I'm in the market for a laptop, but I'm not sure if I can get away with meeting all my criteria.
- It'll be purely for business, the most demanding thing it will be opening is numerous Chrome tabs.
- It needs to run Windows software, with MS Office.
- I want it to be lightweight and no bigger than an A4 pad.
Is there any chance of me getting this for around £200?
I've been seeing refurbished X series Thinkpads from as little as £100, but maybe this is dodgy?
The refurb X-series machines are ace. They're relatively thick and heavy by modern standards, but they're also fast, durable and easy to repair or upgrade. The battery life isn't great compared to a modern ultraportable or Chromebook, but performance is excellent. Avoid the X201, as you can find an X220 for about the same price or an X230 for a little more.
The battery might be very tired in some of these machines, so budget for a replacement. It's also well worth considering an SSD upgrade, as it'll shave the boot time down to a few seconds and make the machine feel much more responsive. The X220 and above have an mSATA slot, so you can fit both a hard drive and an SSD if desired. A small mSATA SSD can cost as little as £20 on eBay.
The only reasonable alternative in that price range would be a cheap ultraportable like the Asus E200HA. These machines are just barely adequate in performance, but they're extremely lightweight and achieve phenomenal battery life. They're basically a Windows tablet with a keyboard bolted on, for better and for worse. Fine for basic browsing and office tasks, but they'll bog down quickly if you ask too much of them. You're looking at about £180 new or £130 b-stock.
People throw away laptops with those sorts of capabilities at the skip. Get down there quick and have a rummage, you might save some poor African kid the trouble.
>>25886 Agreed - many of the T series and X series of Lenovo are actually still IBM designs in disguise, before Lenovo bought them. They are very very good PCs and what I would have were I not a Mac person. We use them extensively at work, also. You can pick them up s/h very easily and they are quite upgradable and fixable.
>>25886 Good advice.
>It's also well worth considering an SSD upgrade
I would say that an SSD is one of the most important considerations for a new laptop (or PC for that matter). There's been plenty of evangelism for them here in the past so I'll spare you the sales pitch, but get one, even if it means getting a machine that's shittier in other ways.
>>25886 Seconding the X220. I lost one after getting really drunk and liked it so much I replaced it with another one. It was only £120 so the loss didn't sting too badly.
An SSD is a good suggestion too. My X220 feels faster and more responsive than my fancy gaming PC simply because of the SSD.
>>26747 You zigged when you should've zagged. The X100e and X120e aren't really considered legit Thinkpads and are regarded as pretty shit.
There's a web app version of Office. Chromebooks run a custom Linux distribution and won't run any native Windows software. Most new Chromebooks do run Android apps, which is handy.
Because it's a (lesser) version of the office suite that can be run from a Chromebook, and I wasn't aware of the difference between office apps and the full programs. No cunt-off today, thank you.
I know it's too late but I need to tell you all how good the X series thinkpads are. I have a 220 and a 230 just because I can. Still shows up a Macbook pro in my opinion.
>Is the entire laptop about the size of an A4 book?
Pretty much exactly. If you have one of the larger batteries it sticks out a bit more, but it still fits in a 13" MBP sleeve.
>Also, is the screen a good usable size for student/work tasks?
This is where I have to admit the X series isn't perfect. The screen itself isn't a bad size, but the resolution isn't amazing. You might struggle for real estate. Personally I'm very happy with it and use to do all of my business work, so a lot of word and excel. I have good eyes, your mileage may vary. I know a lot of people recommend the Thinkpad T430, which is essentially a 14" version of the X230, but for me the portability and battery life of the X series wins out.
For what it's worth I think the people who really struggle with the X230 screen size are programmers.
I have seen the FHD mod, though I've heard some people say that you can get flickering issues and such. I'm happy enough with the size it is, personally. I had planned to get a nice big monitor for my desk for working on bigger stuff, but honestly I've not felt the need yet.
Hello again lads. I still haven't bought a new bastard laptop and have been struggling along with the X100e. It's unusably slow.
