Opinions on laptops

[TheDustyZebra]

I agree with Dusty here. I have an Acer, an HP, and a Dell combo laptop and tablet. As far as keyboard goes the HP has them all beat by a mile. the Acer which is a nice and quite cheap laptop has that reduced key board Dusty is speaking of and I find it a royal pain. But so far all of them have been very dependable. (err. after I taught my wife to use the power-off rather than than the power button on the Dell.)

Oh, good, it's not just me! Seeing how many of the blasted things there were being made that way, I had concluded I might be the only one who cared.

 

[hopewrites]

I type too hard to use my built in keyboard. I use a wireless one that is larger than my 13" laptop would accommodate, and is sturdy enough to handly my firm typeing.

I also use a wireless mouse because I never could get the hang of backwards finger mousing on that dratted pad they tuck right where my weary hands want to rest.


Granted, most of my computing these days is done on one of our three cell phones. As they have our only internet at the moment, and even tethering them to the laptop doesnt provide adequate data speed.

We've had it... 2yrs? Bought it referbished. The cd/dvd drive was the first to go. Replaced it with a peripheral one, what, two months back.

Im half tempted to download a new keybord for my new phone. The stock one is driving me nuts. Ive retyped 40% of this post.

 

[Kylara]

I use SwiftKey with a colemak layout on my phone. Love the colemak layout, but SwiftKey and I have been having disagreements with touch accuracy, though it may be my phone screen. My partner has no such problems

 

[REBerg]

How far we've come.

 

[Vertigo]

I use a laptop exclusively but mine if a very high power machine that I use for development work. Less experienced on low power cheaper ones, though I did recently get a cheap Lenovo for my mum which seems to be working just fine.

One thing I would recommend though is, if you're going to be doing much running on battery, then consider paying the extra to have all solid state drive rather than a hard disk. I don't recommend this for speed but rather for because it will at least double running time before the next charge.

 

[Mirannan]

Something that migbht be worth looking into, for anyone who might want to upgrade memory:

Check how many memory slots there are in your laptop, and also (more important) where they are. As an example, I have a machine that used to be state of the art but is now 15 years old and I can't reinstall the OS to gid rid of the rubbish because M$ no longer supports XP. Anyway, it shipped with 512M of memory. Crucially, said memory occupied 2 slots; one of them is easily accessible (remove a panel on the bottom) but the other is buried deep in the guts of the machine. So I have the rather odd amount of 1.25GB of memory in it, now.

The point is that if you want the machine upgraded, it might be a good idea to arrange for that to be done before shipping - unless you can find out the way the memory is delivered (1 slot filled? 2? 4?) and where the memory slots are. Which is often rather difficult.

Regarding the issue of disks and power, it might be useful to consider the effect of more memory on power usage. If your machine is relying on the swapfile a lot (because of not really enough memory) then it will use a lot more power, be slower and get a lot hotter - maybe this wouldn't apply if you have a solid state disk, but I can't comment on that because I don't.