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Hey goons, I got roped into trying to get a laptop for my parents, since because I build desktop PCs I must be an expert on laptops!  My mom gave me a rather non-specific list of requirements, so being able to recommend any specific one is becoming a chore. I forget what the gently caress they even were, but I do remember that an optical drive is a must. I initially tried to steer them towards the T430, but they started complaining about the weight. Then I tried to steer them to a Dell Inspiron just to get it over with. Finally, I'm leaning towards this Lenovo Ideapad http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834313729 Any feedback? They aren't exactly power users here. My mom mostly uses her iPad anyway, so I'm not looking for some Alienware rig that can play CoD on max settings. They'll probably just use it mostly for burning CDs, web browsing and probably using it to hook up to the TV to stream poo poo on the TV once they figure out they can actually do that. I just don't want them complaining to me about how crap their computer is 2 years down the line. Infidel Castro fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 02:42
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At 4.7lbs for the T430, you're not going to find many lighter laptops that have an optical drive and aren't complete pieces of poo poo (or excessively expensive). That IdeaPad is a full pound heavier.
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May 7, 2014 03:16
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DrDork posted:At 4.7lbs for the T430, you're not going to find many lighter laptops that have an optical drive and aren't complete pieces of poo poo (or excessively expensive). That IdeaPad is a full pound heavier. This has basically been going on for over a month, so I'm sure they even forgot the T430 exists, much less why they didn't want it. On top of that, I'm having a bitch of a time finding one with a Haswell chip that fits their budget (basically less than $700). They also seemed inclined towards a 15" monitor, so there's that too. Infidel Castro fucked around with this message at 03:30 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 03:23
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Needing an optical drive and needing a light weight laptop are conflicting needs. That's like wanting to live out of your car but not wanting an RV as your daily driver. Why not just get them RND*ultrabook and a $30 USB DVD drive for the six times a year they will use it? What use case do they have for an antique drive in their shiny new laptop? If the laptop isn't going to leave the living room/always be plugged in, you don't have to get them a Haswell model, an Ivy Bridge will do just fine for around the house use by adults.
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May 7, 2014 04:25
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do they mind refurbished? you could keep checking the Lenovo outlet store. when I was camping it out looking for a yoga 2 pro to show up, there were plenty of t440p's in the 700 range popping up here and there.
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May 7, 2014 04:47
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I'm not sure which series of Thinkpads include an optical drive, but I'd strongly consider a lesser Thinkpad such as an E or S series given your requirements.
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May 7, 2014 05:12
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Tom Guycot posted:do they mind refurbished? you could keep checking the Lenovo outlet store. when I was camping it out looking for a yoga 2 pro to show up, there were plenty of t440p's in the 700 range popping up here and there. I haven't even bothered looking at refurbished ones. Saying "refurbished" to them is almost like saying it will give them AIDS. Hadlock posted:Needing an optical drive and needing a light weight laptop are conflicting needs. That's like wanting to live out of your car but not wanting an RV as your daily driver. That's exactly the problem, they don't know poo poo about computers. They're telling me they want something that isn't heavy, but it HAS to have an optical drive. They also seem to think whatever they buy is going to work perfectly well 10 years from now, which I tried to explain is impossible. At this point I'm getting headaches any time they bring up the topic, and I just want to be done with this.
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May 7, 2014 07:03
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Infidel Castro posted:I haven't even bothered looking at refurbished ones. Saying "refurbished" to them is almost like saying it will give them AIDS. lol, well from my experience with refurbished Lenovo's I've gotten, unless it says "scratch and dent" its basically indistinguishable from new, and they would never know unless you said so. they even have a standard 1 year warranty through their outlet store as it is.
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May 7, 2014 09:09
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Infidel Castro posted:Any feedback? They aren't exactly power users here. My mom mostly uses her iPad anyway, so I'm not looking for some Alienware rig that can play CoD on max settings. They'll probably just use it mostly for burning CDs, web browsing and probably using it to hook up to the TV to stream poo poo on the TV once they figure out they can actually do that. I just don't want them complaining to me about how crap their computer is 2 years down the line. Maybe a Toshiba Portege R30? It also has a 1366x768 screen in 13.3" which is perfect for old people vision.
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May 7, 2014 12:18
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shrughes posted:Most of their models don't come with an optical drive. It looked like most/all of the recent Lenovos without optical drives have touchscreens, and I don't want either. I'll take another look.