At some point I intend to drop £300 - £400 on a decent one. The other ThinkPads looked great, but I've also been tempted away by the IdeaPad.
That aside, is there anything I can do to make the x100e perform better until I'm sure I can spunk the money? It's crippled with running a few tabs with Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 at the moment. Any recommendations?
>>26811 Install an SSD, if it doesn't already have one.
Install more RAM, if it's not already maxed out.
Install a lightweight Linux distribution if you swing that way, such as Xubuntu.
If you want to stick with Windows, try disabling all graphical effects and the like.
As said, an SSD is a huge performance boost in older machines. You can also try to blast out any dust that might (definitely will) be caking the cooling fans and vents, as if it's running hot enough the CPU might be thermal throttling too, I've seen that happen a lot.
It probably isn't worth upgrading. The x100e has a feeble single-core Athlon Neo processor with a PassMark score of 409. It was piss-poor in 2010 and it's utterly unusable today. By comparison, the slowest processor in Intel's current desktop lineup has a Passmark score of 3,269 and an i7-7700k scores over 12,000. No matter what you do, it's grossly bottlenecked by that dog of a processor.
You don't need to spend £300 to get something vastly quicker than your current machine. A Thinkpad X220 will set you back about £120; the default processor in that machine is an i5-2520M, which has a Passmark score of 3,588. The very cheapest Chromebook would be a significant upgrade, as would any old laptop with an Intel Core-series processor.
A lightweight Linux distribution might help a bit. If you're not using an adblocker, for the love of god install uBlock Origin - ads and ad trackers have a huge CPU load. Firefox Reader Mode is very useful on slow machines, because it strips out all of the CSS and Javascript.
Hallo again fellas. I bought a swanky new laptop which I'm very happy with.
What should I do with the old X110e? It's basically unusable and dead weight to me now, but being a thrifty person I don't just want to throw it away. Any useful spares I can salvage from it? Should I perform a factory reset and just give it away?
>>26903 If you don't mind lots of fucking about you can buy yourself an enclosure for about £16 and turn the hard-drive into big ol' memory stick. I'm fucking knackered right now so in brief before you take the hard-drive out be sure to right click on [whatever drive] -> Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> add in an 'everyone' with all permissions and check boxes ticked. Saves you spending a night doing it via usb.
You can take out the RAM easy enough but really even the hard-drive will just end up collecting dust somewhere.
I have a stack of annoyingly small hard drives that I can't quite bring myself to chuck out - probably seven or eight drives of between 160GB and 500GB.
500GB still seems like a useful amount of storage, but then I remember that there's a 4TB mirrored pair in my main machine and a 400GB MicroSD card in my phone.
I used to hoard the hell out of audiowarez and stopped in 2004. The programs, sample sets and tutorial videos on those websites are often 2-4GB apiece now and you can download several of each every day. In my day the programs were about 4mb and sample CDs maxed out at 700mb.
Anything media-related involves massive amounts of storage.
Sample libraries for music production are fucking massive. Komplete 12 Ultimate requires 490GB of drive space. VSL Symphonic Cube is 375GB; that goes up to 1TB if you opt for the full Super Package. Omnisphere, Trillian and Stylus are another 150GB. Those libraries the bare minimum needed for a serious composer's workstation. Add in the major packages from Spitfire Audio, Sonokinetic and Orchestral Tools and you could easily be looking at the thick end of 4TB. If you're working on large projects, it really needs to all be on SSD in RAID 1. Compared to the cost of the library licenses, a thousand quid's worth of SSDs is practically pocket change.
4K raw video footage is between 500GB and 1TB per hour; a post-production facility working on feature films might need 1PB of storage per project, plus local backups, plus off-site backups.
>>26974 Modern sample libraries really are yuuuuuge. I know someone working for a company in that space, and I'm told that these days they record each note around a dozen times, pick the best three and employ some shifting trickery so that repeated notes sound different enough to feel organic, but that still means a shitload of actual recordings in high enough quality to use in an actual production.
>>26974>>26975 > Sample libraries for music production are fucking massive
Say, if I pester search engines long enough, will they tell me what all this jiggabyte-sized stuff is for? I can guess - I have a vague idea what samples are for but hundreds of GBs? Colour me astonished.
