• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Please recommend an affordable laptop...

D

Dkin

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 11, 2011
Messages
1,777
Reaction score
310
- for the wife
- mostly email and MS Office
- LOTS of online shopping (kidding)

Processing power is not the goal here. Just need something affordable and reliable.

No tablets (including Surface Pro...which I like, but she doesn't)
 
I goth the wife a fairly low priced Dell recently. I'll get feedback, but it seems to be working well.
 
I was dumb enough to buy an HP laptop and laser printer/scanner/copier last year. Let a HP salesman on the floor at Best Buy get in my ear. Worst tech junk I ever purchased. Stay away from HP. I wish I had.

My wife got a Lenovo and loves it. It's twice as fast and weighs half what mine does and the solid state hard drives last longer.
 
My Lenovo Thinkpad was like $350 or so and it does everything you need just fine.
 
Brangus said:
I was dumb enough to buy an HP laptop and laser printer/scanner/copier last year. Let a HP salesman on the floor at Best Buy get in my ear. Worst tech junk I ever purchased. Stay away from HP. I wish I had.

My wife got a Lenovo and loves it. It's twice as fast and weighs half what mine does and the solid state hard drives last longer.
Click to expand...

I disagree with this line of thinking. Every manufacturer has good and bad offerings. Laptops are commodities to some extent anyways so it's hard to fuck it up. I have an HP now and it's the best computer I've ever owned.
 
DEACisGO said:
I disagree with this line of thinking. Every manufacturer has good and bad offerings. Laptops are commodities to some extent anyways so it's hard to fuck it up. I have an HP now and it's the best computer I've ever owned.
Click to expand...

Most people here know I work for Lenovo so I am biased. But even I know this is true to a large extent - especially at the middle and lower price points. There is some differentiation and innovation in the high end products. And ours are the best, of course. Seriously, look at the Yoga 910 or the ThinkPad X1 Yoga is you want something great.
 
I need similar advice for my wife in the 400-700 range. She needs MS office and laptop capability.
 
Since most everything is done via phone or work computer, I have not bought a laptop in 5 years. But with the wife going back to school I am going to need one as our old HP is about dead.

Any recs with all the new technology out there? There will be no gaming needed, just school stuff and web browsing.
 
I was in the same boat, not having purchased a laptop in many years. I recently bought an Acer Aspire E5-575G-53VG back in March for ~$550 on Amazon, and it's been great. It's relatively cheap in price (but not the cheapest), and does very well in many important areas I was targeting: long battery life, solid processor, large solid-state drive, and decent enough graphics card to run the videogames I want to play.

Edit: TAB's post reminded me - also has a CD/DVD drive, 3x USB, HDMI, and VGA hookups.
Second edit: this may be larger/heavier than what you're looking for, but I routinely (read: several days a week) tote it around in a laptop backpack.

I'd look at that, and comparable laptops (Amazon makes this very easy to do side-by-side comparisons). There is a large tier of cheaper ($250-$500) laptops, but they will feel cheaper and won't last as long because of worse processing, worse battery, etc.
 
Last edited:
I need some recs as well.

Looking to buy 3-4 business laptops for attys to work from home/travel. We have a Microsoft Office 365 setup linking to cloud servers, so maybe need decent processor speed but not a ton of onboard storage. Also defs need a port for external monitor. Looking up to 1k per in price.
 
TheTwinAndreBen said:
I need some recs as well.

Looking to buy 3-4 business laptops for attys to work from home/travel. We have a Microsoft Office 365 setup linking to cloud servers, so maybe need decent processor speed but not a ton of onboard storage. Also defs need a port for external monitor. Looking up to 1k per in price.
Click to expand...

In all seriousness, if I was buying a computer for people to use for work, especially if they are traveling, I would buy a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. If you don't need it to be so thin and light and want to save some money go with a ThinkPad T4xx model. We (Lenovo) make a lot of cheaper, commodity computers but the ThinkPads are solid as a rock and very durable. The usual caveats apply - I am not a technical guy and am no expert - this is all just my opinion...
A solid state drive and lots of memory are key features.
 
My 2010 Macbook's battery died (for the 3rd time) a couple months ago, and Apple no longer fixes/works on products of theirs that are more than 5 years old. Didn't wanna go the third-party route to get it repaired, and I needed to get a new one anyways with school starting up soon. Ended up purchasing a Lenovo Yoga 720 2-in-1 13" a week ago, and I have nothing but good things to say about it so far.
 
scooter84 said:
In all seriousness, if I was buying a computer for people to use for work, especially if they are traveling, I would buy a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. If you don't need it to be so thin and light and want to save some money go with a ThinkPad T4xx model. We (Lenovo) make a lot of cheaper, commodity computers but the ThinkPads are solid as a rock and very durable. The usual caveats apply - I am not a technical guy and am no expert - this is all just my opinion...
A solid state drive and lots of memory are key features.
Click to expand...

Also not a computer guy, but my work gave me the X1 carbon and it's been great so far. Might be more than he wants to spend though.
 
scooter84 said:
In all seriousness, if I was buying a computer for people to use for work, especially if they are traveling, I would buy a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. If you don't need it to be so thin and light and want to save some money go with a ThinkPad T4xx model. We (Lenovo) make a lot of cheaper, commodity computers but the ThinkPads are solid as a rock and very durable. The usual caveats apply - I am not a technical guy and am no expert - this is all just my opinion...
A solid state drive and lots of memory are key features.
Click to expand...

We are looking at the Lenovo Thinkpad T470 14" starting at around $800, it looks like its in our price point and capable enough and has the right ports, although I prolly wanna go hold one in person before purchasing.
 
scooter84 said:
In all seriousness, if I was buying a computer for people to use for work, especially if they are traveling, I would buy a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. If you don't need it to be so thin and light and want to save some money go with a ThinkPad T4xx model. We (Lenovo) make a lot of cheaper, commodity computers but the ThinkPads are solid as a rock and very durable. The usual caveats apply - I am not a technical guy and am no expert - this is all just my opinion...
A solid state drive and lots of memory are key features.
Click to expand...

Any yeah -- the carbon looks sweet but they start at 1200 I think, and I need 4 so getting up there.
 
HailToTheDeacons said:
I was in the same boat, not having purchased a laptop in many years. I recently bought an Acer Aspire E5-575G-53VG back in March for ~$550 on Amazon, and it's been great. It's relatively cheap in price (but not the cheapest), and does very well in many important areas I was targeting: long battery life, solid processor, large solid-state drive, and decent enough graphics card to run the videogames I want to play.

Edit: TAB's post reminded me - also has a CD/DVD drive, 3x USB, HDMI, and VGA hookups.
Second edit: this may be larger/heavier than what you're looking for, but I routinely (read: several days a week) tote it around in a laptop backpack.

I'd look at that, and comparable laptops (Amazon makes this very easy to do side-by-side comparisons). There is a large tier of cheaper ($250-$500) laptops, but they will feel cheaper and won't last as long because of worse processing, worse battery, etc.
Click to expand...

Bump.

This laptop has been absolutely fantastic, BUT my right hinge just started breaking. Apparently this is a very common problem this laptop, and Acers in general. It's quite lame, and naturally it happened just two months out of warranty. Now it's effectively a desktop because I don't want to open and close it anymore to make it worse. The computer and screen still work fine, so I don't want to fork out money or spend time trying to repair it.

At first I thought it was just the screen bezel popping loose, but it's just cheap/poor design in the underlying frame. FYI for anyone else looking at an Acer.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top