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May 7, 2014 15:28
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If I'm not concerned about using the best graphics card, but want some sort of Nvidia card in my laptop, what graphics would you recommend? I have a laptop with a 260m which runs what I want it to run, would I notice a price difference between the 700 line and 800 line that would make it worth grabbing an older 700m laptop? I've looked at just going with an Intel gpu, but after trying the 4400 gpu it appeared to run games at about the same level as the 260m. Would I notice a difference with a higher 4000 line gpu or the 5000 line?
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May 7, 2014 17:03
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As far as I can tell, there are two varieties of optical drives these days. One in a 12.7mm thickness, and one in a 9.5m thickness. Is everything else standardized? Can I just buy any generic caddy that fits one dimension or the other and swap out my optical drive? (Let us, for the moment, exclude Apple products from this question.)
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May 7, 2014 19:05
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SwissArmyDruid posted:As far as I can tell, there are two varieties of optical drives these days. One in a 12.7mm thickness, and one in a 9.5m thickness. Is everything else standardized? Can I just buy any generic caddy that fits one dimension or the other and swap out my optical drive? (Let us, for the moment, exclude Apple products from this question.) They often have little spikes and such in their shape to avoid incompatibilities or something. For example you can't use W510 optical drives in the W520 because they slightly changed the shape of things. Also, some things seem to have rectangular optical drives while others have hexagonal optical drives. I would get a caddy from newmodeus for the specific laptop you have. I don't think there's much room for other options to save you a significant amount of money.
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May 7, 2014 19:09
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Drunk Badger posted:If I'm not concerned about using the best graphics card, but want some sort of Nvidia card in my laptop, what graphics would you recommend? I have a laptop with a 260m which runs what I want it to run, would I notice a price difference between the 700 line and 800 line that would make it worth grabbing an older 700m laptop? I would say you'd have to look even harder than just the name of the GPU, even down to the VRAM configuration. For instance, the performance difference between a DDR3 750m and a DDR5 750m is easily 10% (yes, even little laptop GPUs these days can be memory constrained). Integrated graphics especially so when manufacturers decide to gently caress you over with single channel memory. And don't forget that some laptops just throttle the GPU when pushed hard because thermals and/or power. I'd rather have a 750m that doesn't throttle than a 860m that does.
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May 7, 2014 19:17
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shrughes posted:They often have little spikes and such in their shape to avoid incompatibilities or something. For example you can't use W510 optical drives in the W520 because they slightly changed the shape of things. Also, some things seem to have rectangular optical drives while others have hexagonal optical drives. I was afraid of that. If I hadn't forgotten to tick the box for the disk caddy for free when I originally ordered...
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May 7, 2014 19:24
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I'm really close to getting a high-end laptop, and after finding out that the razer blade 14" has a lovely screen, i'm now looking at the Gigabyte P34Gv2. But i have yet to find a review on it online? Small sidenote - what's the difference between maxwell/kepler architecture on geforce cards? And do they have any noticable difference in performance?
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May 7, 2014 23:50
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-double post
Nostalgia4Dogges fucked around with this message at 00:25 on May 8, 2014 |
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May 8, 2014 00:23
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I've been suggesting it alot but check out the Sager 8268-s
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May 8, 2014 00:25
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Bloody Wanker posted:I'm really close to getting a high-end laptop, and after finding out that the razer blade 14" has a lovely screen, i'm now looking at the Gigabyte P34Gv2. But i have yet to find a review on it online? Pros: Light and thin as gently caress No ostentatious lights, colors, emblems, or other gamer poo poo Solid performance, both CPU and GPU Excellent cooling, so no GPU throttling and the fans are reasonably quiet for what it is Beautiful screen Good build quality--minimal flexing and bending Default config is 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD, so you're not suffering for space Cons: Keyboard is kinda crappy (it works fine, but the keys feel a bit cheap, especially coming from a T430) Battery life sucks (3-4hrs w/49Wh battery, should get 5-6 if you opt for the version with the bigger battery instead of the HDD) Trackpad buttons use a rocker bar, rather than two physically separate buttons (still works fine, though) Bloody Wanker posted:Small sidenote - what's the difference between maxwell/kepler architecture on geforce cards? And do they have any noticable difference in performance?
