would suggest that the original problem wasn't necessarily with the screen itself but either a connection issue or a screen driver chip fault?

I'm guessing it was the former as it looked like a physical fault. Each time the laptop went back to Team Knowhow for repair they would just replace an entire party though. There was no mention of a loose connection. Unless somehow I just got unlucky with the factory build of mine and it would never work. It's interesting as well how mine was fine for 4 months and then all of a sudden it wouldn't stop doing it.

Regardless I've started putting together a spreadsheet of the different prices, deals and specifications I've come across. It's what I did when I was looking for my previous laptop as there are so many variations of essentially the same laptop. I'll share this when I've got it somewhere.

One annoyance is that while looking into the Dell 9570 I've heard there are potential heat displacement issues when you push either the i7 or the i9 versions hard and it either throttles the power or just locks-up altogether. Doesn't bode well, especially for £1,200+!

Shoxt3r

Hi all,

So over the past few days I've been putting together a spreadsheet of the current deals and prices - looking at both custom laptops and pre-built ones - and trying not to be drawn in by the Black Friday offers! It would seem that as is generally the way with technology, the custom laptop prices are fluctuating quite wildly because of the increase/decrease of various computer part prices (I blame it on bitcoin miners personally!).

Anyway, I've narrowed it down to 12 at the moment, with some I'm not sure about highlighted in orange, mainly because it will cost extra to get an OS licence (preference is Windows 10 which I've found on Amazon for about £40 for an OEM disc - I've ordered it twice before) - but also I've looked at value for money and even the ones hovering around the £1,200 mark actually have a good specification to back them up.

As before, I'm ideally looking for a laptop with:
- Good screen (thin bezel, high refresh rate)
- An i7 processor
- Decent graphics card (now started looking at ones with a GTX 1060)
- Good RAM (8GB+ minimum)
- Decent sizes for the HDD (1TB) and SSD (256GB+). If the SSD is large enough though I'm happy just to have that for now

Let me know if you have any questions
The spreadsheet below is open to everyone to view.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k-covj7EAV5znATN-zFI1VcE5VR6YFXaHuU96K7gT18/edit?usp=sharing

Many thanks in advance for your help!

Cheers,

Andrew

Shoxt3r

So after much deliberation I've decided to save up further for the Gigabyte Aero - the spec is great, the laptop has shining reviews and generally it seems a fantastic deal. Now to save the dosh...or hope for a massive Cyber Monday deal!

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...50h-gaming-laptop-lt-08s-gi.html?template=amp