New Laptop time, Which Brand Would You choose?

[Chunkford]

Yes, plus a dock to drive two giant 4K monitors.

Can that be done properly. Been reading it will only do it @ 30ghz not 60

[DrCool]

Have a Dell Latitude E7470 here at the office. Stays docked most of the time but is nice and light to carry around. I don't find it the most comfortable to use while sitting on the couch or at odd angles. The front edge seems a bit sharp and it kind of digs into the heels of my hand. But when it is on the desk or a table or something it is great.

[Leona]

Wow thanks guys, so it looks like I will tentatively try Dell again then. The reliability report in 2015 is probably right if judging it from 3 year previous Toshiba's used to be the best in my opinion but the last one I bought 2 years ago, like I say the hinges are killing it and am having some weird behaviour that normally comes a few months before the laptop fails. When I bought this I asked the guy which laptops are brought back the least and he said the Lenovo, which is what made me consider it but they didn't have anything with my requirements at the time. However, I have heard that they have put spyware on their systems since then so I though they may be going down hill. As for the hinge fail maybe they are using the same casing guys as Toshiba.

The ones in my current budget are the Inspiron range, the XPS is double my budget but it does have 32 rather than 16 Gig of ram which makes me drool like Homer over a beer, although I think this will only make a real difference in gaming and when using after effects which is only occasionally for me. So I don't know whether this is worth over double what I would be paying for the inspiron which also has 4GiG on the graphics card rather than 2. I got burn't last round as I bought an all singing all dancing custom build from PC specialist that was a piece of crap and their customer service reps were even worse. So I was a bit nervous on this round especially being over in SA. Your input has been really helpful.

http://www.jarir.com/sa-en/computers-peripherals/laptops/dell-inspiron-15-7566-laptops-467925.html

Yes decision made I think I will go for the Inspiron, not sure if the XPS is worth the budget this time. Thanks guys. It would be interesting to drag up this thread in the future when they all start failing so we can compare on the next round.

[jetboy]

Can that be done properly. Been reading it will only do it @ 30ghz not 60

Honestly? Never tried it. The Dell dock that was supposed to come out shortly after the latest XPS range got pulled, so it looks like folk are trying all sorts of different methods to try and get two 4K monitors at 60Hz, with varying success. All I can say is that it was part of the Dell sales pitch at the time.

[bill]

Lenovo - Beware! Lenovo Caught (3rd Time) Pre-Installing Spyware on its Laptops https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html

I am not much of a laptop user. The last one I had was a Dell Inspiron 8200 which lasted forever.

If I ever get another I've got my eyes on one from Purism. They cost more, but I appreciate the work they do to decouple the hardware from software that can surreptitiously spy on you.

[Rooftop]

Sort of related: It's 2016. Isn't it time we had a serious alternative to Windows?   I don't ask much from an operating system:

• Launch a browser
• look after my files
• run excel quickly
• run a few weird java tools
• don't be a dick about updates

All the features they keep adding, wouldn't cracking those be fairly simple?   
Oddly ChromeOS is about the closest.  If the offline "docs" experience was better I could be tempted away.  Maybe time to try something nix based again and see if the spreadsheet solutions have got any better

[Leona]

James is a big nix fan and also a excel wiz and has mentioned in the past that unfortunately it is the main downfall, nothing quite matches up to microsoft excel for more complex needs.

[Rooftop]

Hard drive has just failed on my brand new XPS.  Less than 12 hours use.  Pissed off after putting that amount of time setting up and transferring stuff. 

[Brad]

> hard drive

Ouch. 

[Rooftop]

I'm not convinced it is the drive.  I think something wacky is going on with Windows.  Dell support are being very good.  They've been remoted in for about 90 minutes already.  Not sure we are getting anywhere though

[jetboy]

If it's a Samsung PM951 NVMe SSD then the driver choice is critical. Mine blue screened initially with the Samsung driver (installed as part of a clean install). The Windows update driver has been fine.

[Rooftop]

Jury is still out on the hardware,  but I can't knock the effort of support.
Spent nearly six hours between phone and remote support today.  Hopefully sorted now,  but lots of setup to do over again.

[ergophobe]

Last time I bought a laptop, I got an HP and the drive failed twice in 90days, which is the return period at Costco. I gave it back and got an Asus that has been my very good friend for a few years now.

Point being... if it fails in two weeks, that's a bad since for the future.

[Leona]

Ouch that is terrible! Did you manage to get it fixed? Was it the hardware? A friend bought an all singing all dancing gaming Dell a few years ago, spent £3K on it. Everything failed within the first year (he is a big gamer), he got the extended warranty so ended up with pretty much a brand new computer after a year but it was worrying that they had supped it up so much that the system couldn't handle its own specs.

HP are terrible, I had one that the inside build was so badly constructed that it overheated and killed the motherboard. Another one did exactly the same for a friend a couple of months after. This was a few years ago but after having a printer that I don't use too often fail within 8 months needing new print heads (which printers are what they are known for, they are the industry leaders regarding innovation of  commercial printers I believe) I didn't trust them to improve on their laptops so they weren't even a consideration.

I ended up buying the Dell Inspiron gaming laptop linked above. It has the capacity to increase the RAM to 32GB. A couple of days in and so far so good. However, the high resolution screen is causing me issues. My eyesight can't cope with the small text so I have spent half of the time configuring text, zooms on programs, brightness etc. Still feeling sick after a few hours use, hoping it is a bug and not the laptop but the jury is out on that. If it continues to make me sick then I may have to buy another with a less painful resolution for day to day (if they exist).

I was worried about moving to windows 10, a few niggling issues with that but after a move from 8.1 it isn't quite as painful as I had anticipated. James is as scathing as always though being a Linux boy. He is tempted to still try the Asus on his next one so that is encouraging ergophobe.

[ukgimp]

Win 10 is fine