Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Need A New Laptop- Brand Reco?

Macs are like Toyotas and Hondas. Pay a bit more in the beginning and less in the end. Plus the resale value

LENOVO

All will last past obsolescence.

MacBook Pro, hands down.

MacBook Air or Pro.

Lenovo lives in my backpack. Flights weekly 6 months of the year with it. Working construction sites. Current one is 3 years old. No issues with durability.

Operationally, work keeps them constantly updated with latest and greatest protection. No issues that way either.

HP Pavilion 15-inch Laptop, 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1165G7 Processor, Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB Solid State Drive, Windows 10 Pro (15-eg0021nr, Natural Silver Aluminum)

I just got this one. About $998.00 Laptop.

I just replaced my last MacAir with another one, wasn't economical to replace the battery. Six years was a good run. Plug it into a big monitor at my desk, toss it in the truck or whatever. Love the solid state memory, no hard drive to muss up by dropping it (again).

Don't care for the price, but the cost per mile is lower.

Above is good. I make Access data bases and also advanced Excel and also where Access opens Word or Excel and inserts data into Word Bookmarks and Excel cells. This can very complicated an easy to have problems. I always like it the business has HP or Toshiba. Only problem with Toshiba these days is they have gone back to like they were in the 90s and only sell the more expensive stuff like the Portege and Tecra

If you want something expensive then Microsoft Surface Book will give you Apple prices but with Windows 10.

If in doubt it is hard to go past HP with 15.6" screen. The laptops with detachable screens are good but cost a fair bit more and might at the end of the day be not much advantage to you. They can also have problems. Personally I have Toshiba Porteges and Microsoft Surface, both the Pro 7s and Surface Go. The Toshiba Porteges are detachable screens but I prefer the MS Surface range. The Surface Go are the same size as an iPad and mine are cellular.

My lack of Apple is not a reflection on the machines but the operating system. The big plus with Windows and especially with MS Office is there are so many developers that work with them. Sort of like using a Rem 700 action as the basis of an accuracy gun.

My vacation/travel laptop is a lower-end Chromebook. Frankly, one could do nicely with a higher-end one for everything. You would have to be comfortable with Google hosting all your work, but if you were, there's no cost for any software, no personal stuff on your machine (in case it gets stolen) and the machines are much less expensive.

If you absolutely want to stick with Windows, you can get a gem or a lemon with any brand, but Dell, Lenovo, and HP seem to be good in the moderate cost division. I would urge you to not pay annual subscription costs for software, however. Open source and free packages like Libre Office do everything that MS's bloated monster does - even being able to read and save in MS file formats.

I cannot help but suggest that you dump Windows altogether and run Linux Mint as your OS. But some here seem to not like that advice.

Nothing wrong with Linux especially if you don't have to work in a Windows environment. I can almost say the same for Mac. My job was integrating office machines into our customers office. Some of the equipment mfg have spotty Mac support and admittedly we were weak in that area anyway. Windows still ruled when I quit.
I've "fixed" some of my older less computer literate friends with a Linux install. Set up right its hard to break them and if they do ball it up its cheap and easy to fix. Most of these folks only use a browser and nothing else.

Lenovo or HP, hard to go wrong either way. Seem durable, I've been using an HP for the last 4 years and still working fine. Lenovo is what we use on the job site for programing the POC on the total station. They ride around in the work trucks full time and hold up well.

That is not correct for advanced stuff and especially Access. Of course 99.99999% of people are not going to make advanced Access applications or where Access links to SQL Server or advanced Excel applications, HOWEVER, they might well use something made by someone else.To make something for them in Runtimes Access costs a lot more and it won't run the Word or Excel things if they don't have MS Office or Office 365

The subscription Office 365 is a far better deal than the earlier CD ROM versions of MS Office.

I bought a refurbished Lenovo T430, rated A+ condition, new SS124G hard drive, 4G memory, came with Win10. It cost about $200. I had already made a Mint USB, I turned on the new laptop, let the windows crap run until it let me access it, inserted the Mint USB, and Win10 went to hell. My second Linux machine. I had a MacBook Pro that died, that's when I bought the Lenovo.

I am speaking to the 99.99999%, Mike. The original poster is not among the 0.00001% if he needs to ask what brand of laptop to buy. That is not a slam on the OP by any means; just an acknowledgment that he is among the vast majority of people - including me - who use a computer mainly to browse the internet and maybe do a little word processing and spreadsheet work.

Your advice is good and correct as far as I know, but it's like saying that a Toyota Highlander won't cut it on the F-1 circuit.

Way to go, Wayne.

SSD is a must with anything you buy and extra memory.

Hey Lenovo guys, thank you for subsidizing Communist China.

Regarding iMac, it took me about five minutes to learn how to use its operating system, the Windows office suite works just fine, for 99 cents/month it backs up my thousands of photos automatically and gives me free help when needed.

The helpers are Americans.

Macbook Pro with new M1 chip. Once you go Mac you'll never go back.

Rocky read again what I said. That 99.99999999% are the computer owners that developers like me makes things for. When they start to find out what can be made they are ....yeah, I want some of that ..... BUT if they have open source stuff then it is a No Go. HOWEVER, that is where the subscription Office 365 makes things real easy. Do you know if you had Office 2013 on subscription the change to 2016 has no cost.

You said "do a little word processing and spreadsheet work." Correct. Then people like me make something for him that is so much better. As I said before Windows and MS Office is like the Rem700 as basis for an accuracy gun. There are simply so many advanced developers for Windows and MS Office; That in also lets people like me get help and others get help from me etc. This stuff is a bit like a custom rifle. One blokes does wood stocks/blued steel and M70/M98 another bloke is mainly an accuracy builder but they have overlap and sometimes one helps the other.

Tomorrow is Cyber Monday. You might want to check out the deals on refurbished laptops at WOOT!