New laptop time - ASUS any good?

Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Huawei - they're all much of a muchness really. Good value whatever spec level you go for. I've previously owned both an Asus desktop and a 15 inch laptop and both lasted over 10 years before being sold on / handed down still in good working order.

Asus are decent enough.

I have a Huwaei laptop which has been utterly faultless, but ran out of storage and the cost of paying someone to swap out the SSD etc is making me think buying a new one and offset sale of this one is a better route.

Nope, that's crackers. Change the drive. If you're not confident then I'll do it for you for the price of a pint if you're local enough to get it to me.

What's caused it to run out of storage? Is it just a tiny drive, or have you filled it full of stuff that can (should) be backed off elsewhere?

Cougar is talking sense (damnit 😫).

Swapping a drive is pretty easy and avoids more pointless landfill.

Pretty easy assuming it's not one of those where the SSD is soldered on...

But it depends on the rest of the specification of the laptop too.

Asus are generaly fine.
I actually have a really cheap Asus vivo book and it's fine for traveling with , but only has an (10th gen I think) i3 dual core 4 thread processor and 4gb ram so it's no good for multi tasking, despite having an SSD... for example running pokerstars and a zoom call at the same time during lock down it was basically on its knees so I'll never bother upgrading it... It's just used for internetting and watching films on really when traveling, with the added bonus of being a pc for the odd spreadsheet /light office work, for the most part so it suits it's purpose.

I had an ASUS for work for 5 years - an aluminium framed and cased thing that looked like a MacBook Air. It was brilliantly tough and worked tirelessly.

Son has a powerful ASUS Vivobook (pro?) - it is a proper powerhouse, but is more plastic than my older machine. Still, he gives it a hard time at college everyday.

Yeah with computers the specification is more important than the brand name generally speaking.

Obviously the slimmer more powerful ones cost more, slim and powerful ones cost a lot more.

Nope, that’s crackers. Change the drive. If you’re not confident then I’ll do it for you for the price of a pint if you’re local enough to get it to me.

What’s caused it to run out of storage? Is it just a tiny drive, or have you filled it full of stuff that can (should) be backed off elsewhere?

I think it was you who partitioned this for me remotely when I first got it back in 2018.

I've filled the 320gb HD up with loads of videos of utter dross, but I'm a photo hoarder and have 200gb of family photos and MTB go pro stuff on a external HD. So the plan is to get everything on this new 2tb machine and then set up a back up.

I took this machine to a shop and he said it's one of the ones that has a soldered SSD, so I'll clear this one down and my daughter needs a laptop so she can have it, that way nothing goes to landfill. Even the battery still lasts 5 hours, it's been a great machine.

I have an Asus Vivobook. It is awful.

I was advised to burn it with fire on here.

Why not just an external drive, 2 TB is about £60?

Or go the whole hog and get a NAS drive, twin drives set up as a RAID back up?

Not hard to do, sounds more complex than it is.

Swapping a drive is pretty easy and avoids more pointless landfill.

Provided you don't have to remove a keyboard that is held in with dozens of tiny screws or use a heat gun to soften glue used to seal up an ultra-thin design. But, definitely, there'll be online guides to replacing the drive, most likely it'll literally take 5 minutes.

If it has an i3 or i5 level processor, it should handle basic office work and web browsing just fine. If you go to the Crucial or Kingston websites, they have wizards that will analyze your machine and advise you on possible upgrades of memory and SSDs. Win10 will run nicely with 8 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD isn't expensive these days.

Yeah, my laptop is Asus. Had it ages (8 years?) and only swapped the old hard drive for an SSD, which gave it a new lease of life. It is from a period where laptops weren't glued together, though.

I have an Asus Vivobook. It is awful.

I was advised to burn it with fire on here.

Interesting, the vivobook range goes from really cheap crap up to pretty powerfull machines... it all depends on the spec Vs price as to whether it's any good or not.

a 512 GB SSD isn’t expensive these days.

Indeed 1tb from Scan with next day deliver for around £45.

Thanks everyone, I ended up buying an Asus Zenbook 13", 2TB SSD and 32gb ram, really nice little bit of kit.

Can anyone recommend a) software to enable me to back it up to my Seagate external 1TB HD?

Also, is there any way of plugging one laptop into the other and dragging files over to new one?

I think what you really need to do is starting using Microsoft One drive (or similar), store everything on the cloud and have it accessible from any machine.

I think what you really need to do is starting using Microsoft One drive

Yep.

I do probably 99% of my work using cloud services now!

Google Drive installed on my 3 computers and everything is available everywhere.

Remember the days of actually installing software? 😱

I literally haven't installed any extra software on my XPS and I can do everything I need to (obvs this is business specific)!

I think what you really need to do is starting using Microsoft One drive (or similar), store everything on the cloud and have it accessible from any machine.

I looked into this a while back, but I found that a lot of older file types won't play in it. It's a fair suggestion though.

I think it was you who partitioned this for me remotely when I first got it back in 2018.

Christ, yes, you're not wrong. I hadn't made the connection (I'm hopeless with usernames).

Can anyone recommend a) software to enable me to back it up to my Seagate external 1TB HD?

First I'd be questioning why / if you need it all locally on the new laptop when you said yourself that it's dross. As a one-off operation you can drag and drop it onto the external drive with Windows Explorer.

For dedicated applications my only modern experience of backup software is in the corporate world so any recommendations I have for consumer-grade software would likely be out of date. In any case, as others have said I'd be looking at cloud storage for anything I care about. But before all that I'd be ascertaining things like what exactly you want backing up and how urgently you'd need it back if the original went pop.

My backup of 'dross' is a bare hard drive in a drawer in the sideboard at my mum's. I retrieve it periodically to update it. It's a 40 minute round trip if I ever need anything off it, it's completely airgapped (obvs) so not susceptible to ransomware attacks, and it'll survive if my house burns down. For me it's perfect. But what works for me might not work for you, you need to define a problem before seeking a solution.

I found that a lot of older file types won’t play in i

Huh?

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