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I just bought a MSI GF65 with 10th gen I7, GTX 1660ti and 512gb nvme drive, was about $800 all-in. The difference between generations of the Intel chip are negligible in general, but the difference between the I5 11th and I7 10th is probably very noticable in favor of the I7. Add the nvme drive and the dedicated gpu and for the $200 I believe it to be a better value and somewhat more future proof. At least I hope so, since I already spent the coin.
I noticed a lot of the HP laptops advertise "on-board ram" - Im not sure, but that sounds like they may lack any upgrade path.
Most laptops lack any upgrade path as usually the ram and hdd are soldered on as well as the batteries are internal, more like the cell phones, no expandable memory or easy battery switch, at least laptops have USB for external storage...
I bought a HP laptop last year, one of the higher end sceptre models. There's not much difference other than pure cosmetics... Thickness, weight, battery performance and screen. I use them for ms office and net browsing, can't use them for anything else, so paying more doesn't make much sense, but I wanted a nice lightweight machine that would stick around for 5+ years and the fact that I have to carry my work laptop and my personal laptop everywhere since the work laptop is very tightly locked down had me prefer weight and thickness and paying premium for a nice screen for photo editing.
I've been using a HP i5 laptop for about 10 years now! Upgraded the ram and popped in a SSD.
I think the HPs are probably a bit better in quality than the equivalent Acer and Asus, but probably Lenovo is
equal quality. The HPs (and probably most commodity laptops) are loaded to the gills with crapware, and should be cleaned as much as possible prior to daily use. A number of the HPs (IIRC) are still shipping with 1378x768 LED screens, which is a real drag. Try to find a full HD (1920x1024) IPS display. You won't be sorry. At this time, I think 8 GB ram is ok, but a few years from now, maybe 16 GB will be needed. Intel and AMD CPUs are roughly equal now, but you will get a little more value with the AMD. Unless you have serious needs, 4-6 cores should be plenty.
One of the reasons I bought the MSI is it doesn't use embedded components.
Thanks for the comments everybody. This will mostly be used for speaker measurements & music playback. I'm hoping to keep it under $500. I have an old refurb Dell Latitude (I think it's a 2nd gen i5, 8 GB RAM, and an SSD) in that role now, but the screen is horrible and the wifi card is slow. I think a recent i3 would be a huge upgrade compared to that old tank.
I was assigned an HP Elitebook 840 about a month ago. 8th Gen i5 and probably pricier than you are hoping for. It runs beautifully for what I need to do but if you're running MS Teams, corporate bloatware and much else, 8GB of RAM gets to be a limitation. Overall it's a nice machine and seems as solid or better than the Dells & Lenovos I've had in the past. I'd never trade it for my Macbook Air though.
Of the corporate laptops I've used, lenovo are the ones I prefer. They work well and take some manhandling.
Dell were the worst, I worked for them...
My personal laptop is an old hp envy, about 8 years old i5. The keyboard sucks and the onboard audio is nasty. Good thing usb dacs are great and cheap these days.
For measuring and music playback almost anything will do. But do get i5 or equivalent ryzen with good amount of ram if you want to keep it for a while.
Man, I had to look up that CPU. That's a beast for sure! I recently upgraded my 12 year old i7 second gen desktop to a 8th (IIRC) gen i7 with 6 cores and 12 threads, and upgraded the ram on that to 32 GB. Feel that this will keep me going for another 10 years if I'm lucky.
Yeah, it is overkill for my current needs but I expect five years out of a major hardware investment.
My current main desktop PC uses 8 year old hardware and I have zero issues, I just wanted the portability. It is an Athlon FX-8350 and GTX-660 with 16gb of DDR3 RAM. Nice machine, even as aged as it is. Insane how long higher end hardware remains usable these days. Imagine using a PC built in 1992 in Y2K!
You guys convinced me to spend a little more to future-proof...it didn't take much convincing. I just bought an open box 15" HP Envy 360 with a Ryzen 7 4700U at Best Buy for $640. I'll pick it up tomorrow. Seems like a decent machine and the RAM and NVMe are upgradable. Screen could probably be better, but we'll see tomorrow. I'll use a 27" monitor most of the time at my desk. This thing might even edit 4K video with an external drive.
