Laptop time?

[sedrosken]

Consumer notebooks are hard. My Ideapad 1s came from visiting a Walmart and a Best Buy to see what's acceptable at less than $350, because so very often, that's as much as people are willing to spend. I have a prejudice against 17" models and their breaky, breaky screens, and the moment I bring up anything more than $600, I know I'm probably talking to a wall unless the customer wants a gaming notebook... which are also terrible.

I usually steer people toward Asus Vivobooks as a mainstream option. I don't trust Asus service at all ever, but I've never seen a BAD Asus notebook, either. They all have good screens and good input and solid construction. At around $600, it's possible to buy something with a Strix Point APU and 16GB RAM and that's a very good place to be if it's at all within your budget.

I'm not buying her anything consumer-ish, to be honest. I want it to last her and she's not terribly good about babying electronics, so I'm very sure if I get her another consumer grade laptop it'll be broken in a year or two.

I'm okay with it being a bit slower than strictly optimal (trying to swing a 7840U, but I'll settle for a 7540U if I have to) if it means I won't be right back in this spot Christmas 2027.

 

[sedrosken]

I'm kind of playing with the idea of grabbing a 7840U machine for myself before things get utterly ridiculous, and Walmart even had a Zenbook with an 8840HS and 16/512 for an actually fairly reasonable $599 when I happened to be in for something else yesterday. I want the superior build quality of an EliteBook but I'm tempted to buy something where I'm not the warranty.

I looked up a teardown of the Zenbook and I'm disappointed that the RAM's soldered, so I'm not really sold on it, but its screen is really nice. For a new laptop I really want 32GB of RAM. I'm making 16 work right now, and it being soldered means it runs very quick, but I'm just not sold on the longterm viability of a 16GB machine where it's sharing with the iGP and I'm running newer, more intensive games that can easily need 16GB of RAM alone, much less with VRAM.

If I hadn't just bought this Surface Laptop Go 2 a couple months ago it'd be a much easier sell to my sense of reason, though... and if the Surface wasn't a completely competent machine in its own right for what I actually do day-to-day. I really don't need it. The Surface is compact for traveling, and my Precision is still plenty capable of handling actual performance needs.

But I will say the 7840U EliteBook I prepped for my sister (I did end up getting it, but it didn't get to her until after christmas) was the first time I've had hands on a machine I was giving to someone else and I was sorely tempted to keep it. That thing was FAST. It was outright faster than my desktop with the 5700X in general use and put simply, it can run my entire library with no issues...