Anyone else not a fan of laptops?

[rednas]

I am the exact opposite. I do not get the point of desktops and dont see how people who are not constantly playing games would not get more out use out of a laptop.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Man, you people are going to hate the modern office environment. I work for an IT company, and companies are not ordering PCs anymore, only laptops. If they to want a PC, they're getting thin clients to connect to a terminal server. Docking stations are used if people want multi monitor setups.

Here, we all get Dell Latitude E7440 Ultrabooks with i7, 16gb ram, 256 SSD, 14" 1080p ips touch screen. Can dock to go dual monitors. I don't think anybody has a desktop here except for lab pcs.

Liked it so much, I bought a E7440 for home from the Dell Outlet during one of their big sales and snagged a similar one for $800 and a 3 yr onsite warranty. So damn nice, I'm using my tablet much less.

 

[smackababy]

Get better laptops. Consumer grade variants tend to suck IMO.
Business class laptops are built to task. Been using my W500 for 6 years now and with a SSD upgrade its still trucking on.

I did get a Macbook for work though, and I have to say, its really REALLY nice.

Business laptops suck just as bad. The alternative to me bringing my rMBP to work was a Lenovo T430s. It likely cost over $1,200 and is absolute garbage. This is the laptop they force developers to use. It doesn't even come standard with 8GBof RAM. Good luck getting Eclipse and WAS instances open at once on 4GB.

 

[Brainonska511]

My laptop is good for work: something I can bring with me when I travel or just to and from the lab everyday. However, I don't think I'm going to replace it with another after I move on from grad school. I just don't envision a niche for a personal laptop to fill in my life that a desktop + tablet doesn't already cover.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I dislike laptops.

I use a laptop for work, because I need to be able to get in from home, from the office, or on the road.

At home, I have a PC in my home office set up with 3 monitors, and then a PC connected to my projector in the basement, office Radeon 290, basement radeon 6870, upstairs stereo sound with a cheap t amp and a pair of bic horn speakers, downstairs is my 5.1 setup, sounds much better than headphones or cheap laptop speakers. tons of local storage, wired gbit access to my NAS, easy to upgrade/swap parts, low maintenance, less expensive to buiild gaming PC vs comparable performance laptop, and pc's generally last much much longer. Still using keyboards from the 1980s/90s.

Laptop have a purpose, but they are inferior.

 

[Sonikku]

Laptops will roast your tadpoles.

 

[Gunbuster]

Not a fan of craptops (720p washed out screens, spinning disk)

On the other hand give me a surface pro 3 or something else with a nice clear high res screen and SSD... All I do at work is email, remote into other boxes, and MS office apps. Don't need some demon machine for that. Just need the SSD to make it not feel like ass.

P.S. I have a Precision M4700, it's okay docked but the battery is junk and it throttles down if I don't haul the pickup truck sized nuclear reactor power brick home with me. Wish the stupid thing was smart enough to run faster on the "normal" dell 90 watt power bricks.

 

[MrSquished]

my laptop has an i5 cpu, 240gb ssd, 8gb ram. it is comparable to the desktop i had for anything but gaming. My heaviest workload is using lightroom sometimes and it works pretty well compared to my desktop.

I'm in the same boat with lightroom. I have an i7 with a 240gb SSd and 16GB ram. my desktop is still better but this thing does LR pretty darn good.

 

[Ronstang]

Useless to me. If I need a computer I want a real one. I use on to tune cars or if Im on the go and need one but I will always have a desktop at home and office.

 

[holden j caufield]

I think some of you guys are really missing out. I had a top of the line desktop a home built vmware esx whitebox, raid card, top end video card. 32gb of ram. I have laptops with similar specs and the only thing missing is a really top end video card that is replaceable. There are many laptops now with 32gb ram capability, 3k 4k screens, etc.

Since my back doesn't feel so well I work on recliner or standing desk and I can bring the laptop anywhere.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

I think some of you guys are really missing out. I had a top of the line desktop a home built vmware esx whitebox, raid card, top end video card. 32gb of ram. I have laptops with similar specs and the only thing missing is a really top end video card that is replaceable. There are many laptops now with 32gb ram capability, 3k 4k screens, etc.

Since my back doesn't feel so well I work on recliner or standing desk and I can bring the laptop anywhere.

man plus whaddya do if ur speaker get scratchy or ur power supply starts buzzing, desktops fdw man

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I used to be pretty anti-laptop. Two things happened.

1) I got enough monies to buy a decent laptop.
2) I got older, and probably surf the web more now than I game. Not to mention actually using a computer for "real work."

So I probably use my laptop 2x as much as my desktop, because I'd rather work in the living room, on the couch, at the coffee shop, etc., than in my man cave.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

man plus whaddya do if ur speaker get scratchy or ur power supply starts buzzing, desktops fdw man

Headphones? Laptops have external power supplies. Easy to swap for a new one.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Headphones? Laptops have external power supplies. Easy to swap for a new one.

I will say though laptops and TVs are the only products I will buy an extended warranty on.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Get better laptops. Consumer grade variants tend to suck IMO.
Business class laptops are built to task. Been using my W500 for 6 years now and with a SSD upgrade its still trucking on.

I did get a Macbook for work though, and I have to say, its really REALLY nice.

