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Is it at all attainable to get a worthwhile ultrabook for $600? Planning on ditching my iPad and fat Asus for something thinner to replace them both. Would prefer new or refurbished, I already know what I can get used.
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Jun 3, 2013 21:18
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WHAT A GOOD DOG posted:Design choices for laptops and touchscreen convertibles make no sense to me. What is this: what the gently caress is this!?!?! They want you to start using touch input by never, ever using the trackpad. What the hell do you rest your palms on? The keyboard? What the hell good can come of this?
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Jun 6, 2013 17:02
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mewse posted:In the review I read, the acer rep basically said "err, umm, most people use external mice." You'd certainly be forced to.
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Jun 6, 2013 17:12
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Bleh Maestro, what you're looking for doesn't quite exist yet and if you can wait for everyone to roll out their Haswell machines, the new IGPs will fit your bill. You think it won't, but they will. And you get great battery life with it.
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Jun 12, 2013 20:12
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:So, just to be clear, for someone such as me that has been happily chugging along with his E8800 + Radeon HD 4850 for the past 3 years, does this mean that this year I could, theoretically, buy a laptop that would completely replace my desktop and get even better performance? Absolutely. Of course, it depends if you want a "mobile desktop" (see: all Alienware 17" machines) or something more portable. Even the Iris graphics in the new Haswell chips contends with dedicated cards and should at least match the performance you're getting with your current setup, and dedicated cards in laptops are not uncommon anymore.
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Jun 17, 2013 16:12
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:I really only game 3-4 hours a week and I'm usually buying games on sale years after they've come out. I have absolutely no problem in being behind the curve. I'm not quite up to date on what machines are the greatest nowadays, but I'd be most worried with how the system performs with games 2-3 years down the line. For everyday performance, something like a Macbook Air would be great and has absolutely crazy battery life while still being usable.
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Jun 17, 2013 16:25
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modig posted:No not really but it costs a lot less and seems like it should get you like 80% of the way there if it is done well. For what it's worth, I swapped in a hybrid drive into my current laptop because like 80% of other sub-$400 laptops the hard drive it shipped with was slow as hell. It did make a good performance boost. Although I can't comment on how long they last, it is a decent inbetween traditional platter drives and SSD, especially where space is concerned. I unfortunately have no idea how the cache SSDs affect performance, but I'd be wary of the hard drive it's paired with being a piece of poo poo.
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Jun 21, 2013 15:37
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Rye Bread posted:Would a new Macbook Air be suitable for some audio recording (Ableton, etc)? Would this be one of the scenarios where an i7 might be beneficial? The i7 is only marginally better than the i5 and certainly not worth the bump in price. The RAM and SSD size upgrades, however, are.
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Jul 1, 2013 16:48
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sports posted:You're not supposed to use palm rests while using the keyboard. He's not using palm rests, he says the finish has worn where he sets his palm.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:57
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I'm sure Sony offers better driver support for their flagship models, but when you buy a $500 bottom of the barrel Vaio, you get what you pay for in terms of support. I can't see them saying "LOL good luck suckers" in 6 months down the road when it comes to something like the Duo 13. Of course, that's good faith, and for every person who has good faith, one has bad faith.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:29
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Yeah, he does make the XPS 12 sound tempting. It's a pity I've been burned one too many times with Dell, even on the higher end stuff.
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Jul 31, 2013 16:08
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In my experience most laptops sub $500 comes with a legitimately terrible hard drive. For example, my $350 K53TA had a Seagate 7200RPM 500GB drive. I replaced it with an equivalent hybrid drive when the hard drive inevitably went out in a year and it's both insanely faster and has lasted the same amount of time without any slowdowns. (Maybe that's thanks to the SSD cache, though.) It's probably not the case for every laptop, but the two places I see manufacturers cheap out that are the most obvious: hard drive and screen.
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Aug 6, 2013 14:58
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go3 posted:You should literally never buy anything because it will be eclipsed at some point plus you are a terrible person for not doing it my way. I'm sure you think your little quip is extremely witty but it isn't, especially since it's completely valid to recommend against buying a laptop right now since Haswell is still being rolled out. Try again some other time.
