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Can someone help me evaluate a laptop for my home office? I'll pm you the link and my requirements and you can give me a ya or nay?
(It's old stock, bnib and there is only one left so I don't want someone here nicking it before me 😁)
Thanks
It'll probably be fine.
And if it's not it's e-waste so...
... so? What?
It is vanishingly unlikely that anyone is going to hoover up your single solitary perfect laptop that you aren't even sure is perfect just because you posted it on here. If your requirements are a secret then it's going to be difficult to provide advice beyond "read the several hundred other threads asking the same question."
What do you need? You'd pretty much have to buy a Speak 'n' Spell to fail the "Word, email and a web browser" test.
"What bike to ride to the shops?" One with a wheel front and back.
Thanks for your advice cougar.
Anyone else willing to help it would be much appreciated - please pm me.
Especially if you have experience with supporting business level machines.
I'm just trying to avoid ewaste /landfill by making the right decision up front.
Cougar was, admittedly, mildly pissy, but his point is valid. Unless you have some really specific requirements, like heavy graphics use for video editing or CAD type stuff, or you're going to be doing some really hardcore number crunching (and I'm not talking big spreadsheets, I'm talking crypto mining or sciencey stats stuff on specialist software), then any laptop from any known brand will be fine. If you want further assurance then go mid range or upwards.
Mine, supplied by a major financial services company for me to do their work on, including the aforementioned big spreadsheets (I use some whoppers), is a very ordinary HP laptop. It's fine.
Mine, supplied by a major financial services company for me to do their work on, including the aforementioned big spreadsheets (I use some whoppers), is a very ordinary HP laptop. It's fine.
Surely these days it is only used for logging into a virtual machine somewhere though? You don't actually have the spreadsheet on a local machine.
After our home HP Envy Laptop started falling to bits after 9 years (gaming machine) - I bought a used Lenovo Yoga - same memory, 7 generations better i7 but has inbuilt graphics. We don't game on it, but it's built much better. Cost a quarter of the price. The 'kids' had moved on to desktop gaming rigs.
It is vanishingly unlikely that anyone is going to hoover up your single solitary perfect laptop that you aren't even sure is perfect just because you posted it on here.
I think the OP is looking for private, personal advice. Maybe the Classifieds would be a more appropriate place to ask.
Thanks for your advice cougar.
Anyone else willing to help it would be much appreciated - please pm me.
Especially if you have experience with supporting business level machines.
I'm just trying to avoid ewaste /landfill by making the right decision up front.
I have extensive experience in supporting enterprise level business machines and am happy to help.
However, this is a public forum not your personal free helpline. Any advice I/we provide could also be helpful to other readers and I'm not prepared to play 20 Questions to extract your requirements from you.
Tell us what you need and you'll get the assistance you seek. Otherwise, go buy whatever Lenovo is in budget.
Otherwise, go buy whatever Lenovo is in budget.
Is great advice. These days pretty much everything works well enough for standard use so I care about service and backup as much as anything and I've always found lenovo to be great and spare parts easy to get once it is out of warranty
Can you just post the model and specs then say what you want to use if for? If it is a mainstream product it is unlikely that anyone will find the site selling it.
Yes - I wanted private help just because there was only one last unit left.
Someone had a look and gave me some great advice.
A) Definitely buy a business level machine. Less likely to fail, more robust for traveling,
B) As I'm my own IT department, purchase a extended warranty from the manufacturer.
C) good manufacturer support is the ABSOLUTE key. Lenovo, HP, Dell is good. ASUS, Acer, Samsung, LG not so much.
D) Avoid touchscreen/ 2 in 1 if I don't need it.
Point B and C is a revelation to me. I never would have thought of that myself.
Cheers
've always found lenovo to be great and spare parts easy to get
Over the years and across various companies I've managed fleets of laptops running into unit counts of thousands. I've seen the good the bad and the ugly. Name a manufacturer, I've probably had to support it at some point. To my mind, Lenovo wins on three counts:
1) They make the service manuals readily available so even if you're a gibbon you can download the PDF telling you how to take it to bits and hopefully put it back together again. I have a folder of service guides an inch thick.
