Crap selection of laptops

[Chewy509]

Hi Guys,

This is more a rant, than a ask for help...

My dad is flying up from country Victoria to visit this weekend, and he has finally admitted defeat and is getting a new laptop for home. (Current PC is hitting 5 years old, running XP, etc + plus no current internet connection).

So, I thought I would have a quick look and see what i could get for sub AU$1000 (which has to include Office, and all the other accessories, which gives a roundabout price of ~$750 for the laptop).

There's quite a few to choose from in this price range (an Asus K55VD-SX073H has caught my eye for $798, and it's smaller cousin the K55A-SX006H for $698 ). We're sticking pretty much with Asus due to local support, as HP, Acer and Samsung support for their consumer range here in Oz is dreadful. Other suggestions welcome, but have to mindful, that the model must be easily purchased in a bricks/mortar store in a day... Unless these K55 series models are to have known issues?

But what I noticed was, once you start looking for an i5 class CPU, 8GB RAM and dedicated gfx, choices become very, very slim. And, the big item I noticed was the lack of screen resolution, most, if not all 15" laptops, that are sub-AU$800 come with 1366x768 displays? WTF? Mind you, 8GB included was pretty rare as well, and anything sub $600 was all Intel Integrated gfx (which is completely understandable) and some models only had 2GB RAM? (a $500 laptop only had 2GB RAM which was shared with the AMD APU and came with Win8 ).

If it was me and wanted a full size laptop, I would most likely order online from Lenovo, but since my parents live in a small country town (Melbourne is 3hr drive, Sale is about 1 hr drive), I need to mindful of support options in case something goes wrong. (We live about 2000km from them, so all support is remote). The other issue, were they live, the only Internet option is 3G wireless (up to 3Mbps according to Telstra, and my dad has confirmed at least 1.5Mbps on his phone), as there are no plans for their exchange to be upgraded with DSL capability, and NBN connectivity for them is copper phone + 3G wireless for those interested, and dialup is problematic at 33.6K. Which may make things hard.

So I guess, it's good to see cheap laptops and expensive laptops, but WTF happened to the middle ground area? The Asus K55 series seems to hit that area nicely, but are their alternatives I should consider?
(A windows based PC is a hard requirement, so tablets are not an option).

 

[Mercutio]

I'd flat-out tell you to drop dedicated graphics. It's silly. It's adding heat and noise and unless dad is a gamer you're not going to notice any benefit at all. HD3000+ can run two or three displays and does all the HD video decoding goodness we can presently do, so it's not a joke in the way older generations of integrated video have been.
I also would not particularly prioritize an i5 over an i3 for this purpose without knowing why your dad needs real CPU cores instead of the still-pretty-damned-good HT ones.
I will say that your father will probably be quite happy with 1366x768 because of age and eyesight, so I would not weight that as a negative. I usually go out of my way to find low-res screens for older folks so I don't have to make as many text size adjustments for them.
Buy extra RAM yourself. Retailers seem to think that it's a justification for premium pricing but of course we know how cheap and easy it is to put in. Very probably you'll save yourself $100 by buying your own 8GB kit.

I know a couple people who have had Asus K-series laptops. I do not know anyone who is happy with one. Asus is supposed to have a high quality product line but as far as I can tell the quality is not in the K or U series models.

All that said: Yes, you're right. There is no middle ground. There are shitboxes and there are premium products and there are shitboxes disguised as premium products (very common for expensive S*ny and Toshiba models), but there's no "I want one step above a shitbox" product. My boilerplate recommendation is to look for something that was meant to be sold to businesses, some kind of Thinkpad, Pro/Elitebook or Latitude. You'll find a greater diversity of hardware offerings there as well, but you'll really have to hunt to find someone to sell you the hardware.
HP Elitebooks do carry a standard three year warranty if you can find one in your price range.

 

[Chewy509]

Thanks, I've got no issue with modern integrated gfx, either HD3000+ or AMD APUs, but it was interesting to see some models still sold with 2GB RAM?

Point taken on the K series then - looks like they must be made to match a feature list, and not expected build quality. His main usage will be general internet, Skype, Youtube, basic office stuff, which only needs a Sillyron or an i3, but had the extra $$$ and saw a few i5's available... I don't think I would go less than a i3 for him, but know a Celeron will most likely do for him. As I said, got the cash, so why not try to get above shitbox value/quality.

I was planning on installing an additional 4GB myself, as all models that are easily available only come with 4GB. Thankfully most models still have 2x SO-DIMM slots. Just hope, the upgrade is simple enough? (I've noticed some laptop require some decent amount of work to do the upgrade, eg my wifes HP 4510s ProBook needed the keyboard removed to get to the DIMM slots, easy enough, but still annoying).

