Reply to: Time to buy a new laptop - which is best for around £1K

[radish2008]

Don't get a Sony. In my experience they're badly put together and not very resilient.

I bought a Vaio and regretted it completely, bits of it falling off after a few months and having to be glued back on....And I really look after my stuff so it wasnt me being heavy handed,

I've had a Vaio VPCF13S0E for a while now (8 months plus) and it's been great

[sasguru]

Friday night and you are buying a laptop? That's sad.

What are you doing? Pot noodling furiously?

[AtW]

Friday night and you are buying a laptop? That's sad.

[sasguru]

How close to the £1k was it?

Top spec (i7, 8 GB RAM) was just over £1,100 from Lenovo site. Massive discount on there compared to usual retailers.
Well pleased TBH, although the X1 has its flaws, it's horses for courses and will do me well.
Took about 3 tries to actually buy the thing on their dire site though.

[SimonMac]

How close to the £1k was it?

[sasguru]

Have decided on a Thinkpad X1 (i7,8 GB RAM) because (1) good keyboard (2) Has a mini displayport so can use my iMac 27 inch as screen (3) quite a tough laptop with 3 year guarantee
Now if only Lenovo's tulipe site would let me spend the money

[VectraMan]

Chiclet keyboards I believe they are called, I'm not that keen it's like going back to the rubber buttons of the ZX Spectrum. Saying that, I'm daft enough to pay 80 notes for my very noisey Das III mechanical keyboard, I love it.

qh

It was the half-sized cursor keys that really put me off. They must be the most useful and commonly used keys (at least if you're a code monkey they are), so making them half sized because some designer decided it looks pretty is insane.

It turned up this morning, though I haven't had a chance to even switch it on yet.

[Scrag Meister]

I gave into temptation and bought an XPS15 (L502x) from Dell Outlet. That's £500 for an i7 Sandy Bridge, with 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD and with both the Intel graphics for battery saving and and NVidia something or other for games (not that I'm likely to play games on it). I'll probably spend another £130 on an SSD and turn the existing drive into an external USB one for if I need the storage. So that's a pretty high spec machine for ~£600.

I have 2 XPS laptops, a mobile 13" and a larger 17", bought back in 2007, still running fine.

Chiclet keyboards I believe they are called, I'm not that keen it's like going back to the rubber buttons of the ZX Spectrum. Saying that, I'm daft enough to pay 80 notes for my very noisey Das III mechanical keyboard, I love it.

qh

I have a Razor mechanical keyboard, love it except for the spacing/design of the Caps Lock key. Keep pressing it when going for an "A".

I used to have an old IBM mechanical until a couple of years back.

[quackhandle]

Plus the keyboards look crap on those (i.e. copied from the MacBook).

Chiclet keyboards I believe they are called, I'm not that keen it's like going back to the rubber buttons of the ZX Spectrum. Saying that, I'm daft enough to pay 80 notes for my very noisey Das III mechanical keyboard, I love it.

qh

[Friday Blue]

I gave into temptation and bought an XPS15 (L502x) from Dell Outlet. That's £500 for an i7 Sandy Bridge, with 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD and with both the Intel graphics for battery saving and and NVidia something or other for games (not that I'm likely to play games on it). I'll probably spend another £130 on an SSD and turn the existing drive into an external USB one for if I need the storage. So that's a pretty high spec machine for ~£600.

I was tempted by the thin and light (though "light" is a bit of a lie) XPS15z Mac Book clone for a couple of hundred more, but in the end decided I'm not really interested in pose value and want something that can be a desktop replacement. Plus the keyboards look crap on those (i.e. copied from the MacBook).

The equivalent MacBook is over £2K, and you don't even get a copy of Windows.

Only thing that's annoying me is that it hasn't turned up yet. I ordered over a week ago, and initially they said yesterday but are now saying next Monday. They don't need to build these outlet machines especially, so I was expecting it in a couple of days.

i bought an asus X53e similar spec from comet for 499 few weeks back. havent got round to change the HDD to SDD and it is VERY slow in terms of loading speed. hopefully when i have time i will swap the HDD out. but running programs has been a major improvement over..well...my 3 years old celeron.

[Spacecadet]

Recently had dilemma as using my own laptop on client site for Excel development, but it's a mac. Installed bootcamp & windows 7. Works a dream and very glad I didn't buy a PC

Just imagine the nightmare work would be if you didn't have to jump through all those hoops just to do your job

[VectraMan]

I gave into temptation and bought an XPS15 (L502x) from Dell Outlet. That's £500 for an i7 Sandy Bridge, with 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD and with both the Intel graphics for battery saving and and NVidia something or other for games (not that I'm likely to play games on it). I'll probably spend another £130 on an SSD and turn the existing drive into an external USB one for if I need the storage. So that's a pretty high spec machine for ~£600.

I was tempted by the thin and light (though "light" is a bit of a lie) XPS15z Mac Book clone for a couple of hundred more, but in the end decided I'm not really interested in pose value and want something that can be a desktop replacement. Plus the keyboards look crap on those (i.e. copied from the MacBook).

The equivalent MacBook is over £2K, and you don't even get a copy of Windows.

Only thing that's annoying me is that it hasn't turned up yet. I ordered over a week ago, and initially they said yesterday but are now saying next Monday. They don't need to build these outlet machines especially, so I was expecting it in a couple of days.

[Vandalay]

Recently had dilemma as using my own laptop on client site for Excel development, but it's a mac. Installed bootcamp & windows 7. Works a dream and very glad I didn't buy a PC

[quackhandle]

Anyone with a Thinkpad T420s?

Thoughts good or bad?

qh

[quackhandle]

Cheers for the comments/advice.

qh