If the new M1 MacBooks had upgrade options, that would certainly be my choice. I would just run Windows apps on Parallels or Fusion. That new cpu & machine code are stupid fast for so little money, but everything is soldered on the boards.
Fwiw: We bought a HP laptop at costco this year. $499. I5, NVMe, intel crap graphics. But it has a IPS full HD screen. Works great for what we use it for. No gaming though.
We have a 360 convertible with touchscreen - have had it for a while now and it is a solid performer. we like that you can flip the screen around and prop it up like a tent /\ to watch movies and it doesn't get hot.
Dang, you guys must have jinxed me. After ~7 years, the hard drive on my old $250 Toshiba is on it's last leg. Have to get an external drive, 250g should do it, and save what I can before it completely STB. Lot of pictures, build logs, hard to find programs, etc. on there. Not going to be an easy job retrieving all that stuff especially considering the hard drive keeps everything at a complete craw. No fun. No fun at all.
After 4 days of trying to get that thing up I give up (err, boy got tired of messing with it) and we made a mad dash to BestBuy. Picked up a Lenova Legion for $799. intel i7, got some kind of graphics or sound card in it, gaming computer thingy. More than I need but maybe this one will last as long as the old cheap Toshiba. Wish me luck on retrieving data off the old computer.
Easus Data Recovery software. I've recovered numerous crashed drives with it.
It looks like all the data is there and undamaged but getting it out is another story. With very little running, cpu usage in the single digits, memory hovering around 40%, disk usage is 100%. Disk usage never drops below 100% and read/write time is crazy high. It bogs down so much it literally takes 5-10 minutes from the time you click the start button till the menu pops up. We finally got to safe mode and disabled/uninstalled some stuff that could have been the problem and the only change is at startup, it almost boots at normal speed, but give it ten minutes and the disk will be back to 100% and everything comes to a halt.
Is there a way to read the disk with another device if whatever controls this hard drive is faulty but the data is still good? Will that software do this?
If you can get the drive out meaning it is not soldered ten you can get a usb to sata cable and connect to your new laptop to copy. But all laptops are different, but 7 years old might still use an old fashioned HDD.
Kornbread - I'm hoping it's a controller chip going out and not the actual drive. Probably not, but I have my fingers crossed for you. I didn't see that particular Lenovo when I was searching. Our local BB must not carry the Legion series.
Update - The HP I got from BB turned out to have a problem. It made a faint ticking sound, especially when playing YouTube videos. I ruled out the fan. A little searching and seems to be a somewhat common problem. Some people think it could have something to do with a voltage regulator. I'm not taking any chances, so back it went. After watching lots of comparisons from various video production guys I follow, I decided to try the new MacBook Air with the M1 chip. It's fast - edits video about on par with my over-priced machine at work. That machine has a CPU that was over 3 times the price of this MacBook. I also confirmed that ARTA will run using Parallels on OSX, so my old 2012 MacBook Pro will eventually become the new measurement/music machine here in the audio dungeon.
Just realized all my resumes/portfolio/contacts are on the old laptop with no way to get them and I currently have several job applications active. #*ck!
Try booting with linux on usb and see if you can access the HDD and use another usb to copy or move online.
@Kornbread - been there, done that!
Take the problem drive out of the system.
Connect the problem drive and a fresh empty drive to your new laptop.
Boot linux and try to copy the data from the problem drive to the new empty drive.
Explanation:
The drive probably has "bad" sectors. If any of these are used by the operating system, the copy will continually fail.
You just want your data files (and some programs) off of it.
The Linux "drive rescue" utilities can try a particular sector many times before it gives up, and moves to the next sector.
When it's done, you don't care if c:\windows is full of corrupted data, but (typically) most or all of your data files are ok.