I would love to get a Lenovo or ProBook/EliteBook, but finding one retail is very hard and often have a price to match. eg a HP 6570b is just shy of $1400... (i5, 4GB RAM, 750GB HDD)

 

[Chewy509]

Oh, and I know he can do everything I've mentioned on a tablet, but mum has one of those expensive computer controlled sewing machines, which needs a PC to load the SD Card with the patterns, so the machine can sew them. (sorry for not mentioning this earlier)

 

[Mercutio]

Point of fact I just replaced the 802.11 card on a K-series Asus this weekend... and that's not a repair I've had to do very often. I was for a time actually suggesting Asus notebooks as an option for people I thought might otherwise be tempted by HP Pavilions and Toshiba Satellites, but they seem to be much the same sort of crummy product.

So, wait, why do you have to deal with retail, anyway? Don't you guys have a local Amazon/Newegg equivalent?

 

[CougTek]

Too bad he's coming this week-end and not the one after. Haswell is launching next Monday and while it's a so-so new for desktops, it's great news for laptops. It has way superior graphics and lower TDP than Ivy Bridge. Laptops with Haswell processors should therefore have increased battery life and possibly even thinner chassis.

At least you should be able to tell him what he'll miss for getting a new laptop 2 or 3 days too soon.

 

[Chewy509]

Don't you guys have a local Amazon/Newegg equivalent?

Sadly, no...

Our best equivalent to Newegg is UMart, and their laptop range is pretty limited. Actually, shit, at Umart, I can get a HP 4540s ProBook for $709! Decisions...

 

[time]

You're doing it wrong. Retail stores just don't stock the kind of value proposition you're seeking.

My recommendation is to look for refurbished Lenovo in Oz. My youngest daughter's Thinkpad has been amazing and the Lenovo-backed warranty is now proven.

 

[time]

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

[Mercutio]

My recommendation is to look for refurbished Lenovo in Oz. My youngest daughter's Thinkpad has been amazing and the Lenovo-backed warranty is now proven.

Here in the US, there's usually a substantial discount on "two models back" Thinkpads, which at this point are Tx20s or the like. Which is what I'm typing on right now. Those are the units that I hunt down and offer to individuals who want something decent and are more concern with price than other factors.

Also, I strongly suspect there's somebody around here who can help you with your Office problem.

 

[LiamC]

Are you dead set on Microsoft Office? LibreOffice is enough like Office 2003, that anybody from the XP world should have no trouble adapting. I've recommended to a number of people, and no one has had trouble opening or saving Microsoft documents. You just need to remember to turn off the warning when not saving in ODF format. It might be an option that would allow a greater spend on hardware.

 

[Chewy509]

Ended up getting 2x HP 4540s Probooks - i5's, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, AMD/Intel hybrid graphics.. very nice machines for the price we got. (The ones we got are basically the same as the HP Elite m6, but in a ProBook chassis and the business support, and most importantly, official Win7 support from HP).

Both units were the "old" model of the 4540s, not the refresh ones just released, so had very nice discounts on them.... The guy I spoke to said Haswell based ProBooks were 6-8 weeks away... FYI.

@LiamC - I recommended LO, but Dad was insistent on Office... His money, not mine really...

 

[Tannin]

I started this thread with quite a lot to say and by the time I got down to here I had absolutely nothing left to add to this thread 'cause Merc's first post covered the lot!

Can't say I care for ASUS much. Care for HP even less, though I have seen some quite solid-seeming HP corporate notebooks lately. Good luck with them!

 

[Mercutio]

I think HP Probooks are a lot like Dell Vostros or Thinkpad Edges. They're essentially the same thing as Pavilions but they get real support. I'm not super impressed with them, but they're the cheapest business notebooks out there and that by itself has value.

 

[Tannin]

My wholesaler claims to have, in stock, a few dozen Thinkpad T530s with 500GB, the middling screen (1600x 900), and a mid-range i7 processor for under a grand. So I ordered three of them. Order seems to be stuck in never-never land. I suspect that they don't want to sell them to me after all.

 

[Tannin]

They arrived! No idea why they were so cheap. These are T530s with a mid-range CPU (yes it's an i7 but only a 3520M which is apparently Ivy Bridge and not as nice as the newest ones) and a 1600 x 900 screen - not as good a screen quality as I'd like, but much better than a lot of so-called high-end T Series Thinkpads have been lumbered with over the years. Why, why why do Lenovo insist on having such cheaparse screens on such otherwise outstanding laptops? I'll never figure that one out!) Anyway, best screen I've seen on a Thinkpad for quite a while. 500GB Toshiba hard drive (which, for my own machine I've swapped out for a 750GB Seagate hybrid unit); 4GB RAM. (Guess I'll put 16GB in mine. Might as well just do it straight away and forget about it, I guess.)