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May 8, 2014 00:28
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DrDork posted:The biggest difference is that Kepler has more CUDA cores, but Maxwell has higher clocks. The 2GB vs 4GB VRAM apparently doesn't impact performance much, if at all. The end result is that Maxwell is 10-20% faster in most (but not all) games. Power use while gaming is pretty similar, though Maxwell should be slightly better when idle. Basically, Maxwell is better, but not SO much better that you should immediately discount an otherwise great laptop just because it has Kepler. I mean, poo poo, even the Kepler 860M is some 30% faster than a 765M. Maxwell is vastly more power efficient than Kepler ever was. From nVidia's own press materials, it is said to have have doubled the performance/watt from Kepler. On the desktop side, I've started dropping 750 Ti cards into my budget boxen; no need for a secondary power 6- or 8-pin connection, all the juice it needs comes from the slot. I cannot imagine that these benefits also extend to mobile cards. (Indeed, nVidia has said that all their new GPUs will be mobile GPUs first, now.) SwissArmyDruid fucked around with this message at 00:38 on May 8, 2014 |
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May 8, 2014 00:35
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I'm looking at this: Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E540 Intel Core i7-4702MQ 8GB DDR3 RAM 1TB HDD 15.6 " FHD LED (1920x1080) Nvidia GeForce GT 740M 2GB WLAN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 (not otherwise specified sadly) Windows 7 Professional 64-bit/Windows 8 Pro I'm intending to use this as a digital audio workstation and am hoping a four core i7 will let me use lots of vst plugins. I know the processor won't reach its maximum potential due to temperature restrictions, but then all laptops with top of the line i7s have that, apparently(?) I'm thinking it might still have more power than an i5 [y/n]? It's about the only Lenovo I can find here in Euroland that costs about as much in Euro as it would cost in dollar (+/-10%) and not, well, about twice as much (all before currency conversion). I cannot reconfigure; it's this or some HP Envy for more money actually. Pre-empting Macbook Pro: about 400€ more expensive than this Lenovo here. With search down, I have trouble finding relevant posts in this thread. Can someone shed some light on the E-series? Build quality? Touchpad without buttons? Some reviews say the screen might be a bit poo poo, but I'm never sure if they're talking about this specific panel. Is this Lenovo's shittiest line and if so, is it still bearable compared to, say HP's consumer stuff?
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May 8, 2014 01:03
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nVidia's press materials aside, NotebookCheck's Kepler vs Maxwell tests put their power draw as pretty similar. I'll admit that the results are curious considering that nVidia says Maxwell should have a 45w TDP vs Kepler's 75w TDP, but so far that's all I've seen as far as a head-to-head comparison.
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May 8, 2014 01:05
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Anyone have any experience/opinion on the Lenovo L440 Hybrid Drive option? I've never used an SSHD before, but will need the space of a regular HD, and would like the OS/application loading speed increases that a SSD would give. Seems like a SSHD would be a nice option, but have zero experience with them. Lenovo specifies theirs as "SSHD 500GB5400 8gb Cache" and it's only a $20 upgrade from the base 500gb 7200rpm drive. Almost seems too good to be true?
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May 8, 2014 02:09
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SSHDs are fine. $20 for the upgrade isn't an impressive price or anything. It is a 5400 RPM drive though, which is a step down in that aspect relative to 7200 RPM. But if you're a "normal" computer user it'll be a win.
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May 8, 2014 02:16
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spidoman posted:Lenovo specifies theirs as "SSHD 500GB5400 8gb Cache" and it's only a $20 upgrade from the base 500gb 7200rpm drive. Almost seems too good to be true?
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May 8, 2014 02:25
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DrDork posted:That's because they're not really a whole lot better. 8GB isn't a lot of space for it to cache stuff to, so you're not going to see nearly the improvement in day to day things that you will with an actual SSD. It'll help for some stuff (mostly booting and a few small, commonly used programs) though. More importantly: It's a Seagate. </palpable disgust>
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May 8, 2014 05:07
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does anyone have any wisdom about asus's nx500? with the 4k screen. no release date. not a lot of details.
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May 8, 2014 05:55
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Flipperwaldt posted:I'm looking at this: I've been imaging and deploying an i5, 720p version of this for a client and it's a pretty solid machine. Generally ThinkPad Edge, while being a notch below ThinkPad proper, is a step up from IdeaPad in build quality. That said, definitely get a mouse, the clickable one-piece touchpad isn't much fun. The only HP models that get a nod in this thread are EliteBooks and some ProBooks.
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May 8, 2014 11:24
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Any opinions on the current state of the xps 12? For hotel/airplane use.
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May 8, 2014 13:47
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Wilford Cutlery posted:I've been imaging and deploying an i5, 720p version of this for a client and it's a pretty solid machine. Generally ThinkPad Edge, while being a notch below ThinkPad proper, is a step up from IdeaPad in build quality. That said, definitely get a mouse, the clickable one-piece touchpad isn't much fun. The only HP models that get a nod in this thread are EliteBooks and some ProBooks. As long as it's not absolutely bottom of the barrel for the price range I'll be fine.
