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posted by
Dopefish
on Saturday April 05 2014, @03:21PM
from the moore's-law-still-trucks-ahead dept.
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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Recommendation for a Good Laptop Computer
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belief, n:
Something you do not believe.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DarkMorph on Saturday April 05 2014, @09:28PM
Great laptop, and apparently a great company too. I did a lot of research online as well and found extremely little negative feedback in general. There were minor grievances with older models but that's about it. If I recall, they also have an engineering team that contributes to open source to ensure low-level software is solid on the hardware they sell. I recall there being a bug in upower that was fixed by their team and other laptop models benefit from the correction, not just their own.
For an amusing comparison I had my hands on a brand new Toshiba Satellite. The bundled paperwork and such, including a seal on the plastic packaging, if you read it carefully, tells you about spyware pre-installed on the Windows OS on the machine, which will attempt to transmit info as soon as you go on the Internet for the first time. Their warranty also declares itself void if you tamper with the configuration of the pre-installed OS. If that's not all, the PSU blew out less than five minutes after using it. I didn't even have time to reboot from the system setup to boot a Live CD. Even a friend of mine from Japan says that Toshiba products these days have really dropped in quality.
These crazy license agreements and shady warranties these days make me really appreciate a company like System76. I really wouldn't want to buy a laptop elsewhere at this point. My first laptop about a decade ago was an Asus model that came with no OS. (I won't pay for Windows, ever.) It was all right but it definitely had hardware issues. BIOS had bugs; booting the Linux kernel with APIC support caused zany issues; booting with a USB mouse attached hard-locked the system, and lastly, after a few years it had hard-locking issues due to overheating. I had to force the CPU to run at 800MHz so the temperature would be low enough for it to operate. 100% load at the full 2GHz would lock the system within minutes due to heat. (Temp approached 85-90C if I recall.)
Long story short if price is not an issue, consider System76. I cannot find even one reason to vote against them. If the time comes to buy another laptop I'm heading straight back to System76 to see what they have in stock.
Other comments I'd offer would be about the business line from Dell. I once heard their business higher-end line was solid, but I have no personal experience with that. This was several years ago and I don't know how they have been these days. I hear their support services have become poor but that seems to be true with all the big names all obsessed with outsourcing anything they can.