The PSU remains the same as the T400 and T500 generation (which is great!) but the damn docking stations will all have to be replaced. Again! I didn't really want a 15 inch notebook - I prefer the 14 inch models for myself - but at the price I can put up with that small bit of extra size and power consumption. Oh, and a 9-cell battery as standard. Nice! 4 USB ports (about time!), 2 of them USB 3. DVD can be replaced (as always) with a second hard drive in a caddy. Win 7 Pro with the units, which can stay on except for mine which I've already upgraded to Win 8 Pro. (I had the sense to buy that in advance, while the super-cheap $50 price was still going.) Three year warranty too.

All in all, very tidy machines and a very nice price. Typically, you'd expect to see these at close to $2000 retail: at $1300-odd I'm happy.

Now I suppose you will all line up to tell me what's wrong with them and why I should have got something else. That's OK, I'll read with interest - and keep my wallet firmly in my pocket.

 

[ddrueding]

Nice call Tannin. Only thing different from my latest is to put an SSD in the laptop and a big disk in the expansion bay. Actually, the ultrabay usually contains a battery, but the drive is there if I need it.

 

[Mercutio]

It's a T-series, so you can stick an mSATA drive in and then have your internal 2.5" and ultrabay for other purposes. It's quite nice, though power use with two installed 2.5" drives is a bit higher than I'd like.

 

[Tannin]

Cheers lads. I had to look mSATA up, although I vaguely knew that there was an extra slot you could put some sort of SSD into - must have read that on the Thinkpad forums somewhere. The mSATA drives look horribly expensive and much too small for me. A quick look at a wholesaler gives me the biggest one they have at about $300 for 240GB - "Intel SSD 525 Series 240GB 3.6mm mSATA 6Gb/s" is their descripton. Doubtless there are others, I haven't looked yet. Can I run one of those and two real hard drives? One plus a drive would be too small. (Currently I have 2 x 750GB Seagate hybrid drives in the T400; for the T530 I used another 750GB Seagate as a boot drive 'cause it's what I had in stock and will add a 1TB one into the Ultrabay.)

 

[ddrueding]

You can boot the mSATA and have a pair of HDDs. As Merc said, it will draw considerable power.

 

[Mercutio]

My T420 has a pair of 1TB drives and a 240GB mSATA drive. Having the extra spinning drive can cost me as much as an hour of battery life, so when I know I'm going to be untethered for a while I usually pop the ultrabay drive for an unpopulated blank.

 

[timwhit]

Can you have it spin down the mechanical drives when they aren't in use?

 

[Mercutio]

Not that I've found. Even if I disable the ports in firmware, the drives still spin when the laptop is on.

 

[time]

Tannin: Crucial is just as reliable and only $232 for 256GB. However, for a boot drive, the 128GB version for $135 is probably more what you're looking for.

HTH.

 

[LunarMist]

Not that I've found. Even if I disable the ports in firmware, the drives still spin when the laptop is on.

You are going about this the wrong way. Move the drives to the state of solid.

 

[Tannin]

Cheers all. I'll leave the SSD go for the time being. I'm running Seagate hybrid drives so I get better than mechanical drive performance already. I'll revisit the SSD theory a few years down the track when I'm no longer happy with the performance I'm getting.

Right now, I'm mainly just looking forward to having more than 4GB of RAM. (I've been trialling Windows 8 Pro 64 + Classic Shell + Object Dock + Explorer++ on a desktop for a while and I'm ready to go live on it now for this, my main system, which has been running 32-bit XP since they released Service Pack 2, which would be getting on for 10 years ago.)

 

[Mercutio]

I have an Asus Zenbook Prime in my office for the time being and I have to say it's a ridiculously nice machine. I'm told it was only about $700, but it has a 1.7GHz i5, 4GB RAM, a 128GB SSD, 1920x1080 IPS screen and weighs about 1kg. It has a decent chiclet-style keyboard and a huge touchpad. It doesn't have an Ethernet port (boo) but Asus threw a USB3 to Gigabit adapter in the box. For what's basically an Air ripoff, there's nothing to complain about except possibly the silly wall wart it uses. It has a mini-displayport instead of a more consumer-friendly HDMI, but so do the Thinkpads and Elitepads I've purchased lately.

