Laptop Recommendations for 2019
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I find a lot of keyboards bury those arrow keys around the right shift key, which is annoying. I either up arrow to gt the right shift or shift over and over, unable to move up.
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Dell XPS 13 if you want ultimate light weight and portability.... XPS 15 if you spend a ton of time at it and need the bigger screen.
I drive an external 4K display from my XPS 13. It rocks, and has for 3 years now. (I recently opened it up and replaced the battery, and it is like new.)
The only other laptop up to scratch, in my book, is the Microsoft Surface laptop. But if I was shopping today I would just get an XPS 13.
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Dell XPS is very good
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I have only had budget laptops with upgraded parts (such as an upgraded drive).
My HP Envy was problematic from day 1. Had a stuck pixel. Got it returned under warranty before getting too attached and things were better with the new one until it stopped detecting it was charging. It would charge, but think it was not charging. Which meant that BIOS updates would fail and I couldn't have different power settings for battery vs plugged in. Again, fixed under warranty. Then once out of warranty it had issues with the brightness after a reboot. SOMETIMES 100% brightness was as bright as it would go, other times 100% brightness was screen off and I needed to turn it down to 0% brightness to get max brightness. Now it was out of warranty, so I just kept it at a nice 50% brightness most of the time.
I should note, I paid $350 for this laptop and it was a full touchscreen laptop I got 6 years ago and it still works without any major problems, just minor annoyances and has some performance issues.
I upgraded from that to a CHUWI (China brand) laptop with a 2K resolution screen. VERY nice screen on the laptop and works quite well. 2 years after having it, the battery started swelling, but it was simple and cheap to replace. The bad side of that laptop - 64 GB NVME for the internal disk, BUT it had an M.2 slot, so I bought a 256 GB drive for that and problem solved. Laptop price here was also $350 AFTER adding in the 256 GB drive.
I am definitely a budget laptop person. I don't play a lot of modern games on it; do play some of the classics like space quest and police quest and hero's quest and kings quest (notice a theme?) and dungeon keeper and wing commander and doom, and I use it for presentations. If I need a SQL instance, I'd much rather do it in Azure so I don't have windows updates hammering my disk/CPU and screwing up the timing on my demos. I had run a presentation a few years back on indexes and was showing how they could improve your SELECT performance only to have windows defender start an automated scan in the middle of the demo making it LOOK like the index caused a huge performance hit. Now that is my fault for not configuring things properly before the demo, but still irritated me. Plus if I run some high CPU queries on the database, I would prefer if they didn't melt my laptop.
I also buy budget laptops because I have no real laptop budget. My job doesn't require me to have a laptop, my hobbies don't require a powerful laptop, and you don't really need a powerful laptop to show a PowerPoint slide and RDP/SSMS to an Azure box.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system. -
I have no keyboard issues - shift is 3 keys wide and numbers are not directly above qwerty - , but throughout my research in replacing my own current P51 I found that below 14.4" size of the laptop you get some sort of skewed keyboard almost guaranteed at least in the Lenovo lineup.
So there is either the option to carry an external keyboard around for some of us - which might end up being bigger than the 13" laptop in your travelling case - or don't do much coding / larger texts while mobile which both at times seems impractical to me. The P73 is nice but too big and heavy for me, 5.5 lbs for the P51 is still doable.
If I wouldn't want 64+GB of RAM I'd still probably go with the P53s against the P43s, for a few grams more in weight you get 1" more mobile screen estate and you can still use up to 48 GB of RAM, if battery life is of concern then the 4k Display Option should be left out.
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I'm currently using an HP ZBook 15 G5. I tend to work mostly from my desk but need mobility for meetings, demos, presentations, conferences and logging in from home. So if you want the power of a desktop inside of a laptop it definately checks that box. However, if you are looking for something lightweight than it's definately not the right choice. With great power comes with tired arms! =)
SELECT quote FROM brain WHERE original = 1
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I only buy new hardware every 8 years or so. When I do, I tend to go with something that's going to last quite a while. This time, it wasn't just a laptop... I think of it as more like a "portable desktop" and I bought it because I don't do much travelling and when I do, it's not arduous.
I bought a Dell Alienware 17R (weighs about 10 pounds) with a 6 core (thread to 12) I7 1870U (iirc) (2.2GHZ to 4.2GHZ), 2TB NVME SSD (overprovisioned the hell out of that), 1TB HDD, 32GB RAM, and enough ports (including but not limited to ThunderBolt, specialized display port, USB 3C, and a couple of power "regular" USB 3-x, HDMI, etc) to keep up for a couple of years. It also has Windows 10 Pro and a couple of very high performance fans that will give a 20 inch box fan a run for it's money.