>>26976 Every single bloody note of a piano or what have you, with and without sustain etc, in some high quality lossless format, soon adds up I suppose.
Most instruments have a lot of subtle variations in tone; you need a lot of different samples to capture that variation in a realistic manner.
A piano is probably the simplest case. A piano doesn't just get louder when you hit the keys harder, the quality of the note also changes. A modern piano sample library will include a minimum of eight recordings of each key, from very soft to very loud. That adds up to at least 704 stereo WAV files. Those recordings at different levels are blended together to give a realistic response to the player's touch.
You'll also usually get at least five different microphone positions, from close microphones right under the piano lid to a broad stereo pair capturing the ambience of the room. A single piano can therefore add up to several thousand samples, taking up a few gigabytes.
A violin is probably the most complex case. There are a huge variety of ways to play a violin. You can pluck the strings (pizzicato), you can play with the bow close to the bridge or close to the fingerboard, you can play with the back side of the bow or with a mute on the strings, you can blur the notes together smoothly (legato) or play crisply separated notes (détaché).
For each of these possible playing styles (articulations), you need separate samples of each note at multiple volume levels. The sample playback software (Kontakt) allows you to switch articulations using the keys on the left of the keyboard, playing the notes with the right hand. Again, you'll usually want a variety of microphone positions to give you control over the room ambiance. My preferred solo violin library has 38 different articulations, adding up to over 24,000 unique samples.
Multiply that across all the instruments of an orchestra and you've got a shitload of samples. The VSL Symphonic Cube orchestral library includes 764,000 samples, hence the 375GB installed file size. Most composers have multiple sample libraries covering an entire orchestra, each of which has a different sound based on how the instruments are played and how they are recorded. VSL is very traditional and is ideal for orchestral works. Spitfire Albion is quirky and modern for Hans Zimmer style atmospheric cinematic arrangements. The EWQL Hollywood Orchestra does exactly what you'd expect, giving you that epic John Williams sound.
We don't just want an orchestra of course, we want modern instruments like guitar and bass, world instruments, historical instruments and so on. We also want a variety of each - I currently have 94 different drum kit libraries installed, from a vintage 1930s jazz kit to a modern heavy metal kit.
This meticulous approach to sampling gives us an astonishing degree of realism. You probably don't realise it, but the overwhelming majority of music you hear on film, TV and video games is produced on a computer using sample libraries. Some productions have the budget and the timescale to go out to Eastern Europe and record with a real orchestra, but most of the time it's just one bloke in a home studio with a ton of software.
>Some productions have the budget and the timescale to go out to Eastern Europe and record with a real orchestra, but most of the time it's just one bloke in a home studio with a ton of software.
To add to this, there's not even any guarantee I could record the Czech Philharmonic any better or more appropriately than the lads who did the orchestral library I have anyway.
We've come a long way from MIDI synth'd instruments and the leap in technology that's allowed it is simply exponentially increased digital storage space. The first digital musical device I owned had it's entire sample library on a 128mb compactflash.
Most sample libraries nowadays come with a nice powerful sample player UI, and lots of metadata so you can quickly find stuff and it's all nicely organised, like Kontakt here. The big players are very good at this, to the point where I could browse a category like "brass, alien, sci fi, fx" and find something specific to all of those.
Even without all that the standard practice for a sample pack is to put everything in very specific nested folders, so even looking at the raw files you could easily find your single short C sharp trumpet note by going Sample Pack>Orchestral>Brass>Trumpet>C#staccatotrumpet.wav, though that's really not neccesary these days since most sample makers will include indexing files for all the common sample player software.