This particular machine has a Windows 8 COA that was pre-downgraded to Windows 7 and the crapware load was fairly minimal: Acrobat Reader, Bing Toolbar, the 30-days-of-Office 2010 trial and 90 days of Trend AV. I removed a couple Asus-branded applications on general principle but none of them were impacting start time. I was expecting 90 minutes of work reloading the machine and I'm pleasantly surprised that I just needed to run Decrapifier and a Ninite executable to whip it in to fit condition to be delivered.

Acer's ultrabooks have felt a lot more cheap in terms of build quality and software load. This thing was not bad at all.

 

[Howell]

I saw an ad for one of those recently that cause me to pause. It does really look nice.

I like the display port because the right $10 dongle will get you VGA VDI or HDMI. And I think display port is license free.

 

[Stereodude]

I like the display port because the right $10 dongle will get you VGA VDI or HDMI. And I think display port is license free.

I dislike it because they needlessly created another standard where none was needed because they didn't want to pay the license fee for HDMI/DVI.

 

[Chewy509]

You do realize there are some advantages of DP over HDMI?
eg, native support for 4K monitors @60Hz with 30bit colour (10bit per colour channel), double the bandwidth (~20Gbps vs ~10Gbps) and support for multiple streams/monitors on a single cable?

 

[Howell]

I dislike it because they needlessly created another standard where none was needed because they didn't want to pay the license fee for HDMI/DVI.

Needless except for all the needs met you mean?

 

[Mercutio]

I think it's more a case that HDMI could have been and probably will be updated to accommodate those things at some point in the future. I *have* had people bitch at me because they forgot the $10 adapter on a day they needed to plug in a projector and I wish there were only one common port just for the sake of convenience.

 

[Stereodude]

You do realize there are some advantages of DP over HDMI?
eg, native support for 4K monitors @60Hz with 30bit colour (10bit per colour channel), double the bandwidth (~20Gbps vs ~10Gbps) and support for multiple streams/monitors on a single cable?

Whoopteedoo... You're comparing the 1.2 spec to whatever HDMI flavor they're up to. I'm talking about the 1.0 spec vs. what DVI/HDMI had at the time. It offered nothing noteworthy other than an equivalent digital connection without the relatively minor royalty.

Needless except for all the needs met you mean?

No, I meant exactly what I wrote. What wasn't clear?

 

[Stereodude]

... and I wish there were only one common port just for the sake of convenience.

Well, you can thank Dell and Genesis for the pointless split in the marketplace.

 

[LunarMist]

Yes, all the different connections are truly awful.
For example, my home desktops have DVI, one of my laptops has HMDI and the other one (same model) has a standard DisplayPort. Meanwhile the new work Ultrabork has a mini DisplayPort from what I understand. They provide a dongle for VGA because every conference room in America still has that connector, even if the display is a 64" panel.
Now, how the bleep do I use all of these devices on a KVM?

And of course don't even get me started on the Thunderbowel video...

 

[Handruin]

I dislike it because they needlessly created another standard where none was needed because they didn't want to pay the license fee for HDMI/DVI.

It wasn't needless and I do see advantages with the actual cable connection design. I like that my DP cables can't simply pull out of the back where as HDMI can easily be pulled out. Also, competition is good in the sense that we as consumers don't have to wait until HDMI decides to rev a spec and increase a license fee to help pay for it. If DP wants to jump ahead in terms of revising their cables and help drive use to a connection that can benefit the consumers sooner, I'm for it.

 

[Stereodude]

Umm... DVI doesn't pull out. I don't understand why everyone compares DP to HDMI instead of DVI.

 

[LunarMist]

Umm... DVI doesn't pull out. I don't understand why everyone compares DP to HDMI instead of DVI.

I'd rather that an accidentally yanked cord pulls out than breaks something.
Laptops are especially vulnerable to accidents.

 

[Handruin]

Umm... DVI doesn't pull out. I don't understand why everyone compares DP to HDMI instead of DVI.

DVI is bulky and annoying. It also has several formats and can be limiting in resolution. I view DP as an improvement to DVI with respect to the connector and also increased bandwidth in future revisions. Are there newer revisions of DVI? I feel like it's a dead end connector at this point. I compare DP to HDMI because both allow audio. DVI as far as I'm aware doesn't allow audio.

 

[Chewy509]

According to VESA (to standards body), DisplayPort supersedes/replaces DVI.

PS. For those are not aware DisplayPort is defined by VESA, but HDMI is defined by a loose collection of companies... One of the reasons for HDMI was HDCP and audio as default and not as optional implementation extra.