2) Following on from that: serviceability. This is model-dependent of course, but I have one on my desk here and a hard disk swap is one screw. One. The same procedure on my partner's HP was north of 40 (and a bunch of those stupid plastic snap clips which break if you fart in the wrong key).
2) Build quality. The failures I saw were either mechanical (spinning hard disks, system fans, the cable to the screen which has to be routed through a hinge) or stupidity (slamming the lid shut with a pen on the keyboard or throwing it across the car park). They just don't die.
My T420 was manufactured in 2011 and it's still as capable as anything else in here. Alright, it was a higher-end spec for its time, but still. Come the apocalypse we'll be left with cockroaches, Nokia 3310s and T-series Lenovo laptops.
Someone had a look and gave me some great advice.
I would disagree with a chunk of that. But as it's a secret I can't really comment further.
If you've found something you've set your heart on to a degree where there's only one left and you daren't tell anyone about it, just buy it already. CEX exists if it turns out to be a turnip.
Yeah it's a laptop, not a faberge egg.
Just tell the make, price and the spec if you want... And people should be able to advise whether it's good for the price or not.
You don't have to say what company is selling it.
D) Avoid touchscreen
Obviously you may have no need for it at all, but the touchscreen on my Dell XPS has been invaluable at times. It's also possibly the longest lasting laptop I've had without issues too
I'm with the consensus on this one, these days a toaster will run office.
It's been about a decade since I built an excel spreadsheet that had to be paused, I can't even remember where the pause is! It was crunching through about a decade of meteorological data with 1minute intervals 😂.
A) Makes sense
B) It's most likely to fail from physical abuse, you're possibly better off paying for gadget insurance and a decent backup.
C) Following on from A/B, does it matter? If there's a business case for needing a PC then you'll just go out to PC world and buy a new one that day, not wait for a repair which even in the best case with the super on-site warranty is going to be days. Hence having a backup is the key thing.
D) Touchscreens are surprisingly useful when traveling. I'd use one over a trackpad if it was an option.
Also, manufacturer extended warranties are often much more expensive than like for like 3rd party ones, though not that big a deal if you are only covering one machine.
It's a bit more nuanced IMO... It's fine saying anything will run office, and that's largely true.
I say that as my old laptop (a gen 10 i3) only had 2 physical cores and 4 threads.
That basically meant it was only powerful enough to do one thing at a time.
For example if I'm playing PokerStars with my friends, also have zoom running for chatting to said friends, and a music player running... It was on its knees. It just couldn't cope with what I would consider to be fairly light workload.
Also bear in mind you can't really compare laptop CPUs to desktop CPUs... They often have fewer cores and threads than the desktop equivalents... Not to mention power limitations in bios that favour battery life over performance, with it being a laptop that's kind of a big deal.
Basically you want a proper pc for your home office and a laptop for when out and about.
The only reason to ever consider a laptop as your main computer is if you literally have no space for a desktop pc.
The only reason to ever consider a laptop as your main computer is
... if you need to move it about.
Yeah, I'd go the other way round - the only reason to select a desktop PC over a laptop is if you definitely don't want to move it about. Even the ability to have have it on your knee whilst, I dunno, idly purchase browsing whilst watching telly is handy.
Started off looking at:
Lenovo P16s gen2. I5 1340p 16GB/500Gb, A200 GPU. Open box. 14 months Lenovo warranty. £800.
Ended up buying:
Lenovo T16 gen2. I5 1345u 32GB/500Gb, integrated GPU. Open box. 30 months Lenovo warranty. £880. A touch slower CPU, more RAM, a touch better battery life, much longer warranty. And it's a T instead of a P.
Both eBay.
A brand new just released T16 gen4 AMD is only £130 more with 12months warranty. I'm a low risk taker so happier with something that's been the the wild a bit.
On the T16 I bought, I can extend the warranty when the current ends - I was told at this level they are well supported, all common problems well documented, parts available. Thus keeping it from being e-waste that bit longer - which is my main requirement.
Performance wise, something for £299 from Argos would have worked - but it wouldn't have lasted or been remotely economical to repair. Landfill in the blink of a eye.
Thanks W for spending so much of your time helping me out. Total Superstar.