Laptop Choice?

Surface Laptop 4 on offer at John Lewis for £599

I love my SL3, seems like a bit of a bargain

Oh yeah that is a good deal 👍
Another to the list 🤣

Yoga i7. They are superb, but mine is hardly taxed by what I do with it.

Cheers. I was leaning to the yoga and zen book
How's the build quilty?

Is that an offer at 599?

Excellent. I've been using Thinkpads for about 15 years, and they've always been good. This one is no exception.

I'm still running a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad x230 (with another one that I bought a few years ago but haven't really used as spare) which I bought for under 200 quid about 6-7 years ago (wow, time flies!) with 16G RAM, 256G SSD and Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz. My OS is Debian GNU/Linux and I use darktable for photo processing which does everything I could ever imagine wanting to do plus more. I highly recommend.

I've got the 2 in 1 and can't say I've noticed the fan noise,

They do an Inspiron 16 2 in 1 now?

I'd say so for a device that is less than 9 months old; think I paid £800 odd for my SL3 in late 2019

Inspired by the Lenovo love on the thread I just got a x260 i7-6500 2.6 GHz 16Gb RAM 256Gb SSD for £142 for a bit of audio/ DJ stuff

that's a good price - where did you get that from? do they have any others?

eBay guy who seems to have had lots available and is very upfront in product descriptions and pictures andy_preston2001

That is a good deal - I've an SL4 - good machines

Am tempted by this tbh.

Just unsure if 8gb will be enough ram for my needs.

Ordered a new laptop, mostly for photo editing (casual) and maybe playing some not new games.
Dell Inspiron 15 plus. I5, 8gb ram, 512ssd, RTX 3050 GPU.
AFAIUI there are spare ram and m2 slots for expansion. Don't think I'll need an SSD soon, but am worrying the ram might be a little under specced, so am looking into an addition stick.
I think I've asked before, so apologies, but can you mix capacities without worry?
Looking to buy a 16gb stick to accompany the 8 already held (it is 1x8 not 2x4) for a total of 24gb.
Will this work? I've done similar in my old desktop (2+4+4 iirc) with no drama

(Edit: forgot to say it was NOS in the clearance section, so couldn't respec to higher ram, also managed to stack some discounts so it went from £650 to £530)

can you mix capacities without worry

yes

Just to say, I have an Inspiron. The graphics card went bad after a year and dell just refuse to engage with you unless you pay for extended warrenty. Which is bullshit. I won't buy dell again because of this.

Thanks for the warning, I didn't take out extended warranty, hopefully it'll be ok.
Not going to be rinsing it with Crysis, so hopefully won't get too stretched

I had to buy a Dell XPS 15 last year because I needed to replace a broken laptop quickly and I couldn't believe how shit it is considering it's one of their core products.

First annoyance was that it was not possible to upgrade the Windows Home license to Pro. Didn't even recognize the Microsoft maintenance key and needed a complete re-install.

Then the backlight wouldn't come back on after it went to sleep. Now fixed by a firmware update I think.

Wifi stops working after it goes to sleep, needs turning off and on again in the task bar.

When headphones are plugged in a Dell window pops up confirming that headphones were plugged in but no sound is send to headphones, need to be unplugged and plugged in again to work. If at any point it was connected to a Bluetooth audio device headphones will never work
again and needs a reboot.

The screens minimum brightness is too high for a dark room at night, needs a dimmer app
to make it workable. Have to reset a registry variable to disable adaptive screen contrast
after every Windows update (might not be just a Dell problem).

They put a high wattage CPU in a slim case with shit cooling so I have to keep it massively throttled in Intel XTU to prevent it from spinning the fans all the time with light tasks like
Teams calls. On a base model without a dedicated GPU.

Also needs a massive power brick with a fixed USB-C cable and won't charge from other
USB-C laptop chargers.

All the surfaces facing you are made from tacky plastic that dents easily and always looks greasy from fingerprints.

The trackpad rattles sometimes, then it stops for a while and rattles again.

Only real positive compared to other laptops I have found is the really quick SD card reader.

I was just about to post that the 12 Inspiron 15s I bought for work have been great for the last year, but I'll pipe down. That sounds horrendous!

Edit: I wonder if it's because we run Ubuntu?

Must be, most of my problems seem to come from Dell specific drivers. Didn't have any of it
on a previous Xiaomi Laptop or Apple before that.

I've got a client who buys Dell laptops. Mostly ok, but a very expensive XPS 15 failed just outside of the warranty period and needed a 250 quid system board, and several others (Latitudes) have had display issues just outside of the warranty period

I had an Inspiron 16 needing a trackpad replacement (otherwise a brillian laptop) recently but our XPS 15 and 17 have been rock solid.

It almost feels like pot luck with Dell.

Some of our inspiron 15 have really dull screens but they are within spec so that's more us buying the wrong models.

I've had a shit load of Dells thorough work. The one that gave me problems was their consumer version (maybe Inspiron but I'm not sure).

Their business versions have been great

Depends on the model I think. A lot of the vostro are just rebadged inspirons. Not all though.