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posted by Dopefish on Saturday April 05 2014, @03:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the moore's-law-still-trucks-ahead dept.

Question for the lentils out there: What makes and models of laptops are good these days? Traditionally, you could just get an IBM ThinkPad if you were willing and able to pay extra for quality, but judging by reviews, they aren't as consistent as they used to be. A 'nice' laptop has to get a lot of things right: fast internals, sturdy case, quality keyboard, excellent battery life, and good heat management, to name a few. Are there any manufacturers that sell machines worth buying anymore, or do you have to compromise?

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by etherscythe on Saturday April 05 2014, @05:54PM

    by etherscythe (937) on Saturday April 05 2014, @05:54PM (#26754) Journal

    Depending on exactly what options are available to you (i.e. are you buying locally or online?), as a repair technician I recommend checking for the following features:

    -easily accessible hard drive cage (you do NOT want to have to do a full teardown to do an SSD upgrade/drive replacement)

    -easy access to RAM slots for upgrade

    -removable battery

    -Windows 7. Even if you intend to install Linux, Windows 8 notebooks have a tendency to have locked-down Secure Boot features which, though they can be "disabled", do not always work like you want them to. Particularly if something goes wrong, the BIOS/boot hotkeys can be a nightmare. Microsoft expects you to boot Windows, click the power menu, hold the SHIFT key, and click Restart in order to select a boot device or access the BIOS. If the OS gets hosed, you're in trouble. Sometimes you can induce a boot menu by forcibly powering down in the middle of boot, but on some systems the menu is missing options, at which point, you're screwed. Don't risk it! Get a machine designed for Windows 7 with regular hotkeys at the boot screen.

    Also, if you want to be buying Windows 7 on your next build, now is the time [microsoft.com]. Windows 7 stopped shipping to the retail channel in October, and this coming October will see the end of OEMs preinstalled with Windows 7. You'll pay a premium for Windows 8 Pro if you wait too long and try to use the Downgrade Rights (Core Edition does not qualify), and it will be an inferior experience all around (see hotkeys above, possible driver issues as well).

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  • (Score: 1) by Immerman on Saturday April 05 2014, @08:36PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Saturday April 05 2014, @08:36PM (#26814)

    Lets add an easily accessible fan (or intake filters) to the list too - unless you live in an industrial cleanroom you'll likely need to access that far more often than any other component in your laptop. Of course I'm not sure there are actually any laptops in existence that make it *easy* to reach the fan, but there are certainly some that make it so horribly difficult that you are tempted to replace it completely (the fan OR the laptop, depending) rather than just wiping off the built-up mung.

    • (Score: 2) by etherscythe on Saturday April 05 2014, @09:55PM

      by etherscythe (937) on Saturday April 05 2014, @09:55PM (#26839) Journal

      That's pretty much a lost cause for the average layman. Most times I just use an air compressor and blow through the exhaust vent on my clients' machines. A small can of compressed air could do a decent job. It's amazing how people don't think of notebooks as collecting dust.

      That said, if you could manage to locate a machine where the fan doesn't require a complete teardown, that would be amazing. But I've yet to see one other than the no-name or low-visibility brands (Averatec I think was the name), and none made more recently than maybe 10 years ago.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05 2014, @11:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05 2014, @11:45PM (#26869)

    Windows 8 notebooks have a tendency to have locked-down Secure Boot features

    Properly named, this would be called Crippled Boot.
    You've probably heard about Matthew Garrett's mjg59 "shim" and other problems with getting Linux going on boxes that ship with Visduh8.

    That's not the half of it.
    Crippled Boot will even cripple Windoze. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [techrights.org]

    The technology that you want is Open Source firmware. It is called coreboot . [google.com]
    (At this point, even Legacy BIOS is preferable to UEFI with Crippled Boot; if your laptop has a super-gigantic disc, CoreBoot is definitely the way to go.)

    Crippled Boot is simply another anti-competitive move [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [techrights.org] on the part of the (dying) Borg.

    .
    You've probably also heard about Samsung's incompetence in implementing UEFI and how that left boxes bricked.[1]
    Several other manufacturers have screwed up their UEFI firmware implementations as well.

    [1] Yes, "bricked" is the correct word; these boxes had to be sent back to the factory and they had to be repaired by someone with soldering gear.

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Sunday April 06 2014, @09:41AM

    by mojo chan (266) on Sunday April 06 2014, @09:41AM (#27011)

    Do Panasonic sell Toughbooks where the OP lives? In Japan they are called Let's Note. Rugged as hell but still good looking and not too bulky. Excellent support. Windows 7 is available as an option. Expensive but worth it, and you can often get really nice second hand models as companies upgrade their fleet.

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