A pretty technical process, but it works. I've done this 2 or 3 times over the years.
https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/get-your-data-back-linux-based-data-recovery-tools/
Thanks guys but I'm darn near computer illegitimate. KISS. Way, way over my head and not sure I trust boy to do it, and he has a big fancy room heating gaming puter he built with Linux. Just cannot risk loosing that information. Don't know what it's going to cost, but after Christmas I'll be forced to take it somewhere. Hopefully it won't be too much $ to get the data.
@Kornbread - you can send me the drive and I'll do it for free. One trick sometimes used is to put the drive into a freezer for a couple of hours (in a secure plastic bag of course), then take it out and immediately begin data recovery.
@Kornbread, an easy option for keeping a small number of documents safe (and always available) is Dropbox Basic - a free online storage. Pretty easy to setup and access, maybe give it a shot. Good luck with the job search!
15GB of combined space with gmail on google drive is also always free. both dropbox and google drive can be setup to show as a folder on your machine, so it's easy to move stuff. Dropbox on both windows and mac, google drive, not sure about mac... (don't have any fruits)
I don't know if this functions as well as Time Machine, or if it even functions at all. Time Machine has saved my skin many times, and not only for failed hardware.
https://www.portableone.com/Tech-News/Microsoft-Windows-10-PCs-have-their-own-Apple-Time-Machine-feature
If it's a 7 year old Toshiba and it's got bad sectors in the OS portion, it's almost certainly a standard 5400 rpm spinning platter drive. That's good news - you can take that drive out and use one of these with your new machine to pull the data off -
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tool-free-Enclosure-Optimized-EC-UASP/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3NK6KMZHSTPT5&dchild=1&keywords=2.5+hard+drive+enclosure&qid=1608829924&s=electronics&sprefix=2.5"+,electronics,198&sr=1-3
I just pay the $100/yr for OneDrive premium. A terabyte of cloud, and a full MS Office license that I can run concurrently on five machines, plus the mobile apps.
Onedrive is pretty well integrated in Win10, painless to be honest. My phone is setup to save pictures and other files to the cloud, as well. I really do not like Google Drive, so this is for me a great alternative.
I didn't knew about the 100/yr one drive subscription. The O365 office subscription costs more than that.... I use onedrive for work, and google for personal. MS keeps mixing up my profiles, hence now I carry around two laptops... One work, locked down one and one my personal ubuntu/win 10 dual boot one
Thank you for the offer, but I'm going to need, or plan on using those resumes and portfolio while we're on Christmas/new years break and with shipping as slow as it is right now, it could be a long trip. If not able to get it done locally you may be getting a package.
And yes guys, I'm going to remove my tinfoil hat and start using some of those cloud-based services. If onedrive includes the full microshaft suite, it may be an affordable option.
Tom, watched a vid on removing the hard drive and it doesn't look that hard, but it doesn't look like our kind-of local BB (120 mile round trip) has that hard drive enclosure in stock and if ordered online, s&h will once again be an issue this time of year. If using a usb to sata cable like Ani suggests, will the enclosure be necessary?
Ani, it looks like the local walmart has this https://walmart.com/grocery/ip/PNY-500GB-2-5-SATA-III-SSD-Upgrade-Kit-with-Transfer-Cable-and-Software/172976564 is that a sata to usb cable? Will this work? For the price of just the cable at BB, it looks like I get a cable, free 500gb ssd hard drive, and it's literally a mile down the road instead of a 4hr round trip. If this is the correct cable, what kind of software is needed to move the data?
As far as getting a real shop to work on it, nothing is going to happen till after Christmas anyway, so I'll get boy on it the next couple days. Maybe pick out the hard drive if you guys think that cable from walmart will work, and hopefully he can do some good and not all the way kill it.
Let me ask this though. We shut down a lot of programs, totally removed AVG, and other suggestions we found on the web, no success.
What else, besides a problem directly associated with the hard drive, do I need to be looking for? The hard drive 'says' it's good and that's why I mentioned the data is still there ... I hope that means the data is still there, intact. sfc/scannow did find some corrupt files but boy said they were not important and scannow was unable to fix them anyway.
Is there a favorite website for this kind of thing a dummy could understand and trouble shoot without totally fubaring everything? Or is it best to just stop right here and remove the hard drive and pull data if I can find a cable? and enclosure???