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Help Gareth decide on a laptop to buy
Thrillho:
Holy shit look what happened.
I've realised that I don't need the 1TB hard drive on this laptop. I'm mostly going to use it for writing articles and browsing the internet around the house/in coffee shops/libraries because my current place has terrible internet. If I eventually get rid of my current desktop, I can just get an external 1TB hard drive when the time comes.
I think something cheap and cheerful should do. I was looking at something in PC World yesterday that was about £350, but I can pay it off within six months (which was my plan, because I can't afford to buy something outright). I should've written down what it was.
Thanks for all the advice folks. I'll let y'all know whatever I decide on.
Also I'd rather get AIDS than get a Dell [/exaggeration]
snalin:
--- Quote from: LTK on 30 Jun 2013, 04:10 ---If I were to buy a laptop I'd definitely want one with an SSD, but I have no idea if laptops with SSDs are actually on the market, and affordable.
--- End quote ---
You get a lot of laptops with SSDs, but you get back to the scaling problem - outlets scale the components in the computers together, so if you're looking at a laptop with an SSD, there's usually at least an high-end i5 and 8GB ram with a decent graphics card as well. The high performance, but not graphically powerful combination is kinda rare. It would be perfectly possible to build a decent dual-core 4GB thing with an SSD and nothing fancy on top for not that much, but it's not something you see for sale anywhere.
cesium133:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 30 Jun 2013, 00:39 ---
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 29 Jun 2013, 16:38 ---The university I'm at has a contract with Dell, so unfortunately I couldn't avoid them. It didn't help that all the computers in our lab were the same model, bought at the same time, all with the same defect that caused the capacitors to blow up at the same time.
--- End quote ---
And when the issue was identified, if the IT people were sufficiently on the ball to be in touch, Dell were round to replace all the affected components FOC regardless of age and warranty status (I had just two of that model). Capacitors are a real pain, though. I've had two audio interfaces fail in the last week, a MOTU and an E-MU, both with power supply cap problems.
Dell also do this sort of replacement proactively; I had a couple of failures of three-year-old hard disks (in RAID, so no data was lost), and the third time Dell identified that the disks concerned were part of a suspect batch and sent me replacements for all my disks that came from that batch without my even asking. (What's more, the new disks were four times the size of the originals, so I got a useful upgrade along the way!)
On AMD vs Intel: I can't speak for comparative reliability, because I've never had a cpu failure ever. Intel made a big efficiency and performance mis-step with the Pentium 4 range, and AMD got the edge for those years; but with the Core-2 range Intel took the technical lead back decisively and still have it. But the difference is small when pricing is considered as well.
--- End quote ---
We got replacements (IT gave us some spare computers they had), but I still had to reinstall the software we need to run the equipment in the lab, which was a bit of a pain.
Lupercal:
--- Quote from: LTK on 30 Jun 2013, 04:10 ---My sister has an Acer laptop with comparatively high specs, and it's fast, thin, light and quiet. Of course, it's my anecdotal evidence versus Lupercal's, so you should really just look for information on the specific model you're planning on buying if you want to know how reliable it is.
--- End quote ---
I'm sure that a high-spec Acer isn't too bad - with the lower budget laptops everything important is sacrificed. The guy in the repair shop we took her computer to said "all I get in here are Dells and Acers". She was a student at the time and the majority of students get those £300ish Dells/Acers/Toshibas. I use Dell desktops at work and they're fine but not great.
pwhodges:
Dell at work are fine, and their pro support is second to none. I've little experience of domestic Dells, but what I've seen was not inspiring, and the stories of how bad their support is are very persistent.
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