It IS a heavy beast so I don't recommend it for frequent travel. Like I said, I bought it as more of a portable desktop box and, so far, I freakin' love it.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
This one popped up in my email this morning. Not totally sold on the colour though.
https://www.asus.com/Laptops/ASUS-ZenBook-Edition-30-UX334FL/Features/
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface
- Jeff Moden wrote:
I only buy new hardware every 8 years or so. When I do, I tend to go with something that's going to last quite a while. This time, it wasn't just a laptop... I think of it as more like a "portable desktop" and I bought it because I don't do much travelling and when I do, it's not arduous.
I bought a Dell Alienware 17R (weighs about 10 pounds) with a 6 core (thread to 12) I7 1870U (iirc) (2.2GHZ to 4.2GHZ), 2TB NVME SSD (overprovisioned the hell out of that), 1TB HDD, 32GB RAM, and enough ports (including but not limited to ThunderBolt, specialized display port, USB 3C, and a couple of power "regular" USB 3-x, HDMI, etc) to keep up for a couple of years. It also has Windows 10 Pro and a couple of very high performance fans that will give a 20 inch box fan a run for it's money.
It IS a heavy beast so I don't recommend it for frequent travel. Like I said, I bought it as more of a portable desktop box and, so far, I freakin' love it.
Very similar to my HP ZBook 15 G5...main difference is my HP came with a 500MB NVM SSD and 2TB HDD. I'm thrilled with it so far. I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice travel friendly for more horsepower. 🙂
EDIT: I also wanted to mention that having a full size keyboard with a seperate number pad makes such a huge diffierence in comfort and convenience.
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just out of interest.... does anyone miss having a dvd drive in their laptop?
I'm travelling now, and I have a Netflix subscription, but no signal - I used to take a few DVDs with me when working away on my own
MVDBA
- MVDBA (Mike Vessey) wrote:
just out of interest.... does anyone miss having a dvd drive in their laptop?
I'm travelling now, and I have a Netflix subscription, but no signal - I used to take a few DVDs with me when working away on my own
I haven't had one of those in quite a while. You can download Netflix shows and watch them offline. Worse case scenario, just buy an external drive.
SELECT quote FROM brain WHERE original = 1
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Jeff,
I bought my Alienware 17 back in 2014, and lately (past 2 months) it's gotten a little unstable, I think it's time for a hardware refresh but up until now it's been pretty great... I liked how easy it was to replace the hard drives with SSD's (mine came with standard HDD's back in 2014).
Can't decide between another Alienware or the MSI laptop. and that sucker is heavy! but the times I've needed to take it with me, it's worked out ok.
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ha - corporate policy, i'm not allowed to plug in any usb device unless it's encrypted or approved and purchased by the network team... even my USB stick containing keys and certificates for backup decryption is AES256 encrypted and monitored
likewise I think they would look down on me for storing movies on my laptop.
back in the old days we used to shove blu-tack into the usb ports to stop people using them... now it's all got high tech 🙂
MVDBA
- MVDBA (Mike Vessey) wrote:
just out of interest.... does anyone miss having a dvd drive in their laptop?
I'm travelling now, and I have a Netflix subscription, but no signal - I used to take a few DVDs with me when working away on my own
Yes. Absolutely. And so much so that I bought one of those USB R/W DVDs. They're something extra to carry and remember to take but they're pretty lightweight and surprisingly fast if you have USB 3 ports on your laptop. That's a part of the reason why I went with the Alienware laptop... it's got all types of ports available.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) - sqlman63 wrote:
Jeff,
I bought my Alienware 17 back in 2014, and lately (past 2 months) it's gotten a little unstable, I think it's time for a hardware refresh but up until now it's been pretty great... I liked how easy it was to replace the hard drives with SSD's (mine came with standard HDD's back in 2014).
Can't decide between another Alienware or the MSI laptop. and that sucker is heavy! but the times I've needed to take it with me, it's worked out ok.
MSI was my other choice but, even on NewEgg, they wanted close to $5K for what I have in the AlienWare for a little over $2K. I probably could have done better by buying a stripped down box and then adding my own hardware but I've done that with every box I've ever bought since the mid '80s and wanted to treat myself for once. Simplifies the warranty, as well.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)
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