[CONSUMER ADVICE] Laptop Buying

i just bought the zenbook UX31E

my eee pc has been pretty great. i can type on it and my battery life is 8+, it's just what i need given that i carry it by bike. biggest problem is video can choke it pretty easily ime.

damn this thing is fast

this thing == ilx obv

i need a new one to replace my '09 Compaq Presario

so, roughly equivalent

low to mid $, will stream video (mostly live baseball)

i got a couple of these for the office recently after doing some scouring and i've been impressed
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BJLGJ9H

is that low to mid $$$, wouldve thought that a v decent spec

$700 which I guess is mid given that you can buy a MacBook or a Dell for 1500 easily. I have the i5 version of the above and it was nearly £600 with a big anniversary discount about 1.5 years ago.

You should be able to go quite a lot cheaper than that though, you don't need an i7 and ssd to watch YouTube.

ya think it's OK to buy something "certified refurbished"?

https://www.amazon.com/Elitebook-840-LED-backlit-Professional-Refurbished/dp/B07FSRST8M/

I do it at work all the time, but only if the seller is Amazon themselves or Amazon Warehouse. They will accept returns without much fuss. Third-party sellers on Amazon Marketplace you have no idea if they will honor a returns policy or (more frequently) they'll be too incompetent/indifferent to do it correctly.

Wellll, in the last 90 days, the distributor above has 40/40 positive ratings.

(I don't even know how to search for similar products sold by Amazon.)

They're probably fine, the order is fulfilled by Amazon so that means Amazon will process the returns. Looks like back in May they shipped out a bunch of defective systems, but Amazon took the returns.

thanks

Is it better to wait till Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Holiday as opposed to getting a new laptop right now? QOL for my 8-year-old laptop is awful.

how are the prices on what you're looking for? i bought my current laptop after nearly ten years of using the previous one and prices had dropped so much in that time for what i wanted (nothing special or high-end).

I'm eying something higher end, lord knows why since I'm probably going to just stream on it.

What's a good laptop just for web browsing/video streaming/ms office? I've got a mac, but my wife's laptop is dying and she's not terribly picky. I don't know anything about non-mac laptops though, and there appear to be a billion options.

I'd probably just get a Microsoft Surface with a keyboard stand for anyone who just wanted typing and web in 2018.

no idea if it's good but it's a choice you won't have to spend that much time thinking about!

that said there's apparently six different ones of them now so even that's a drag

The surface keyboard is the worst and completely unusable without enough table space. If you career about using it on a plane or on you lap, don't buy one.

gonna choose to believe career was not an autocorrect there

didn't even occur to me that it was not the word intended

double unintendre

probably will mostly be used to work from home occasionally but yeah probably actually for lap use apart from that.

What's a good laptop just for web browsing/video streaming/ms office? I've got a mac, but my wife's laptop is dying and she's not terribly picky. I don't know anything about non-mac laptops though, and there appear to be a billion options.

I recently bought a used Chromebook for about 60 euros and use it for surfing/streaming/writing

it's lightweight, has good battery time, basically great value for money (I use Google Docs for writing, if you have Office 365 or whatever the cloud Office is called, it should work fine too)

If one has a laptop with a keyboard that's fucked up -- ie, some keys don't produce the characters they're supposed to! -- can one download a fix, or have to box up the thing and ship it back to the fuckups? Asking for a friend. :/

nb: what I have in REALITY (ie what shows up on the screen) is a QWERTZ keyboard like this, mislabeled as a standard US keyboard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTZ#/media/File:KB_Germany.svg

try rebooting and moving to austria

Is it new enough to be on warranty? If so, get it replaced! It is unlikely that yours was the only fuck-up, so they are already fielding complaints and replacing yours would be just S.O.P.

If it is approaching its expiration date but money is too tight to buy a replacement, it might be worth looking for a keyboard remapping utility program. I know such programs used to exist, ages ago. There are fans of non-standard keyboard layouts, like the Dvorak keyboard, so such programs may still be floating around out there. This might provide a relatively cheap workaround, but only if all the required characters can be produced by pressing a key somewhere on the keyboard; it could not magically produce characters all on its own.

Even then, I won't guarantee success.

I am on a 90-day warranty, so i should be able to get it replaced.