Hey lads, I'm in a similar position to OP but have procrastinated on a decision for about a year now. It's just so bloody difficult to make a choice on what you want when it comes to a new best friend. I was looking at a V-series the other-day but upon closer inspection I suspect the build-quality is absolute toffee:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-81V50004UK-V155-15API-Laptop-Windows/dp/B07HVZFSXB/ref=sr_1_1
My criteria has shifted around but generally:
>Budget is £500-£1000 depending on what it can do
>Weight isn't a problem, this is going to be an effective desktop/tv due to lack of space in the flat
>Something sturdy that will last me years and years if anything
>My benchmark was finally getting to play GTA V but a laptop able to play it in decent quality appears still out of reach
I really should make a choice now as my current laptop is starting to BSD more and more.
>My benchmark was finally getting to play GTA V but a laptop able to play it in decent quality appears still out of reach
Not any more. At the low end of your budget, a machine with a Ryzen 5 2500U will run GTA V on medium settings at 720p at about 50fps, while still being reasonably portable. At the high end of your price range, you could have something with an i5 and a GTX 1650, which will give you decent frame rates at 1080p on very high settings.
>>27265 Your budget will definitely stretch to something GTAV-capable, my laptop runs that and it's only worth ~£500. I picked an Inspiron 15 7577, which doesn't look like the usual "gamer laptop" with rainbow LED and go-faster plastic tacky embarrassment. By all accounts it has a quiet cooling system by gaming laptop standards, but it's still too loud for me when it gets going. When a game like GTAV is running you'd better have headphones or some way of moving the thing into an adjacent room.
Can you really not squeeze in a decent desktop? And then grab a second-hand chromebook or something dirt cheap for when you're out and about? Gaming laptops are inherently a significant compromise, don't go there unless you really have to.
If anyone is after a refurb laptop, there are loads at 20% off on eBay right now. You can have an X250 with 8GB of RAM and a 180GB SSD for a mere £127.99.
Talking SSDs as the singlemost effective modern upgrade - how do you install an operating system on one? I've done it before but it put a really sour taste in my mouth. The actual install is fine - it pretty much does itself - it's all the faffing about with USBs, CDkeys and calling Microsoft that really gets me.
Do they not sell them on disc, anymore? How do i buy directly from windows, or find a legitimate retailer?
sage for not really /g/ and barely relevant to the thread.
If the PC has previously had a license for Windows 10, the license will be automatically recognised, even if it's a clean install.
You can buy a boxed retail copy of Windows 10, but it's over £100. Given that Windows still works even if the license isn't validated, I'd rather take my chances with a cheap key off eBay.
>>27289 >>27288 eBay has quality buyer protection so if you get dicked over with a bum key you should be covered. Unless you're worried about malicious software or something.
>>27290 Download Windows 7, activate it, then claim a free upgrade as a user of assistive technology. I mean, who hasn't tried getting the narrator to say silly things?
> If the PC has previously had a license for Windows 10, the license will be automatically recognised, even if it's a clean install.
How does that work, exactly? Is the product key stored in UEFI or even the TPM? I did notice when work shipped me a new Thinkpad with Windows 10 on it there was no printed product key, either on the laptop itself or in any of the paperwork that came with it.
I'm going to have a serious grumble to myself if there's some unique device ID that's sent to some remote service in Redmond that verifies that your device previously ran Win 10 and is eligible for continued service.
> A unique number called a globally unique identifier, which is assigned to your computer
Good grief. *grumble*
This begs the question, however, of how they deal with virtualization. Presumably I could spin up a thousand cloned VMs and have them all activate on a single license. Additionally it's probably going to cause all kinds of problems (as MS Office has for years) when you want to test and debug a system image locally then upload it to a production server - as soon as it detects a different CPUID then you'll have a different GUID and everything will break.
They don't really care about individual users - Windows 10 will work indefinitely even if you don't bother to activate it. I think they realised that a) people who build their own computers will just pirate Windows anyway and b) the risk of pushing people towards Linux outweighs the paltry sums they might earn through retail Windows sales. The real money comes from volume licenses for OEMs and enterprise users.
There's an entirely separate (and dizzyingly complex) licensing system for corporate customers who are likely to be using automated deployment. If you buy a shitload of licenses, Microsoft will automatically authenticate any machine on your network.
>>27296 Microsoft have cottoned on to the 90/9/1 distribution of their income, knowing they get the majority of their income from enterprise customers using enterprise products, a smaller slice from business customers buying Windows and Office, and a tiny slice from home users.