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Aug 16, 2013 16:16
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go3 posted:This isn't about Haswell. Its about the same people parroting the same disingenuous bullshit because occasionally people want different laptops than they do. Like what? Like how $640 is a good price point for a quality machine? I don't know what point you are making. (Most) of the advice given in this thread is with the intent of making sure a person doesn't buy something so awful that they will come back in a month and complain that the hard drive in their lovely $200 laptop went dead. You're not doing anyone any good by parroting the "all advice given by this thread is superfluous, biased and terrible" sentiment.
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Aug 16, 2013 17:44
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HP is going to release a surprisingly good looking Haswell chromebook before the holiday season. I'm picking one up in the turquoise color if the initial reviews don't turn out to be "floppy piece of dick plastic, don't buy." Haswell, too, means better IGP performance, if even marginally, and better battery life, which is the big thing Chromebooks should care about.
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Sep 16, 2013 04:32
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My entire university just switched to Canvas for pretty much everything academic, so all you really need for 90% of classes is something that dumps word docs or has a web browser, keyboard and internet connection. e: Yeah, I realize that's specific to my university, but it's still pretty much true unless you're in a CAD program and need triple quad-core CPUs and 8TB of RAM. Macichne Leainig fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 05:09
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stanislaus posted:Does anyone have opinions on a best ultrabook in the $1000-1400 range? I'd be using it mainly for Microsoft office/light programming, so no real need for touchscreen or a decent graphics card. Currently leaning towards a macbook air, the build quality, support, and battery life seem tough to beat. I don't know about upcoming competitors but the MBA is still king in build quality and battery life. Support is Apple support - at least you get to talk to a real person in the U.S. I think the new Ativ Book 9 Plus (is that the name) sports like, a 3200x1800 display, which beats the MBA. But Windows scaling sucks poo poo. Battery life on that guy should be good and build quality decent, but if you need it now, you can't really go wrong with the Air.
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Sep 16, 2013 07:35
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Bob Morales posted:But it starts at $2,099! For what, a Celeron single-core and 512MB of RAM? Cheap as hell.
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Sep 16, 2013 22:25
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DrDork posted:Still 12lbs, though! Might be cramming an acceptable amount of battery life, then.
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Sep 16, 2013 22:40
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Well I think I just bought an Acer S3 with Sandy Bridge i3 at $120, but time will tell. Maybe I can replace this shithouse Asus where the DVD drive and headphone jack both failed in a year.
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Sep 17, 2013 16:25
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This Aspire S3 is a little on the slow side, and I think it's the Hitachi hard drive, since the performance issues seem to be mostly related to slow-loading programs and whatnot. Should I toss in the 500GB Seagate hybrid drive I have in my old laptop, or just save up for a SSD? I would use the SSD in my desktop but it's only 64GB which is fine for my desktop when I have 2TB of physical drives to support it. 
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Sep 18, 2013 21:24
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Bishyaler posted:We did a company wide report of how much space was used on all computers. The average amount was something like 60GB. That includes OS and MS Office. Company wide, sure. I'd imagine personal computers have a lot more photos, videos, music, et cetera. That said most people just get an external for that stuff these days anyway. 128GB is a decent amount for a laptop drive. I would prefer 256GB myself but I do not prefer the price of 256GB SSDs or laptops with said SSDs.
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Sep 18, 2013 22:15
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I think it's easier for me to live with a smaller amount on my laptop when literally everything I have is stored on my desktop and important documents backed up to Dropbox. But like I said, that's not really everyone's setup. I mean yeah there's the "lol I have 500gb of RAM" morons out there, but they're probably happy with their $300 Walmart Toshibas anyway.
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Sep 18, 2013 22:31
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I guess we can't ask for a lot for $300, but it would have been nice to have a decent amount of battery life...
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Sep 24, 2013 15:39
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bull3964 posted:8.1 is a revelation after 8. I've been using 8 for nearly a year on my home desktop and I'm honestly STILL fumbling around it and getting frustrated trying to find things and do stuff. I like 8.1 if only because you can set your desktop background as the Start screen background, which feels 100% less jarring than before. Really, it's obvious vanilla Windows 8 was to just get it out there, and 8.1 is what they really wanted. I really like it on my laptop, especially with the gestures.
