Sunday, 27 August 2017

Ask SE: Looking for decent laptops under (or slightly over) $500

quote [ • 7th Generation Intel Core i5-7200U Processor (Up to 3.1GHz)
• 15.6" Full HD Widescreen Comfy View LED-backlit Display supporting Acer Color Blast technology
• NVIDIA GeForce 940MX with 2GB of GDDR5 Video Memory
• 8GB DDR4 Memory, 256GB SSD
• Up to 12-hours Battery Life ]

My laptop screen went out due to busted micro-HDMI port, kind of urgent I replace ASAP for work. Looking for suggestions for new machine. More details in extended.

(Link/thumb is to a laptop I'm considering, but is more expensive than I'm hoping to spend.)

Shit happens. My girlfriend tripped over the HDMI cable I had connecting my laptop to her TV so we could watch movies, and she bent the micro-HDMI port in the computer. When I tried to realign it I shorted the port and caused the laptop screen to go out. Replacing the motherboard would be as costly as buying a cheap laptop. So I'm asking the community for suggestions.

Requirements:
Quad core processor for multitasking
8GB RAM (I've found 4GB with Win10 is sluggish)
Dedicated graphics card (separate video memory)
256GB+ SSD or 7200rpm HDD

Willing to consider dual-core processors, and I'd even go integrated graphics if the machine is powerful enough otherwise.

I use my laptops primarily for watching/streaming videos, web browsing, semi-pro audio production (recording and post-processing), and very occasionally for light video editing. Not big into gaming but wouldn't mind a machine that can play titles from 3-5 years ago.

I'm trying to stay under $500, but willing to go over if it's worth it. Used and/or refurbished laptops are being considered. (Especially if the price is closer to $300!)
[SFW] [ask SE]
[by JWWargo@2:48amGMT]

Comments

lilmookieesquire said @ 3:35am GMT on 27th Aug [Score:2 Informative]
Woot.com usually has some refurbished gear.
JWWargo said @ 3:59am GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Informative]
Shipping Note: Shipping to Alaska and Hawaii is not available for this item

Seeing that on every laptop I look at. Downside of living on one of the most remote islands in the world.
lilmookieesquire said @ 4:57am GMT on 27th Aug
You're in Hawaii/alaska now? Noted!
JWWargo said @ 5:04am GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Good]
Hawaii again! Been living here on and off since 2011. Came back in November 2015 and decided to stay indefinitely/until I want to travel again.
krupa said @ 8:33am GMT on 27th Aug
I'm sure some upstanding SE'er could help you with that.
JWWargo said @ 7:24pm GMT on 29th Aug [Score:2 Good]
Thanks for all your input, SEers! I was able to get a one year, interest free loan through my credit card (offer my bank was promoting) and went ahead and purchased the Acer laptop I linked to for the post. Did the expedited shipping for a Thursday arrival and then I'm back im business.
King Of The Hill said @ 6:19am GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Informative]
Try the Dell outlet or Lenovo outlet.

I just bought a Lenovo ThinkPad for $600... 16Gb of Ram, i5, 500Gb 7200 Rpm drive, Win 10 pro. It was on sale as a back to school special...

Got it for my wife... I'm sure you can find cheaper, but ThinkPads are still really stout machines.
captainstubing said @ 7:10am GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Underrated]
After years of muddling through with a parade of $200 second hand laptops I recently splurged on a Dell desktop. Fucking mind blowing. A screen I can see, processors that...you know, process stuff, not constantly worrying about temps, loads of everything...just wonderful. And my posture is so much better now.

I'm thinking the handful of thing I miss about laptops - reading on the loo, reading on the couch etc - can be covered with a cheap Lenovo 10" tablet.

I don't think I will be going back to a laptop any time soon.

JWWargo, could you cover your work needs/ movie watching with a good enough Android tablet and then buy a refurb desktop?
Dienes said @ 2:43pm GMT on 27th Aug
I did the same thing - splurged to build a nice gaming/work desktop and then have a little Chromebook for writing on the road, reading on the couch, etc. The battery life on that thing is incredible and so much easier to write with than a tablet.
JWWargo said @ 6:46pm GMT on 27th Aug
Don't know much about Chromebooks, will look into them. Thanks!
HoZay said @ 5:23pm GMT on 27th Aug
The 7" Kindle is a great little tablet for couch, loo, bed, etc. Fifty bucks new, often see them for $35 as refurb.
captainstubing said @ 10:45pm GMT on 27th Aug
Yeah. Perfectly serviceable tablets are approaching the point where they are all but free. Now pretty much anyone can afford one and use it to tweet their outrage at the plight of the ten year old kids building them. That's got to be some sort of progress.
HoZay said @ 11:57pm GMT on 27th Aug
buy a refurb, and feel good about recycling.
JWWargo said @ 6:45pm GMT on 27th Aug
That's a possibility. Thought also about using the money to upgrade smartphone to something I could use for work, too.
JWWargo said @ 6:43pm GMT on 27th Aug
Thanks, Lenovo has got some super cheap laptops! I'll keep my eye out for a decent one. I need at least a 7200rpm drive for audio recording. SSD is most definitely preferred but probably out of my price range overall.
King Of The Hill said @ 6:43am GMT on 1st Sep
Just buy an SSD from amazon.

