My Older Sister Needs a Good Laptop (she get's discounts on Lenovo and Dell from her company)

Toonation

Honorable
Apr 28, 2013
2
0
10,510
She told me she wants something that dose YouTube, note taking, just everyday stuff like that but is fast and has a 4+ hour battery life. She also wants it to last a long time and have a descent quality because her other laptop only lasted 2-3yrs. Oh and by the way she will be using it for college because her company is paying for her Masters so it'll probably be moved around a lot.

I was on the Lenovo website and was thinking of recommending her the Y510p even though it is gaming i thought it may be useful because it actually has a Graphics card in it and everything is not running on the processor so it will be fast and snappy for everyday applications in 3 years.

I want to see opinions of everyone else she told me her budget is 500-2000 dollars however if she can get what she wants for a cheap price she can't complain.
 

Nathan Willis

Estimable
Mar 15, 2014
77
0
4,610
Go with Lenovo. Dell is junk.

Lenovo is the best laptop brand.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/lenovo-brand-rating-2014

Dell is no good!

http://blog.laptopmag.com/dell-brand-rating-2014

Pick the ThinkPad line. They have some really tough laptops.
The ThinkPad Edge series would be great!
I have used Lenovo for a long time without a problem.
They are extremely fast. Get a Lenovo ThinkPad.

The X1 carbon is very good. ($1000+)

The Edge series are very good especially for the price tag! ($400+)

lenovo_logo.jpg

 

Natos

Estimable
Mar 2, 2014
8
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4,520
Ok... Could you please supply some more info? Such as what she wants in a laptop, what she will be doing with the laptop, price limit, etc.

In my experience, Dell makes laptops that work for a month and then overheat/crash/fail in some other way. My school learned the hard way and went through 3 sets of Dell laptops in a year before ditching Dell and going Lenovo/ASUS.

Lenovo is a bit pricey... that is unless she is willing to go low power, small screen. In that area, Lenovo excels and has the price edge.

If Lenovo just doesn't cut it, Toshiba makes amazing laptops, and Sony makes some low-cost VAIOs that last the average person more than a day on a full charge. ASUS makes tablet/laptops and touchscreen laptops that run fast and have good batteries, whether they are replaceable or not. Anyway, you have good choice.

That laptop seems like a gaming laptop. Is that what she is looking for? That Internal Graphics card is better than the one in my computer!
 

Natos

Estimable
Mar 2, 2014
8
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4,520


Nathan,
I have a Toshiba Laptop that has been of good service to me for 2 years now. It's my 2nd Toshiba laptop, and both worked VERY WELL. It may just be me, but I had a Toshiba for 6 Years, way outlasting my friend's HP.

What experience do you have with Toshiba that mae you not like them?
 

Nathan Willis

Estimable
Mar 15, 2014
77
0
4,610
HP is not any good. Well for one thing Toshiba is on the bottom of the list for quality.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/toshiba-brand-rating-2014

Toshiba was good about 2 years ago, but they have gone down hill very fast.

Every Toshiba I have ever used it full of junk useless software and they are very slow and sluggish.
Most people do not notice is because they get used to it.
The build quality of Toshiba is also worthless.
 


If you read the review, nothing about it indicates that Dell laptops are no good. Lenovo is #2 with a score of 80. Dell is #5 with a score of 75. That's out of 100 so a 5 point difference does not make one laptop good and the other bad.

I have owned 3 laptops. The 1st is the ThinkPad T40 way back when IBM still owned the ThinkPad line and it still works to this day; but of course it is underpowered for today's apps. My 2nd laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad Y470 initially I liked it but it runs hot like all other IdeaPads and many laptops out there today. Under stress it hits 94c and once it hit 99c and begin throttling. There was a lot of complaints about the IdeaPad running hot. I even called tech support about and they were like, "yeah, that's normal". After about 18 months the nVidia GT 550m failed. So much for playing games on it.

My 3rd laptop was going to be the Lenovo ThinkPad T530. I bought it for a decent price with plenty of options. I received it fairly quickly, but when I checked it out it was missing around $400 - $500 worth of options that I paid for. What I received was little more than the base model. Lenovo was willing to send a replacement with the correct specs, but I opted to simply get a refund. At that point Intel current generation Haswell CPU was going to be release in a couple of months so I decided to wait. The quality of the ThinkPad T530 was what I expected; solidly built and very little bloatware. The consumer oriented IdeaPad had a lot of bloatware.

My 3rd laptop ultimately is the Dell Latitude 3540 which I bought on a whim since I saw a refurbished model for about $500; normally about $900 for a new one at the time. Solidly built and runs decently cool when stressed at 70c instead of 95c for my IdeaPad. The only thing lack would be there is no backlit keyboard. Dell does not offer one for this particular model. I was originally looking for a high end quad core i7 laptop, but for almost $500 I couldn't pass up the Dell since it had most of the other features I was looking for in a $1,000+ laptop. Boots up fairly quickly too at about 10 seconds considering there is no SSD or SSD cache.
 


Since she is using it for study purposes you want a laptop with 1920x1080 resolution. Do not settle for crappy 1366x768 resolution. It's too low to see a lot of information on the screen at once especially when you want to have two documents opened side by side so that you can do some cross referencing. Don't get a laptop with a graphics card id your sister is not going to use it for anything. It's like paying for something that you will never use, plus it can decrease battery a bit even though it is in standby mode.

If your sister is going to be travel around, especially if it is international, the go for a ThinkPad laptop since they come standard with a 1 year global warranty. Not sure if Dell offer the same on their business oriented laptops like the Latitude 3000 series. The ThinkPad L series is budget oriented business laptop that may suit your sister's needs. The only thing lacking is that there is no option for a backlit keyboard. That is only available for on the premium T, X and W models.
 

Natos

Estimable
Mar 2, 2014
8
0
4,520


For YouTube? What you are looking at is way too powerful. Intel Ultrabooks without dedicated graphics will work fine for her usage.

You say that she says she wants it to last for 3+ Years? ASUS and many others make Ultrabooks that last for 5+ Years and are still snappy. There is this ridiculous myth going around that a laptop has a maximum lifetime of 3 Years. THIS MYTH IS NOT TRUE! My Cousin ran AutoCAD on his computer for 6 Years straight with close to no problems. The only reason that he upgraded is because his company was migrating to the more power-hungry Revit!

Really, everybody underestimates the extreme power of an Ultrabook's internal graphics. Intel HD Graphics 4600 or 5000 are really powerful!
 

budder

Estimable
May 4, 2014
26
0
4,590
I would recommend lenovo because, as of right now, they have a massive summer sale. The lenovo y40 is only $800, which is a steal. For long term usage, and with no gaming need, ultrabooks are the way to go. She should want an SSD for sure, and probably a fourth gen i5, as this would get great battery life. For the money of a 510p, she could also either get something with really high build quality, or a touch screen, or a higher than 1080p display. I do agree that as a general rule lenovo has higher quality products than dell of toshiba, but both of these other brands have "premium" subbrands that would work just fine (I think dell's is specter, but that might be hp). Asus is also known for their high quality.

If you want to get something a little nicer a macbook could work too.

NOTE: DO NOT GET A GRAPHICS CARD (unless you are playing games or using software designed for one, like photoshop). it is false to say that a graphics card will make everyday applications faster. The only reason to get one is for console quality video games, or workshop style applications