>>27298 Office Commercial revenue is six times higher than Office Consumer revenue. That leads me to believe your supposed distribution is seriously made up.
>Windows 10 will work indefinitely even if you don't bother to activate it
True of any computer that retains its 'globally unique identifier', as mentioned - but any and all hardware upgrades or replacements might trigger an unverification and a 'you need to ring us to sort this out' type message. I think it basically gives you three or four changes behind the scenes before it freaks out, but you never know.
It's still infinitely more friendly than previous systems, and I do indeed have a few legit copies of windows from dodgy win7 cracks and so on.
While we're on the subject of licences, how much of my PC can I upgrade before Windows 10 shits itself?
I'm planning to drop the cash for a new CPU/motherboard combo soon, considering I've had this venerable old 3570K for well over 6 years. If I just throw my current hard drive in, will I see issues, or have computers come past that these days?
I really can't be arsed fannying about reinstalling everything.
>how much of my PC can I upgrade before Windows 10 shits itself?
There's no definitive answer, but your license isn't void when it happens, you just have to sort it out with Microsoft. It's a bit of a hassle but not too bad, though I've heard if you do it too much you run out of activiations, but 'too much' is constant hardware changes on a test bench sort of thing.
How well does an installation tolerate changes in hardware then? I remember last time I upgraded back in about 2013 I just had to boot up in safe mode and swap some drivers.
The answer is 'pretty well', it seems. Here's a decent video on it that goes over the basics, but also demonstrates that even though Linus is actively trying to get the authentication to trip up, it doesn't always work. It also seems like if your Win10 licence is tied to a Windows Live account it's even easier to sort out anyway.
I should add that in my experience, I've swapped out graphics cards, CPU and motherboard, and Windows 10 either didn't notice, or immediately adapted to the new hardware behind the scenes. I've also put my SSD from one Thinkpad into a different model and that worked fine too. I wouldn't worry.
>>27306 > How much of my PC can I upgrade before Windows 10 shits itself?
I'll eventually find this out myself as I migrate various VMs around work/customer/enterprise boxes but I do have a shit ton of experience of Office 2013's "Windows Genuine Advantage" which basically threw its toys out of the pram if your CPU changed.
If Win10 is anything like WGA you can change your hdd/ssd, your ram, and any peripherals like video cards / gpus and the like - but the moment you change out the CPU it'll throw a wobbly.
Essentially it all comes down to what data MSFT uses to create their "globally unique identified" (my money's on CPU model and serial number and probably BIOS/UEFI serial number if it's available).
>>27265 For some reason after making this post I ended up buying a cheapo laptop and never getting to play GTA V - I suspect because of a girl. 2 years later however and I now live in a big flat where I can buy myself a proper desktop and never have to worry about girls again.
Is everything still a mess thanks to Covid and miners? I've not bought a desktop in over a decade so I have no idea on what brands are good, looking online everything has rainbow lights and see-through cases (to make it run faster) along with energy drink names which makes me think it's all a big scam.
AMD decided to get good again, that's the only real difference in the past decade. And I guess SSDs are affordable now, and we'll worth it.
Not checked in the past year or so but I'd bet they're still the best choice for a CPU.
Graphics cards are available, but they're extortionately expensive, selling at 2-3x MSRP. This pricing has also affected pre-builts.
There aren't a lot of great options at the moment. Game streaming services like Geforce Now offer decent visual quality as long as you've got reasonable broadband, but too much latency for competitive titles. An AMD APU like the Ryzen 5 5600G will deliver playable frame rates on older titles while leaving you the option of adding a discrete GPU later when prices eventually fall. Ironically, gaming laptops can be the best bang-for-your-buck if you want to play current AAA titles at medium-high settings. You could of course buy an Xbox.
>>28031 There are two things wrong with what I wrote here:
1. You cannot escape girls
2. My laptop shell was badly cracked and it was expensive to replace for what is a shitty Ideapad that must've cost a couple hundred pounds and has been a complete headache
The latter point led to my own nightmare before Christmas this evening as the slot for the power cable came off with the cable and I couldn't then reconnect the wires. No doubt because a huge section of shell above it broke off and I've just been dealing with the odd spark because why wouldn't I wait until January.