Lenovo has a neat little utility that allows you to make a bootable USB recovery image. Do that, slap in the new and far cheaper on Amazon SSD and boot the usb stick and reimage the machine to the factory image....Worth the coin.
krupa said @ 12:40pm GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Sad]
I just checked for the new macbook pro, with highest specs. In Finland, it is just slightly over 5000eur.

Fuck that shit. I love macs for their pure usability, (and really really good interoperability with iphones) but they absolutely suck regarding the price.

So, I guess I could look for a windows-machine and put OSX in it.
steele said @ 2:27pm GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Underrated]
If you're not adverse to used, check craigslist or your local facebook for sale groups. I see high end laptops that are only a couple years old go for less than 300.
Ebichuman said[1] @ 10:20pm GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Informative]
The Acer one you linked to is not a bad machine. They keep changing the model number (Newegg has an exclusive version of it that is very similar), but for mine I bought it when it had a 1 TB regular 2.5" drive and added the SSD and more RAM for relatively cheap.

The 940M/MX is much better than no video card, but it isn't incredible. Still, it's hard to settle for integrated graphics if you want something that can play games that are less than 10 years old.

My only complaints are: (1) screen is TN panel, meaning it definitely requires some careful adjustment and use to not have color inverted sections, and (2) screen is not a touchscreen, which in fact (once you have it) is very useful in Win 10.

But yeah, it almost seems to be an unspoken conspiracy that laptops cannot have all three of (a) 1080p IPS, (b) SSD, and (c) discrete graphics, for under $600. Considering how incredible phone specs and capabilities can be at $500, the stagnation in computer specs is frustrating.

If you have other specific questions, let me know.
JWWargo said @ 10:42pm GMT on 27th Aug
I also like that RAM and HDs are easy to upgrade on that Acer laptop. Battery life is awesome, too.

Is there a significant difference between the i5-7200u and the i7-7500u processors that would make the extra $100 in price worth it? (Both are dual-cores and capable of hyperthreading.)
Ebichuman said @ 11:54am GMT on 29th Aug
I think the difference between the i5-7200u and the i7-7500u would be about a wash at $100. Not an especially great deal, but definitely some minor (~10%) improvement.
Kama-Kiri said @ 11:40pm GMT on 27th Aug
Let me just interject to say that IPS should not be dismissed. The viewing angles of TN panels are just awful in comparison.

Also at 15" 1080 is the bare minimum if you use the screen for reading.

And, 2:3 ratio screens on laptops rock. (Surface Laptop, Pixel Chromebook, maybe one or two others)
Ebichuman said @ 11:55am GMT on 29th Aug
Agreed. But it's a very tall order to get both specs at a low price on laptops. Only recently have I seen a 1080p + IPS screen on a laptop that wasn't materially deficient in some other aspect for less than $500.
Kama-Kiri said @ 4:58am GMT on 27th Aug
I'd be surprised if you could get 256 GB SSD, 8GB, and discrete graphics in a modern laptop for under $500.

Note that "quad core" isn't a very good indicator of performance, a high end desktop dual core part could easily blow away a low voltage, low power quad core chip.

Since you want a workstation and a not interested in mobility, perhaps a desktop PC?

(I own two laptops, a Chrombook Pixel 2013 which I picked up refurb for $300 and is totally awesome, and a Lenovo x260 16GB/i7 work machine which cost $1000 refurb and is merely OK. Both are very much secondary machines, as I find just any kind of task is easier on a PC with a large monitor and full keyboard...)
JWWargo said @ 5:13am GMT on 27th Aug
That one I linked to is closest I found to my wishlist at $580 brand new. Found the same laptop refurbished for cheaper on another site. Unless I find something else comparable to consider, it may be what I end up purchasing.

I was thinking about a desktop, too, but I need a mobile device as I do some of my audio recording and work for a media production company at other sites away from home. My crappy smartphone just doesn't cut it for what I need to do.
Kama-Kiri said @ 7:30am GMT on 27th Aug
That's a dual core machine. Still, it has a 1080 screen and is otherwise very well spec'd for the price. Even has a webcam and a DVD drive!
JWWargo said @ 6:40pm GMT on 27th Aug
I was under the impression that processors will delegate programs to individual cores to distribute computing power evenly, so the more cores the more programs you can run. Is that false information?
Kama-Kiri said @ 11:37pm GMT on 27th Aug [Score:2 Informative]
It's misleading rather than false.