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Sep 27, 2013 16:38
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Socrates16 posted:Y510p shipping date pushed back from this Monday to 10/21 thaaaaaanks Lenovo. It's probably going to ship in the next week, don't worry.
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Sep 27, 2013 20:49
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Is there any discernible reason why my S3-391 can't connect to my school wireless? My phone and iPad have zero problems. It's WPA2 with user authentication. Yes, I'm sure I'm using the right password. It seems like it might be a Windows 8 issue at first but I think the Qualcomm chip in the laptop just blows - any second opinions? Do Qualcomms/Acer laptops traditionally have problems with user authenticated wireless networks?
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Oct 16, 2013 18:06
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BonoMan posted:Convinced my boss to buy a Yoga 2 Pro and goddamn that thing will NOT connect to our wifi network. It will connect to any other network around, but it just can't get an IP on our network at all. I spent about 4 hours on it today doing everything I could including a complete recovery and fresh boot, but nada. Something about Windows 8 acts really squirrelly with some networks. I can't pin it down, but on both of my machines running Windows 8, they can't connect to my school wifi. However, worked fine in Windows 7 before the upgrade and my phone connects just fine.
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Nov 15, 2013 05:01
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Do MSI laptops have bad fans? I've got an MSI GS63VR 6RF and the GPU fans started squealing horribly anytime they spun up. I have never had this happen with any laptop of any age - my T420 still is working like the tank that it is. I felt like an idiot as I tried to lubricate the fans on two separate occasions, but then I realized I need to remove the actual fan from the motor and lubricate the center piece of the fan unit. Thankfully, third time was the charm and the fans are in great working condition with no noise.
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Mar 6, 2019 01:02
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So I have an HP Omen 15 - the one with the 3070 and i7. Perfectly good laptop, but I was hoping to buy a spare power supply for it. Looking on like Amazon though, they all, y'know, visually look the same, but they're from no-name brands of course. Now I might have gambled for like, an offbrand 65W power adapter such as on my older T420, but for a 200W power adapter it seems like that'd just be introducting an IED into my house. Am I being too careful here? While I'm on the topic of power supplies, this thing definitely gets uncomfortably hot to the touch during gaming. Anyone have any tips on how to keep things like that cool? Easy ways to prop it up maybe?
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Jul 11, 2021 17:45
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Hadlock posted:I prop mine up with two of those classical pink rubber school erasers Nice that sounds perfect, especially because my wife is a teacher so we almost certainly have some of those lying around.
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Jul 11, 2021 17:56
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I figured out a way to prop it up easily and played State of Decay 2 for like two hours straight last night. Went to touch the power brick and it was hot for sure, but not too hot to the touch again so it isn't gonna be as big of a problem as I thought. Now I just scooped up a 1TB SK hynix Gold P31 NVMe for a secondary drive. Hope they're still good, I heard a lot of manufacturers have been doing bad poo poo with SSDs these days. Peeled off those unsightly stickers on the palm rest. Man it's nice to have a decent gaming laptop again.
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Jul 12, 2021 15:16
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Lockback posted:FYI, $20 cooling pads are on Amazon and go a long way to keeping performance better on a laptop as well as add longevity. Probably a better solution to your $1000+ device than pink pet erasers. Power supply, not the laptop itself. Thermals are great on this machine so far, especially once undervolted.
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Jul 12, 2021 17:15
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Where is a good place to find replacement barrel jacks for laptop AC adapters? Long story short I was careless and my gaming laptop took a tumble off a short tabletop. It's fine, a bit scuffed up, but nothing is broken aside from the barrel jack on the AC adapter itself; it's bent to all poo poo. I can't imagine cutting off the original and reattaching a new one is too daunting a task for a computer toucher with electronics experience. Is this a bad idea? I don't want to just replace it with some generic no-name IED AC adapter instead. It's an HP Omen 15 ek1013dx, it if helps at all.
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Apr 20, 2023 18:13
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:Odds are good you can find the OEM charger on Amazon or eBay. Yeah I plan on buying a replacement for the whole thing if I can find a good looking OEM one. Just wondering if it’s worth hacking off the broken bit and replacing the original barrel plug. Maybe not worth it when 200W+ laptop chargers are involved?
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Apr 21, 2023 06:02
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