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Comment by javiramos | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have good recommendations for general office laptops? My company bought about 10 Dell laptops and about half of them have a problem in which they randomly shut off due to some thermal issue. Dell has given us a hard time with the problem and have replaced some of the laptops with new laptops that have had the same problem.

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Which Dell laptops did you buy?

Dell manufactures the whole spectrum of laptop quality, from cheap Walmart garbage to high-end mobile workstations. If you buy their consumer-grade stuff, yeah, it's often junk. But their business- and professional-oriented laptops are usually decent quality. Latitude and Precision, for example. I have both of those and they've been workhorses for me.

Mid-range Thinkpads would also be a fairly safe bet.

They are f%%%ing overheating. Latitudes, Precisions, Alienwares, HPs ZBooks and Elitebooks, all of them have a barely good enough heatsink on the CPU, and often GPU. I dunno about Lenovos, tbf.

Having those chips run at 95+ degrees most of the time (when doing serious work for which the laptops were designed) and depending on Intel's built in thermal throttling (A. Last. Resort. Measure!) is ridiculous.

Dell has even been smartassing it with lower throttle thresholds, god forbid they use better cooling instead.

But hey, they save £1 on every heatsink, so F U, buy a new laptop when this one breaks!

Frankly I am sick of this. Just make proper heatsinks, I can personally come and shove a £2 coin up yours, thanks.

While the MacBook Pro thermals are not frequently lauded for many of the same reasons, the metal unibody does make an effective heatsink. I'm not sure why that isn't standard with every expensive-ish laptop, given that most of the advantages of ThinkPad-style plastic are gone these days (since modern laptops aren't user-serviceable anyway).

> I'm not sure why that isn't standard with every expensive-ish laptop

I don't know about you, but I prefer my laptop to stay cool enough to stay on my lap and be able to type on. Plastic is a good enough insulator to keep the heat away from me, and it's pretty easy to find laptops with adequate heatsinks.

I've a precision 5530. On paper it's a lovely machine. In practice, lots of graphics issues, docking station issues where screens flicker, etc. It's such a shame for something so costly. It's a work laptop, I'd have returned it long ago if I'd purchased it myself.

I have a 5520, so, the generation before.

Specced the heavens, max memory, ECC, Xeon.

I also had issues with the dock, but it was exclusively the dock, the TB16 is a flaming hunk of garbage that has no business being on my desk.

The issues mostly stem from the fact that the USB controller (which powers nearly everything in the dock) is shockingly terrible.

But, regardless, there are more issues because the 5520 (and probably 5530) have only 2PCIe lanes to the thunderbolt port. I was surprised to learn that "thunderbolt3" != "thunderbolt3" in all cases.

I have a 5k laptop that is a buggy pile of trash because someone tried to save a dollar on a USB controller.

Honestly if I could lug this thing at Michael Dells' head I would do so I'm so frustrated.

But anyway, the laptop by itself is fantastic, it does get toasty under full load but I tend to disable the GPU so it's bearable. I considered getting the new WD19 thunderbolt dock before I realised about the thunderbolt PCIe lanes.

It sucks when something good gets gutted for seemingly inconsequential cost savings. I bought a precision M6600 back in 2012. It went all over the world with me for work. I had it replaced with an M6700 in 2015 100% under warranty when the GPU let out the magic smoke.

Since then the one I have has been rock solid. I just gifted it to my kiddo b/c it's overkill for my current role. I will miss all of the jokes about my space heater though. Nothing will unify a group of 30 of my colleagues more than jeering me as I draw that beat up 17" coffee table from my backpack like some kind of nerd excalibur.

(Also more to the point I've experienced OP's issue a few times with it over the years.)

We use thousands of Dell pro laptops (Latitude, Precision). They often release BIOS updates to fix these types of issues, which also include the latest remediation for Intel vulnerabilities. They've got a tool to automatically download and update their drivers stack: https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln311129/dell-co...

IT people supposedly historically have had the best luck with Lenovo, in particular with respect to frequency of problems and handling of problems when they do occur. I just bought a Lenovo Yoga as my first Lenovo laptop and it's my favorite I've ever owned and the only one I like over my last MacBook Pro and Air.

Off late (since 2018) Dell Latitude has been pretty troublesome.

https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Major-Latitude-7390-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8wbhhv/high_failu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/ar1mas/the_latitude_7...

Many people, including myself, like Thinkpad laptops. And by Thinkpad I mean Thinkpad, not any laptop from Lenovo.

I have personally purchased three generations of the Thinkpad X1 Carbon over the years. I know the Thinkpad T4?? are popular also.

Thinkpad are not what they used to be, they're not "terrible" but the Latitude series runs circles around them in terms of upgradability, build quality and software support.

I would rather buy a new HP Elitebook or Dell Latitude than anything from Lenovo at this point.

Software support meaning Linux?

Not just linux, OpenBSD/FreeBSD too.

But yes, they support Windows well enough.

There's also the whole Superfish incident, injecting malware to the OS from the BIOS is scary- and while it did not affect the Thinkpad line specifically I am increasingly wary of the company because of it.

And since the hardware is so hard to service these days, and (soldered components, plastic clips) and it isn't very special either there's not enough "appeal" to suade my opinion in their favour.

Lenovo laptops are still way more serviceable than the alternatives. Its getting worse, granted, over time.

My point was that it’s not actually more serviceable than a Dell Latitude or HP Elitebook.

iFixit regularly rate those devices 10: https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability

Maybe it's just me, but I find the serviceability of Thinkpads subpar. This one is from the T420's maintenance manual:

    1170 Fan assembly
    For access, remove these FRUs in order:
    * “1010 Battery pack” on page 67
    * “1020 ExpressCard blank bezel” on page 68
    * “1050 DIMM slot cover” on page 73
    * “1070 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless WAN” on page 75
    * “1080 Keyboard” on page 77
    * “1110 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless LAN” on page 85
    * “1120 Keyboard bezel assembly, FPC cable, and Bluethooth daughter card” on page 87
    * “1150 Speaker assembly” on page 95
    * “1160 LCD unit” on page 97

https://thinkpads.com/support/hmm/hmm_pdf/t420_t420i_hmm.pdf

I have the feeling that the "legendary thinkpad serviceability" means two things: the document that you cite is publicly available and that customer disassembling the whole thing and replacing one subassembly is supported way of solving warranty claims.

And by the way, the "good thinkpad" series (ie. letter + two numbers) were both made and designed by Acer/Wistron and significantly mechanically simpler than the previous IBM designed thinkpads (eg. if you disassemble "low-cost" 600E, you end up with ~10 random-ish machined aluminium brackets and how to disassemble the thing is highly non-obvious).

For most business line notebooks the maintenance guide is publicly available and you don't have to remove the speakers and lcd screen to access the fan assembly (serious, wtf?). Thinkpad serviceability is overrated, it's certainly not "legendary", even if you can consider it decent.

98% of users aren't going to care about Linux support. That should be relevant only if they happen to need it.

Apart from the x1 gen 7 bad Linux support, pretty much every other thinkpad Linux support has been excellent.

What is the problem with gen 7 ? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb... looks ok to me ?

I'm on my 2nd dud in 2 years Lenovo has ruined ThinkPad.

My workplace mainly uses HP equipment. The HP Probook line seems pretty solid from whats I've seen so far.

Also they are the only manufacturer so far IIRC which include a 'Pre-boot DMA Protection' option in the BIOS which helps mitigate the Thunderbolt 3 DMA attack

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