Programs (tasks) can be shared by a single core transparently to the user, just like the memory, data bus, and storage are shared. It can help to distribute the workload over several physical cores, but it is not necessarily better and it doesn't automatically mean you can run more programs. Note that a "running" program may not be using the PCU all the time, only big loads like encoding, decoding, transcoding typically put substantial workloads on the CPU. How many programs you can run is, at the consumer level at least, bound by system memory rather than CPU.

In my experience how fast a system feels to the user in everyday use is rarely a function of the CPU. Fast storage, sufficient memory and good graphics are more important.
donnie said @ 11:00am GMT on 27th Aug
The only thing wrong is a broken port? You could probably just fix it with a soldering iron. Did you try?
JWWargo said @ 7:08pm GMT on 27th Aug
I haven't soldered anything since I was 14, and I don't currently have access to an iron. I took the laptop in to a local repair shop but he said they don't do soldering.

It's an Asus Transformer, model T200TA-C1-BL. I bought it used off eBay last year for $250, came upgraded to Windows 10. Had an open HD bay and I threw in a 250GB SSD. The only things I really dislike about it are the embedded and unreplaceable 4GB of RAM, which isn't enough to smoothly operate the OS with multiple programs running, and the integrated graphics which slows down many a website.

Replacing the motherboard would cost more than I paid for it, and take time to fix myself or more money to pay someone else to do it.
donnie said @ 8:54pm GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Interesting]
Well... if you have a 250gb SSD already loaded with Windows 10 then it would be silly to pay extra for a new laptop with an SSD. Have a look to see if you can get something similarly spec'd to the Acer in OP but with a spinny drive. When you get it just junk the drive and sysprep (google it) the one you have - it'll be like having your old machine back.
JWWargo said @ 9:25pm GMT on 27th Aug
The SSD is storage only. OS is on the embedded flash memory of the Laptop.
yunnaf said[1] @ 2:12am GMT on 28th Aug
I'm confused. I can understand that Win 10 on your Transformer is embedded in flash memory but donnie was talking about buying a laptop. Win OS is on the drive in laptops. Buy a laptop running Win 10. Transfer the image of the laptop HD onto your SSD. Then replace the HD of the laptop with the SSD. It is not hard to upgrade to Win 10 from Win 7 or 8. It's a matter of what you can buy with Win 10 already installed.
JWWargo said @ 2:22am GMT on 28th Aug
The Laptop came with an embedded MultiMediaCard, eMMC, it's a flash drive like a USB thumb drive or SD card. MY model had a 64GB one attached to the motherboard, so it isn't removable. The computer also had a empty 2.5 inch hard drive bay that I put my own SSD into for extra storage.

More info on eMMC: https://www.howtogeek.com/196541/emmc-vs.-ssd-not-all-solid-state-storage-is-equal/
yunnaf said @ 12:50am GMT on 30th Aug
But I'm talking about your new purchase, a straight forward laptop with a lame HD that you use to switch in your SSD. The idea is that the new laptop has to sold for an inferior price because the HD is small. You already own the expensive SSD. This combination is best bang for the next dollar you have to spend.
JWWargo said @ 2:27am GMT on 30th Aug
I think I was confused, too. I went ahead andcpurchased one that meets my needs and has a 256 SSD plus an extra bay I can put my SSD from old laptop into.

BTW, old laptop stopped turning on completely so I did more than just short the screen out. :(
zarathustra said @ 7:11pm GMT on 27th Aug
I don't have any recommendations regarding a specific lap top, however, if your broken laptop isn't too old you might want to figure out what parts in it may be usable in a new computer. The memory in the old one might serve as a free upgrade in the new one. The hard drive might make a convenient external drive. If you were to get one that uses the same battery you will have a spare. Just something to consider.
JWWargo said @ 7:16pm GMT on 27th Aug
Good ideas, unfortunately with my Asus Transformer all parts are embedded onto the motherboard save for the ability to add a second HD. It has one of those eMMC flash memory drives on the main board, and the keyboard docking station (it's a hybrid) has a second drive bay for adding extra storage. I removed the 250GB SSD drive I had put in it, and already purchased a HD enclosure so I can use it as an external drive for whatever new machine I end up with.
zarathustra said @ 7:46pm GMT on 27th Aug [Score:1 Informative]
Too bad. However, since you have an ssd, you may want to consider saving some money on a lap top by buying one with a conventional drive, putting your ssd in it and using the conventional drive as your external. It would extend your battery life as ssds take far less power and, a direct sata 3 connection is faster than a usb 3 so will take better advantage of the strengths of the drive.
JWWargo said @ 8:04pm GMT on 27th Aug
Totally possible, I would just need to make sure whatever laptop I buy I can swap out the HD relatively easily. I don't have time or tools to get into making a Frankenstein machine.
zarathustra said @ 8:10pm GMT on 27th Aug
Usually, you would be talking about one or two screws on an external access cover. It is literally a five minute job. It would take you longer to reinstall windows, but with an ssd you are probably still talking about an hour total.

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