I’m about to start looking for a new laptop to replace my 15 year old dinosaur Dell unit. Any recommendations or advice on what to look for and stay away from? Aside from general work stuff and typical internet stuff, I’ll be using it for logging race car data and eventually some video/picture editing. Thanks and have a great evening.

Stick to Dell for sure...Go to the Dell outlet for really good deals

Have to agree with Dell.Not expert by any means ,hell barely know ho to turn it on. Mine is probably ten years old and working right now.LOL

At work we have been getting the HP Z laptops. Havne't heard of any failures

Buy a business class unit is my suggestion no matter the brand.

I use a dell, but have been advised to use Lenovo. Ive had 3 hp's over the years and all three had a hard drive failure so I dont use them any more...

I gravitate to Dell as well, but have used HP as a company computer without issues. Consider a SSD (solid state drive) opposed to a hard drive. SSD is akin to a USB drive and gets you away from the mechanical HD. Not to say they can't fail too.

Look at the Lenova Thinkpad. I have had some form of Lenova laptop for years with no issues. Used it in business, race car and around the house.

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Originally posted by maliciousintent:
Look at the Lenova Thinkpad. I have had some form of Lenova laptop for years with no issues. Used it in business, race car and around the house.

X2

^^^^^^^^X3 I bought a new Lenova Thinkpad L13 in 2020 that still has Win 10 and might do the free upgrade to Win11 at some point. This is my Out of Town / Racing laptop. It’s fast (almost as fast as my desk top), like the lighted keyboard, good battery life and been perfect.

Ive been die hard HP for years, but because of supply issues I had to migrate to something else, found a lenovo at best buy, needless to say I was overly impressed with it. It was like going to a led hdtv from a 12 inch black and white. My vote is lenovo.

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Originally posted by markemark:
^^^^^^^^X3 I bought a new Lenova Thinkpad L13 in 2020 that still has Win 10 and might do the free upgrade to Win11

Mark my IT guy told me to stay with Windows 10 . He sees a lot of problems with 11. I don’t know enough about it I’m staying with him.

Thanks for the info everyone. Due to my experience with the current Dell, I’ve been considering another from them. Had not heard anything good or bad about Lenovo, but I’ll be considering them now, given the info here. Probably keep the HP in mind also. Learned my lesson a few years ago with a cheap ASUS for my wife. Not going with the bargain brands again for sure… thanks again.

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Originally posted by J178RED:

quote:

Originally posted by markemark:
^^^^^^^^X3 I bought a new Lenova Thinkpad L13 in 2020 that still has Win 10 and might do the free upgrade to Win11

Mark my IT guy told me to stay with Windows 10 . He sees a lot of problems with 11. I don’t know enough about it I’m staying with him.

Last winter I put together a desktop with B550 Phantom Gaming (AMD Ryzen5 w/graphics) 500gb M.2, 16gb ram, retail Win11 Home for under $400. Replaced a 7 yr old Win 10 desktop. Win 11 runs good and I like it.

I’m on the fence and somewhat agree with your IT guy for doing an upgrade from 10 to 11, but support for 10 ends in 2025.

After 10 years in business facing IT, here's what I will say:

Dell Latitude has by far the BEST warranty policies - IF you buy them. They can nickle and dime you if you don't. We had devices that failed at 4 years and 9 months, that weren't made anymore (5-year waranty). Dell straight up replaced them with equivalent brand now (not re-man) devices.
A great flaw with Dell is that if they ever come to you to fix the device in the field, it's a third party contractor that's usually getting paid flag-hour and doesn't know much. I've caught them doing things wrong several times.

Lenovo's ThinkPad series have won a large chunk of the business market over Dell - mostly because they don't need the warranty's. However, when they do, their policy is no where as easy as Dell's and they do not do field repair - you have to ship to a repair center.

HP's higher end laptops are okay, but still not at the level of Dell and Lenovo. Their QC isn't as strong and their cases are more plasticy.