Is it definitely the keyboard? I've definitely been on Windows machines before where the language got switched somewhere in Control Panel (or, obnoxiously, through obscure keyboard combinations which can be hit accidentally) so that it was interpreting input as German, or Chinese.

well, i hit the keys and different characters come up. i don't know how to begin to determine what causes it. how would i unfuck the control panel?

this is what i hate about this century. i never wanted to own a car because you have to be an amateur mechanic! now i have to be an amateur geek.

give this kind of thing a try

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/258824/how-to-change-your-keyboard-layout

will do

this thing has Windows 10

similar, i think https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/4027670/windows-10-add-and-switch-input-and-display-language-preferences

thx

yeah, def sounds like settings

wishin & hopin

so it's kinda funny, right next to date/time at the bottom it sais "ENG LB", which stood for English/Luxembourgish keyboard. I have clicked and changed it to "ENG US".

Thanks for everyone who pointed out the obvious, lob 'senile uncle' jokes at me.

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop this year and, for the first time a non-macbook

I had the 2014 Air which was great, but has gradually ground down over the last few months and now no longer turns on. I have a 2017 Pro from work, and Ive never liked it. Bad keyboard, and would hang sometimes, has never felt particularly solid. That had an incident and is now also dead, anyway

With both being dead I've had to buy an emergency laptop so i could actually work. Got the cheapest one in the shop, a €250 Lenovo Ideapad. 4gb RAM and runs like a dog (on windows), awful. I put Linux on it, and its actually kind of not that bad. I still have to reboot it as it does hang, so not a good longer term solution. its bulky and heavy but usable for right now

Going to need a proper replacement though, and looking at macbook prices idk I can justify it! Was looking at the Asus Zenbook as a possibility. 800ish doesnt seem so bad, but can i go cheaper and still have something good to use?

criteria:
1) light/small-ish
2) good battery

zenbook looks good, maybe the dell xps? the vivobook is cheaper so maybe theres a trade off. is there any reason in 2019 to got back to macbooks?

its a decade since i bought a laptop but im always peeking

id have said an xps with min i5 to futureproof a little but a decent spec thinkpad or similar should be zippy enough too

im presuming that you know enough to get an ssd in and max the ram for whatever model it is you currently have. makes a huge difference in a windows.

I won't have windows on it, will be a linux distro!

the zenbook is 8gb ram and 256gb SSD for €849. I don't think i need to spec it up any more than that. I'd like to be able to run vagrant and docker, but above a certain level of performance, size, weight and price are more important

Just make sure you're comfortable with the keyboard, mousepad and screen before you buy. My laptop (Acer, 8mb, SSD) is perfectly functional but the screen isn't great and I find not having separate mouse buttons really awkward.

this is definitely a worry, never thought about it with the Air, but the keyboard and feel of the last macbook just wasnt right

OK so the Dell XPS 13/15 seems to be the de facto undisputed Windows laptop these days, but what else is in a similar league? They are SO expensive!!! Also, my work laptop is a 14" screen and it is the perfect sweet spot between the 13 (which feels a little too tiny) and the 15 (which I prefer but is a bit bigger and more $$$)

Ideally I'd like something with user-upgradable RAM, though I know that gets harder and harder these days, and a Ryzen would be great but isn't critical. The only heavy duty stuff I do is very occasional video ripping/conversion with HandBrake, and retro-ish gaming, like mostly stuff that came out 10+ years ago. I don't play a lot of newer stuff, so I think an integrated GPU should be more more than adequate (for reference, my current machine is a 2012 ThinkPad T530 with 8 GB of RAM and I played through Dead Space and Bioshock Infinite just fine on the lowest settings, which I didn't at all mind). I want a nice, solid keyboard, and in terms of screen I want it to have great color and brightness, but I don't need it to go beyond 1920x1080 (I had 3000x2000 on my last work laptop, and it was great but unnecessary and caused scaling issues in a lot of programs, and I switched to a 1920x1080 several months ago and it's caused little-to-no bother). I also don't really care about touch.

When I last bought a laptop (2012), USB3 was still newish and a lot of laptops didn't have it, but I assume everything at this point has USB-C/Thunderbolt, so I don't imagine ports or interfaces will be much of a factor.

Given that I'm only looking for 16GB of RAM and something in the i5 range, do I even need a workhorse/ultrabook style laptop? Does build quality drop off precipitously at the $1000 range? I have no idea what I'm doing anymore apart from whatever Wirecutter recommends.

I bought two of my kids the HP PC Portable Pavilion Gaming 15,6" i5-9300H - RAM 8Go - Stockage 128Go SSD + 1To HDD - GTX1050 - Win 10. Each was 600 €. They seem fine?