What to look for in a small laptop for <$2,000

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  playswithfire on 10/01/2017 - 17:11

  The 14" Lenovo's that keep getting posted here on Ozbargain are great - I got one for my wife and it's really quite powerful and light. I haven't heard the fan on it once. The 13" Asus Ultrabook I got through here for my daughter is also great, and even lighter.

  My current laptop is a 15" Metabox from Kong Computers (who keep putting up deals here) and they are great for gaming, but can be quite loud and the current lineup are quite heavy.

  I personally avoid HP because of really bad experiences in the past. Have not tried Acer or Toshiba or Dell in recent history.

  Hope that helps!

  • 

    [Deactivated] on 10/01/2017 - 17:21

    -1

    I personally avoid HP because of really bad experiences in the past

    Did you cheap out and buy a consumer HP machine?

    HP business/enterprise products are excellent machines.

    • 

      scrimshaw on 10/01/2017 - 17:29

      I've got the flagship HP folio Elitebook 1040 (G1?) and can say it's a pretty good machine. nothing like the lower end Probooks and Pavillions meant for consumer use.

      The only thing I hate about it is the touch-force trackpad. It drives me insane since it doesn't have a mechanical switch — it detects clicks via a pressure sensor.

    • 

      playswithfire on 10/01/2017 - 21:21

      Nope, did not cheap out at all. I'm more than prepared to accept that other people have had good experiences with HP, but it seems to be one of the brands that, for me, is just horrible. This was on a mix of enterprise workstations and laptops and servers, across several employers (I work in IT). At one of them we were even paying an additional $100k per year for a 24x7x4 support & maintenance agreement, which they never honoured… and we ended up having an entire state office down for 5 days - and it only came back up after 5 days after I flew across the country with a "new" machine and swapped the drives from the server with the busted motherboard into the "new" machine. HP finally got the replacement motherboard (that they were contractually required to have available within the next day) to us 7 days after the incident occurred and was first reported to them. When the support contract renewal came up 2 months later I put forward a business case to switch over to Dell enterprise servers with gold support and we ended up replacing all the HP servers around the country for less than it cost to have another year of useless support. And that wasn't an isolated incident at that employer either - every time we needed hardware support, despite our 24x7x4 contract, it would be multiple days before parts were sent out and a tech to change them over.

      The other employer where we used HP we were exclusively using them for workstations and laptops across 60 sites - all the workstations had RAID mirrors which we had negotiated with our supplier that HP would provide support for but when the techs arrived onsite not once did they actually reconfigure the mirrors. The failure rate on those workstations was higher than any other hardware brand I've ever seen across a 20 year career in IT. And the laptops seemed to have a large amount of various failures at the 2 year mark… CPUs/RAM/motherboards/hard drives. about 80% of the laptops would have one of those critical items fail around the 2 year mark.

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  JIMB0 on 10/01/2017 - 17:22

  What is your current laptop?

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    Biance on 10/01/2017 - 18:11

    Sony Vaio E series 14 inch: 8GB RAM, Intel Core i7, I'm not sure what else is useful.
    It did me really well for about 4 years (apart from noise and a little too heavy), but it couldn't run Photoshop or Lightroom.
    In the last year it has been steadily getting worse, and now has issues working chrome, word, etc.

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  [Deactivated] on 10/01/2017 - 17:23

  I wont play games, but will need to run various software packages

  Tell me what software.

  Tell me which area you are doing your PHD in. If it's in medicine, science or engineering, then I can help.

  Don't buy it from retail shops or online as a consumer. BUy it through your university's department/school. The discount can be huge in some cases (e.g if your university is B1G).

  • 

    alchew on 10/01/2017 - 17:35

    How do you buy one through the university or school?

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      [Deactivated] on 10/01/2017 - 17:46

      Are you a PHD student?

      • 

        alchew on 10/01/2017 - 17:49

        Masters by research. I don't know what OP is but that's what i am…in a medical area

      • 

        [Deactivated] on 10/01/2017 - 17:56

        +2

        @alchew:

        1. Tell your supervisor you need a new laptop and buy it through your school
        2. Contact finance department of your school and ask them to pay the invoice
        3. New Laptop!

        :D

  • 

    Biance on 10/01/2017 - 18:22

    My PhD is in marine science.

    I don't know exactly which software I will need to use yet, but as my current laptop is not really functioning anymore I need to get a new one before I'll know for sure.

    I'd definitely need SPSS and Primer, but their websites list really low specs (1GB RAM, 1GHz processor etc).

    I will also need this program, but they don't list the requirements on their website: http://www.fluidimaging.com/products/particle-analysis-softw…

    I would also most likely trial some similar particle analysis software to the above.

    And then for my own use: I want to be able to run Photoshop and Lightroom well: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/system-requirements.html (8GB RAM, 1 GB VRAM).

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  hell0 on 10/01/2017 - 17:39

  The first thing I would do is to filter all results by price and remove any laptop that is above $2000 from the list of candidates.

  Then make sure it isn't an Apple.

  I would then compare features such as: Size, preferentially around 14 inch mark
  Lightweight (You will carry it around everywhere)
  Quiet operation under load
  As good specs as you can get for the $

  Once you get those things done you should be in the ballpark of which laptop to buy

  • 

    Biance on 10/01/2017 - 18:27

    Do you suggest a website to do such a search?

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  zoombie on 10/01/2017 - 17:51

  My recommendation is the Lenovo X1 Carbon…by far the best laptop I've ever own. You can pick them up second hand on Ebay for much less. Since they comes with 3 years warranty, some of the one on Ebay still have long period of warranty remaining.

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  [Deactivated] on 10/01/2017 - 17:59

  Dell Latitude 14 7000 E7470.

  Get the 4cell 55wh battery

  You won't be disappointed.

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  Marcsie on 10/01/2017 - 18:06

  I bought a Zenbook 3 UX390UA, and very happy with it :)

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  activ8newbs on 10/01/2017 - 19:33

  I'm surpised no one has suggestd Dell XPS 13 - i7, 7th Gen, 8gb ram, 256gb ssd. I just bought mine with touch screen and Quad HD Display, for $1678. Happy camper.

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  playswithfire on 11/01/2017 - 12:11

  Grab one of these, upgrade it to a 500gb SSD and you'll be set.

  https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/286955