Picture the stress as I rushed to get everything off my laptop before its battery died and how I nearly lost years of financial records. I just about managed to get everything onto an old laptop before the battery died. It was awful and now I can only play 2000s era games at best over Christmas where I'm on my own.
Anyway, are January sales real and I should hold out or is it wiser to drop a grand on a laptop now? What are the current recommended brands and models?
>>28049 Tried the USB-C port and it didn't take power despite using the power lead from a USB-C only laptop. I can only assume the port is fucked for whatever reason.
>>28050 That would involve buying an enclosure and mean that I'd have no budget data likely until the new year when I need to make a large purchase for a new laptop.
>>28053 What about the parts? I've been planning to build my own PC out of fancy new pieces for several years now; my current one is 11 1/2 years old but it runs just fine. If this is a time when I can be confident I'll be at home to receive a fat new case and motherboard and other bits that won't fit through the letterbox, perhaps I might finally take the plunge.
>>28055 Everything I've heard about PC parts at the moment is that crypto and chip shortages have rendered a lot of things way more expensive than they should be.
>>28055>>28056 A lot of PC parts are cheap at the moment - I bought one of my kids an i5 processor for hardly any money compared to the RRP. But graphics cards are absolutely fucking mental. You'll pay 400 quid for a card that would have cost 100 pounds a year back - I don't know what to do about that other than wait. 3090 cards are over two grand now, which is just a mental amount of money to pay.
>>28057 That's wonderful; that's exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you very much. Now I just need to wait till Monday for those parts to drop even further in price, and soon I'll be tearing around with my brand new 64GB RAM, 12-core CPU, and 3dfx Voodoo 2 graphics card.
I'm thinking about dropping close to a grand on a Dell Latitude 5320 laptop, but I suspect it's overpriced.
I've used one for work the last year and it's done most things pretty well, but it excels at video conferencing. The camera and mic are excellent, I like how I look and sound on it, and Teams/Zoom/Google meet work perfectly.
Are there any cheaper laptops that might do just as well?
I would also consider getting an external camera for my older laptop, but I tried buying a webcam that claimed to be 720p and the field of view was absolute shite.
You're in luck - there are some on eBay right now, brand new with a full Dell warranty for £400. They've almost certainly been purchased by a corporate user, but never actually issued to a member of staff.
I'm about to pull the trigger on this, but like a thicko, I'm now doubting myself. The only thing I can think of that might be different enough to consider is an Apple toy, but those seem to be more fashion statements than laptops. I may be doing video editing in the near future, but is that any reason to get one thing over the other?
That's a tricky one. The Macbook Air really is an incredibly impressive bit of hardware - despite being very thin, the Apple-designed M1/M2 chip is so outstandingly fast and efficient that it'll match practically any Windows laptop, even much chunkier desktop-replacement machines.
The problem is that they start off quite expensive, they get ludicrously expensive with a few upgrades, and you can't upgrade them later - the RAM and storage is permanently soldered on, so what you buy is what you're stuck with.
You only get 256GB of storage on the base model Air. Upgrading to 1TB costs £400 and 2TB costs £800; a 2TB NVMe SSD for a Windows laptop costs less than £100 and takes about ten minutes to install. It's a similar story for RAM - you get 8GB as standard, but if you want 16GB it's an extra £200.
The Latitude 5320 is comfortably fast enough for basic video editing and will cope just fine if you're cutting together some straightforward clips in 1080p. If you're planning on doing something more complex - 4K footage, lots of heavy colour grading, green-screen or other compositing, large projects with lots of edits - then you might want to consider something with a bit more power and/or something with a bigger screen.
Thanks mate. I went with the Dell as I thought it was better to go with what I know. I don't want to fuck about with another operating system on the off-chance I might do some video editing at the moment.
Anyway, thank you for the link, you saved me a good few hundred quid, there.