With all that aside, all 3's consumer devices generally SUCK. The IdeaPad's are as plasticly and under-built as the HP's; Dell's Inspiron's are absolutely miserable if you try to multi-task.
AMD can run circles around Intel at the same price points.

What we always encouraged:

i5 or i7 processor of mid-power or better.

i5-105xx, i5-115xx, i5-125xx
i7-105xx, i7-115xx, i7-125xx
Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 if AMD CPU (doesn't matter the generation of computational power)
16 GB of RAM
500 GB of Storage. Preferably NVMe over SSD over HDD.

As far as Windows 10 or 11:

You cannot get a device with Windows 10 anymore unless it is New Old Stock. It was officially de-licensed from new sales on January 31, 2023.
Windows 11 functions very similar to Windows 10 - it's mostly the same codebase with a different graphics package. When 22H2 it fixed all the major lingering issues. As such, I'd say that Windows 11 is completely safe to use for all applications.

CAVEAT: For anybody that has a computer with Windows 10 currently and are getting those nagging messages to upgrade to Windows 11 for free, yes that is legitimate, however full compatibility depends on what programs are installed. I've found that some CAD and video editing programs aren't 100% Windows 11 upgrade friendly [basically, anything graphics-processing heavy]. If they're installed clean and dry on as fresh Win11 build, it's fine. But making the hop from 10 to 11 causes issues. But I highly doubt that affects many people.

^^^^^ Great advice !! I’m leaning towards doing a clean install on my laptop upgrading from 10 to 11 as everything can be reloaded. Just time consuming.

They'll have to pry my Windows 7 Thinkpad from my cold dead hands....as well as all the other stuff running Windows 7.

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Originally posted by Goob:
They'll have to pry my Windows 7 Thinkpad from my cold dead hands....as well as all the other stuff running Windows 7.

2 Dell laptop work stations running win7 since day one with out a glitch ever...I want to up date to win10 so I can get Chrome to update.

quote:

Originally posted by markemark:

quote:

Originally posted by J178RED:

quote:

Originally posted by markemark:
^^^^^^^^X3 I bought a new Lenova Thinkpad L13 in 2020 that still has Win 10 and might do the free upgrade to Win11

Mark my IT guy told me to stay with Windows 10 . He sees a lot of problems with 11. I don’t know enough about it I’m staying with him.

Last winter I put together a desktop with B550 Phantom Gaming (AMD Ryzen5 w/graphics) 500gb M.2, 16gb ram, retail Win11 Home for under $400. Replaced a 7 yr old Win 10 desktop. Win 11 runs good and I like it.

I’m on the fence and somewhat agree with your IT guy for doing an upgrade from 10 to 11, but support for 10 ends in 2025.

I couldn’t find the Win 10 license key for my laptop (there are ways to retrieve it) for a clean Win 11 install, so after backing everything up, I installed the Win 11 upgrade tonight. Took less than 10 minutes to complete. Everything works as before. Actually seems slightly faster….boots in 12 seconds. I like Win 11 on my desktop and laptop is now the same. I recommend the upgrade for Lenova.

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Originally posted by Hotrod Corvette:

quote:

Originally posted by Goob:
They'll have to pry my Windows 7 Thinkpad from my cold dead hands....as well as all the other stuff running Windows 7.

2 Dell laptop work stations running win7 since day one with out a glitch ever...I want to up date to win10 so I can get Chrome to update.

Microsoft Edge worked through what Chrome can't handle for me. I was shocked. I use Mozilla as the regular browser.

I set up the offices with 8 workstations and 2 data servers on Windows 7 Pro back in '09, everything has run solid ever since.
We never turn them off, I have one user that puts her terminal in sleep mode. Finally had a power supply fail on one that had at least 2 lbs. of dust caked inside it. I've replaced a couple of noisy fans. That's it.

It's all HP / Intel equipment, custom ordered direct from HP. Can't be beat.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Goob,