Ask HN: Which laptop should I buy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which laptop should I buy?

2 pointseel7 comments

My current laptop, an HP Pavilion, is aging poorly with fan noise problems and various minor issues. I would like to purchase a new laptop for programming activities and productivity, and I am hoping to consult the experience of the HN community to help me find a decent brand / model of laptop. I'm hoping for something under $800, but that might not be realistic.

I'm looking for three things, mainly: 1) Good casing. It needs to be durable. My current laptop is falling apart-- cracked plastic grills, wobbly monitor/lid, worn corners, etc. I also don't need or want useless ports like a 56k modem, "expansion port 3," or a remote.

2) Good power usage/long lasting battery. The battery life on my current laptop dropped to 75 minutes after a little over a year. I don't see why a laptop battery can't last 4, 6, 8 hours or more. At a minimum, I need 3 - 4, but I don't want it to go bad after a year again.

3) Decent Linux support. I don't want to end up with a laptop that can't use wifi on Linux. I'm not sure if this is still a problem now.

My laptop usage is between 6 and 14 hours a day. Light gaming occasionally, but it's not a focus. I need Visual Studio occasionally, but most of my coding (Python, JavaScript, PHP) is done most comfortably in vim. Usually I dual-boot between Windows and Ubuntu on my laptops.

Right now, I am leaning toward a non-Mac notebook. I've never used a Mac, and I'm not against them, but I'm not sure how the transition period would work for me, and the price point is a little higher than I hope for as a student.

Whatever you do, steer clear of Acer. I made the mistake of buying my laptop off of NewEgg, which I'd always trusted when buying desktop parts. I bought the top rated laptop from them that fit my specs. An Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T. Six months later the screen died. I went looking and discovered that not only are the Acer Aspires plagued with this issue, but so are many of their other brands. My mistake for not checking it out more thoroughly and trusting the wisdom of the crowd.

Even before the screen went out I was having issues with it. The screen would blank out any time a little pressure was applied to it. And the machine overheated pretty readily. It had a weird keyboard mouse set up that required awkward hand position and the screen wouldn't fold back past an angle that was actually fairly awkward. Plus it lacked a dvd drive which turned out to be more of a pain than I'd thought it would be. Overall, it wound up as not a very good value for the cost. And not reliable at all. We'll see how it holds up once I get the screen replaced - maybe I just got a faulty screen.

My brother got a Lenovo and hasn't had any trouble with it. So I'll anecdotally second Thaumaturgy's suggestion of Lenovo.

Yes i definitely agree, stay away from Acer. My Lenovo IdeaPad Y530 still works well, a solid product. Bought second hand for 400 USD.

If you want a reasonably new laptop for $800 or less, it won't be a Mac. (I'm not a hater, I'm typing on one now, that's just the way they are. And I hate that statements like that need to be justified.)

HP is far and away the most common brand in our shop, and many of them for the results of design defects. HP has taken to cutting the wrong sorts of corners; they're using cheap foam thermal pads on their GPUs, no shock bumpers on their hard drive mounts, that sort of thing.

The battery life you're looking for will probably mean a smaller screen size, not much bigger than 15".

http://dealnews.com/ has a pretty OK-looking Dell Latitude for $697: http://dealnews.com/Dell-Latitude-Core-i7-Dual-2.66-GHz-16-L... -- Core i7 is real nice, although that'll have an impact on your battery life. I don't see anything there that Linux should have trouble with, and we've had pretty good experiences with Dell so far, especially given their price.

I've had my eye on an MSI lately, but Lenovo is still a really good bet when it comes to reliability: http://dealnews.com/Lenovo-Z560-Core-i5-Dual-Core-2.53-GHz-1... -- Core i5 at a slightly lower speed should give you a little better battery life, and Lenovos are typically fairly reliable and Linux-compatible.

Oh, and if you can scare up the extra cash for it, replace your hard drive with an SSD as soon as you can. Your disk space will suffer (badly), and it'll cost a lot, but it'll save you a fair bit of battery life and you'll be thankful for it the first time you drop your laptop. My laptop travels all over the place with me all the time, and despite having to suffer with only 32G of disk space, the SSD in it has saved my butt more times than I care to count.

My 15" Lenovo T61p is well-made, durable, has a 2-3hr battery life, and gets ~60fps in counter-strike. I've had a Dell Inspiron series for 4+ years (still running), and the T61p outperforms it by a lot in terms of durability, weight, and overall handling and processing.

One of the first cons I had with not just the lenovo laptops is the 'fn' key placement. The T61p has it at the bottom left corner, where the 'ctrl' is supposed to be, so i had to get used to that when i copy+paste, but its not that big of a deal, I got used to it.

ALWAYS get a graphics card even though its another ~$100-$150 add-on because its worth it.And although SSDs are so much better, but ~$400-500 for 320GB doesn't seem to be worth the cash right now, but if you really want one, buy from Adata :D

Do you have a preference on size?

I ended up getting a Mac myself, despite intending not to, but whether I'd recommend it depends on your parameters. Do you lean more towards an ultralight 13" with 10-hour battery life, or a more full-sized 15" or 17" machine? At the 13", 4-5 lbs, long-battery-life side of it I couldn't find anything that beat a Macbook, especially for the same price range (~$1000, which excludes Sony's Z series). But for 15" and 17" sizes, the Macbooks start to look unreasonably pricey ($1800+), and there's a better range of good PC offerings.

I've had several HP/Compaq notebooks over the years. Linux support has been mostly Ok. Last year I bought a MacBookPro with 4G RAM and VmWare Fusion. It ticks all all boxes, all metal case, good battery life, WiFi roaming works very well, including remembering where to use proxies and where not to. Based on my experiences I can recommend the MBP without reservations. Check out the student discounts on AppleStore site.

The ASUS UL series are really good, they look like cheap MBP knockoffs though, I have a UL30VT myself. Very pleased :)

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