Laptops

[John K]

1 hour ago, corsechris said:

I also went with HP servers and workstations as well. Not brand loyalty, just found them to be the best all round of those I'd tried for what we wanted.

Agreed - it's been 15 years since anybody trusted me to spend real money on real things, but when I kitted out our South Korean data center, there was a lot of HP kit in it.

Don't get me wrong there is no way  you can extrapolate from 15 years back and enterprise level kit to domestic - but I just always found HP to be decent solid kit.

And a quick headcount of laptops in the house shows 3 HP's and nothing else - and the one I'm typing this on is probably 5 years old... 

And if you are worried about lack of a serial port for ECU tinkering, a quick Google showed a lot of USB to serial dongles.

And a random port comment - my latest work lappy (HP i7 Elitebook, and I like it a lot) is the first laptop I've ever had WITHOUT a modem / RJ11 port...

Edit: Make that 4 HP lappies, still got to send back the old work one..!

[BugMan]

Working for an international company, I can say without fear, pretty much these days there is very little between any of the major vendors, so as long as you stay with a "brand" chances are you will be OK.

lenove, HP, Dell are all these days much the same, but remember to get the best hardware you can afford at the time, as RAM is about the only thing you can practically upgrade apart from the odd hard disk.

if you can get one with an SSD disk as IHMO this really affects performance along with ram.  8Gb is a good starting point, much less will struggle with modern operating systems.  SSD while not foolproof have no spinning disk, which is more reliable than a physical disk drive

I'm afraid Win10 is probably going to be part of the equation as it's just about on everything these days as Microsoft  have an N-1 policy on platforms, so anything with lovely Win7 has a very short life for support.

I'm not a massive fan of Win10, as it is a bit of a change, but you do get used to it

Serial ports are a thing of the past, as somebody else committed if you need one just get a USB to Serial adapter.

get yourself an external USB hard disk to use as a backup device, many supplied with some software, and don't forget to use it.

Few comments about all the updates, and YES there are a lot, but these actually help in the long run to keep it stable, consider something like "Malware bytes" which will turn off a lot of the back flow of info to MS.

LAST OF ALL DONT FORGET SOME ANTI VIRUS

lots to chose from here AVG works quite well, stay away front Norton, it's bloat ware as well.

Given a relatively low budget forget Apple unless an iPad will do the job

PM me if I can help, been doing this for over 20 years, man and boy