Recommend a laptop

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Foscolo

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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #75 on: June 15, 2012, 11:43:55 AM »
Just in case there's anybody out there who doesn't know what an "mSATA SSD" is, it's a solid state drive. Instead of spinning disks read by little magic pixies, or however it works, the hard drive in your computer has no moving parts. It's basically just a big memory stick.

The advantages of SSD:
  • No moving parts means it could probably last for decades without going wrong
  • It reads much faster than a regular hard disk drive
  • Computer start-up is reduced to a few seconds
  • It never needs to be defragmented
  • Any slowdown of your computer over time will probably be almost undetectable

The disadvantage:
They're much more expensive than HDDs. A 96GB SSD will usually cost more than a 500GB HDD. You can get round this getting a cheap external HDD for storage of things you'll want to access only rarely, such as not-very-good photos and music you're bored with. Keep what's on the computer to the essential minimum.

I'm using a four-year-old Dell laptop which is blazing fast and totally reliable - because I put an SSD in last year. It was pretty easy: open a hatch, undo a couple of screws, pull out the HDD, insert the SSD. Then I reinstalled the operating system. And then when I'd totally bolloxed that up, I paid somebody to reinstall the operating system. But it meant the total cost was under two hundred of your Yankee dollars to get my aging computer running better-than-new, about 20% of the price of a new one with comparable specs.


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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #76 on: November 27, 2018, 03:21:18 AM »
Ye olden y470p is a fraction long in the tooth these days...

I've started wondering about the 2018 Huawei Matebook X Pro
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #77 on: December 01, 2018, 12:09:07 AM »
My tablet is a Huawei.  So far, I'm happy with it.

My laptop is an HP.  I've been very pleased with HP and Lenovo/IBM laptops for many years now.
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #78 on: December 01, 2018, 12:38:05 AM »
The Matebook X Pro is the "it" ultrabook at the moment - it tops everyone's best of laptops lists for 2018.

The name is an obvious mash-up - Matebook from Macbook, X from Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and Pro from, i dunno, win7 professional? - and the laptop itself is a mashup too - looks like a Macbook, works like a Thinkpad, has a touch screen - but apparently it's entirely functional - all the things it promises, it delivers. And it's an ultrabook with a dedicated gpu.

And has a 3:2 screen aspect ratio!


But I'm also thinking, if I am going ultrabook, then Thinkpad X1 Carbon, gen 5 or maybe 6...
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Nolefan

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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #79 on: December 04, 2018, 06:13:00 PM »
They're all pretty good these days.. start with a choice of OS, then proceed.

I'm too deep into MacOS to change so that's what i stick with, thus macbook Air, new one is sweet with the right specs.

Microsoft has done some kickass work with the surface, however, i would double check that it comes with windows 10 pro and not some of the cutdown home editions.

on the android market, i'm not sold yet.... it's better for tablets/phones than as a workhorse
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #80 on: December 11, 2018, 03:18:12 AM »
Looking earnestly at the Thinkpad X280

Ideally, the i5 version but with 16gb... except I don't actually know what I'd use 16gb for...


I bought an extra 4 jigglebits of ram for ye olden y470p a week ago. For the past six years it's had 4, now it has 8. I can't tell the difference.  bibibibibi
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #81 on: December 12, 2018, 02:27:45 AM »
Thinkpad X280 i5-8250U 8G 256G SSD FHD

nine thousand buckaroos chinee https://item.jd.com/6543089.html


But...

the exchange rate appears to make the same unit 7600-ish RMB equivalents if bought direct from Lenovo in Australia


Downside of ordering from Lenovo is their shipping estimates are notoriously inaccurate, sometimes by weeks, and if it didn't arrive while I was there....
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #82 on: December 12, 2018, 04:52:19 AM »
But I must be misunderstanding something, right?

https://item.jd.hk/1984001396.html

That says an x280 with i7 16GB 256GB ssd and FHD is 8888 yuan...


What am I missing? Does HK JD not deliver to provinces north?
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #83 on: December 12, 2018, 05:10:23 AM »
Ah, I see...  www.jd.hk aka Jing Dong Worldwide aka Joybuy is formally beyond the Chinese customs border. Delivering goods from there to "the rest of China" is an act of importation and actual purchase price is going to go up by whatever taxes and duties apply....