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May 8, 2014 14:04
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Looking for a laptop that fits the following criteria: 1. 15.6"-ish, 1080p display (very preferably IPS) 2. Not crap Otherwise price sensitive. Don't need gaming performance or anything, just non demanding productivity with a lot of screen space required. Thin and light is great but not necessary, happy to lug an extra pound with me to save a few hundred bucks, but if I have to get an Ultrabook class machine, that's what I'll do.
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May 8, 2014 21:07
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Due to a series of mess-ups on Lenovo's end, I was sent an 8GB stick of RAM that wasn't compatible with my system. (Part number 0A65724 instead of 0B47381, I think it's low voltage where it shouldn't be or vice versa.) I followed the instructions on Lenovo's site to install it, and it fit, but it gave a series of error beeps that indicated that there was a problem with the RAM. They sent me the appropriate RAM, and said I could keep the extra stick to use (or sell, I guess), but I have no use for it. I have a few questions: 1) I'd like to sell it, but I don't want to sell faulty RAM or get ripped off by someone claiming it's faulty. Would installing it in an incompatible computer have damaged it? Is there any way to tell if I damaged it, without a compatible computer? 2) Is there any kind of standard asking price for selling (barely) used RAM? If it helps, it's Samsung. 3) I assume SA-Mart is my best bet for selling it, is that correct?
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May 9, 2014 18:31
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I don't know whether you'd have damaged it or not, but as it's new it's under warranty, so Lenovo will replace it if it's faulty. SA-Mart is a much better option than Craigslist.
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May 9, 2014 20:01
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I'm looking for something cheap, light, small, that I can toss in a bag and do some light office work on. We're talking email, internet, Skype, some TeamViewer support, and doing moderately light stuff like writing a 200 page Word document with some images, and converting it into a PDF. I'd also like to dual-boot with it, so both good Linux and Windows 7/8 support is preferred, but is a nice-to-have. Slimness and small screen are musts, but keyboard must be standard sized, because I expect to do typing up to 2 hours at a time on it. Here's what I'm currently looking at: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314115 This will replace a five year old netbook. I can spend under $400, and yes, I'm fine if it's going to be a 2-year lifetime shitbox compared to a $600 Lenovo. I have a nice desktop PC for the heavy lifting, this will just be for coffee shop work.
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May 10, 2014 00:44
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That doesn't have a full sized keyboard, but then your previous netbook wouldn't have either. Note also it doesn't come with a Windows license, so that'll be extra expense if you want to dual boot.
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May 10, 2014 03:44
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doctorfrog posted:I'm looking for something cheap, light, small, that I can toss in a bag and do some light office work on. We're talking email, internet, Skype, some TeamViewer support, and doing moderately light stuff like writing a 200 page Word document with some images, and converting it into a PDF. I'd also like to dual-boot with it, so both good Linux and Windows 7/8 support is preferred, but is a nice-to-have. If you need windows, avoid Chrome books, but if you wait three more weeks, Intel is announcing some much more powerful Atom class netbook chips which are much better than what's in that device (which is still a decent bargain) and drive the price down even further. Also I would look at the x131e on the Lenovo outlet store, typically going for under $325 and have a top of class laptop keyboard, rugged construction and good battery life, as well as excellent windows and Linux support.
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May 10, 2014 03:55
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Good advice guys, thanks. I can definitely wait a bit to see how price trends go after that Intel release, and since my wife just scored a Lenovo, it'd be pretty neat to get one also on my budget.
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May 10, 2014 04:44
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I don't know if you're willing or able to go over your $400 budget at all, but the lenovo outlet store has a mess of yoga 11s' with haswell for $476.00 at the moment.
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May 10, 2014 05:08
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I'm needing some form of a computer for work. I'm a project manager for residential construction company, and I need something to help stay organized. The company uses Google for EVERYTHING. Each job has a folder in Drive with the elevations, drawings, interior spec sheets, quote ect ect. We also use Google calendar for all of our scheduling, and email. Therefore, I'm thinking a Chromebook is what I'm after. I have a descent desktop at home, and the office has a few laptops kicking around to access Quickbooks on a seperate server (for estimate adjustments ect). I'm currently using an Ipad + keyboard, but think a laptop form factor will be more efficient and less cumbersome. Are most Chromebooks made equal, or are there a few that are the creme of the crop? I think a good screen would be a priority; more viewing angle and brightness than resolution. Can I use my Iphone for wifi with the Chromebook?
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May 10, 2014 16:53
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Reggie Died posted:Are most Chromebooks made equal, or are there a few that are the creme of the crop? I think a good screen would be a priority; more viewing angle and brightness than resolution. Reggie Died posted:Can I use my Iphone for wifi with the Chromebook?
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May 10, 2014 18:40
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