"According to the Notice of the General Administration of Customs, No. 26 of 2016, “Announcement on Regulating Issues Concerning Cross-border E-Commerce Retail Import and Export Commodities” and related regulations, starting from April 8, 2016:
The single transaction limit for cross-border e-commerce retail imports is RMB 2,000, and the annual annual transaction limit is RMB 20,000;
Cross-border e-commerce retail imports are subject to customs duties and import value-added tax and consumption tax, and the customs-paid price is the actual transaction price, including the retail price of goods, freight and insurance;
The orderer is the taxpayer. The e-commerce enterprise, e-commerce transaction platform enterprise or logistics enterprise registered in the customs as the collection and payment obligor of the tax shall fulfill the tax liability on its behalf."



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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #84 on: December 13, 2018, 02:57:32 PM »
Take a shopping trip to HK.  agagagagag
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #85 on: December 13, 2018, 07:27:31 PM »
And wouldn't you know it, if I had've chosen Cathay Pacific for this year's Oz pilgrimage, I would've been passing through HK in a few weeks anyway...

I might give up this laptop hunt for a while. I'm fairly sure the x280 will be what I want given what I use computers for and how I use them, but six months from now might be easier...


Right now for instance, I have a newly acquired 8gb on my six year old y470p. Using this lumbering beast as I usually do, win7 will put between 4 and 5 gb of that ram to immediate use and keep the rest on standby, leaving usually none unused. I can cause between 6 and 7gb to be used directly if I, say, open a bunch of resource intensive browser windows (like, say, some collection of forum pages dedicated to youtube videos) and maybe an email client and another browser doing something else and maybe some other programs...

Which is to say, it looks like 8gb is in general enough - one has to be really sloppy in managing their open programs, or to have some wildly resource intensive thing like some video or music composition software open - to even get close to directly using all the available ram. But see, that's what windows does. I can do the same tests on my 2gb laptop running win10 and it looks like the os routinely only keeps 1gb in immediate operation - which it does, it makes choices about how to manage physical ram and pagefiles.

Which, ironically, is what is convincing me to get 16gb. I know for instance that cpu will probably make the difference more than anything but all I know about cpus is I have a version 1 i5 and hardware support for hevc decoding wasn't introduced until version 4...


I enjoy specifications, obvs. I'll probably only get a real machine after I decide finally whether or not win10 is the devil.
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #86 on: December 15, 2018, 02:04:01 PM »
Psychologically speaking, a "thin and light" ultraportable was going to mean I could leave. Fatalistically speaking, of course they turn out expensive, hard to acquire and full of worrying compromise. So, the E480 is probably where I'll end up, a "think and heavy" barelyportable probably with fan issues but ram and storage expandable. And it has the Thinkpad ergonomics, which is at least one of the features I was looking for.

 bebebebebe
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #87 on: December 19, 2018, 11:32:55 PM »
Unexpected story development: I have elected to do purchase of my first real Thinkpad

All things being equal I will tomorrow take possession of a Thinkpad T480. It'll come crammed full of an eighth generation i5 processor, some 8 jigglebits of RAM, a single full-power NVIDIA MX150, and a pair of hard drives, one a freakish tiny square of an 128GB SSD in the WWAN slot, the other a traditional 5400rpm spinner measuring some 1 terrabytes of void shortly to be filled. It shall also have a full HD display.

At a little less than ticket price too.


Boom.
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Re: Recommend a laptop
« Reply #88 on: December 22, 2018, 04:25:22 PM »
Thinkpad T480 

i5-8250U + 8GB RAM + 128 GB SSD + 1T HDD + MX150 GPU + FHD + Win10 Home

8000 yuan

In the shop I forgot to talk about a backlit keyboard. (I was sorta under the impression they were standard now.) Given my use case I'd very rarely need it, but I was kinda looking forward to playing a bit but when I got home, no. Aww. (Why backlight? For when you don't have a direct light source on your keyboard like a desk lamp or overhead light...)


"Pro" tip - if the first thing you do with a new laptop is format the drives and install your own os, but you can't buy the thing without an os already installed, the difference between Win 10 Home and Pro is 1000 yuan  aoaoaoaoao
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0