My DV7 with the new SSD has been going since 2010, and aside from gaming, works quite well. Even light computer graphics can render fast enough on the i5 so as to be reasonable. At the moment, I have it hooked up to a low res (1360x768) 32" tv for a budget multi monitor setup. Text looks like absolute poopy, but otherwise works well enough for watching anime as they tend to be 720p or lower, while the real work is done on a (slightly) more reasonable 1600x900 display.

I've been debating for awhile if I want to go for a new pc or wait for the lappy to break. On one hand, my cgi hobby can benefit, as well as possibly gaming. On the other hand, my cgi scenes are rarely out of my laptop's bounds, and I don't have the internet to abuse gaming potential anyway, so I feel a new pc would be a waste at the moment.

 

[natto fire]

I used to travel a lot for work, living out of hotel rooms and I have what was a pretty good "gaming laptop" and I got a lot of use out of it. I rarely use it now, but it was a great investment at the time, and now I hold onto it because depreciation has made it worth more to keep as a backup.

 

[88keys]

My laptop is mostly used as a portable youtube/netflix TV.

 

[Aikouka]

In my bedroom, I have my tablet and my lightweight notebook (ASUS Zenbook UX31A) fairly close by. Honestly, I'd rather use the notebook over the tablet in most cases.

Although, the Zenbook has also been one of my most disliked laptop purchases (story time). It's an ultrabook, which means you already pay more for less capability. However, when I bought it, Newegg threw in a free extended warranty -- a nice touch, right? Wrong. After a couple months, I started having issues with my laptop. My tests indicated that the issues were caused by the storage (SSD) getting too hot after doing too much work and simply failing. For example, the system wouldn't even boot after restoring from a back-up -- it just BSOD'd for hours. If you left it alone, it would work fine for a few hours until it got too hot again.

Unfortunately, I just kind of ignored the problem for a while, and instead of using the ASUS warranty, I had to use the extended warranty from Newegg. After talking to the warranty people, he forwarded me to VT Services. I'm going to be pretty frank and say that VT Services is terrible and utterly incompetent. I told them that I was fairly certain that the SSD was the problem, and that it first occurred when I was playing a game (Torchlight II) on the system. The first time that I sent it in, they sent it back stating that they couldn't replicate the problem. Really? That's funny since the Event Log states that it BSOD'd while you had it Not only that, they shipped the laptop back to me turned on. If this laptop had a mechanical drive, it would likely be damaged.

At this point, I wanted to just fix the thing myself. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with the UX31A is that it uses a proprietary SSD that you could only source from eBay for a ludicrous amount (around $1.5 to $2 per GB), and other users reported having issues with the same drive. So, why would I want to pay that much for a used drive that would have the same problem? I decided to send it in again while mentioning my displeasure with their first service, and reiterating what had happened. Well, their grand idea of testing had them browse World Hip Hop News (or whatever it's called) and play Gang Wars on Facebook. As you can guess, nothing came up. At this point, I was frustrated and relegated the laptop to being a busted thing that sort of worked as long as you kept it cool. I actually tried to call the original warranty place that sent me to VT Services, but I sat on hold for two and a half hours before I gave up.

Awhile later, I ended up finding out that Amazon stocked an adapter that converts ASUS's proprietary SSD connector to M.2. So, I ordered one of those and a normal M.2 drive. The first thing that I noticed while working on it was that VT Services lost one of the screws to the bottom of my laptop, and also managed to destroy the threads on that hole as no other screw will stay secured. Then I opened it up and was even more angry at them as they also managed to ruin the screw holding down the SSD. Even though I had the correct screwdriver to turn it, it was rounded out and wouldn't turn. I ended up taking a dremel to my laptop to cut a slot in the ruined screw. Amusingly enough, I found that advice in an old thread on this forum... so thanks.

The best part? It works fine now that I replaced the SSD.

 

[Tombstone1881]

Still, it's nice to have portability.

 

[JohnAlmighty]

When comes the time we'll have internet everywhere, don't see any use for desktops.

 

[John Connor]

Using the laptop on the couch now! I use it on the patio with a Jack and coke and a cigarette too! Laptop is mostly for Internet and desktop is for gaming.

 

[Brainonska511]

When comes the time we'll have internet everywhere, don't see any use for desktops.

We pretty much have internet everywhere. There is still plenty of need for desktops - graphics heavy applications, gaming, large screens for doing work, running instrumentation... The general use might go down, but they won't be redundant and useless.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

We pretty much have internet everywhere. There is still plenty of need for desktops - graphics heavy applications, gaming, large screens for doing work, running instrumentation... The general use might go down, but they won't be redundant and useless.

I think docks and all these new high speed interfaces might even take over those use cases.

At work, we don't even have desktops, we just have laptops we dock. We do plenty of intensive stuff.

The WORST case stuff gets done on ultra powerful machines, but 99% of all use cases are covered just fine with a laptop hooked up to a large screen monitor.

 

[Brainonska511]

I think docks and all these new high speed interfaces might even take over those use cases.

At work, we don't even have desktops, we just have laptops we dock. We do plenty of intensive stuff.

The WORST case stuff gets done on ultra powerful machines, but 99% of all use cases are covered just fine with a laptop hooked up to a large screen monitor.

I work in a lab. For us, especially operating on a research budget, it's cheaper to buy a capable desktop than an equally capable laptop + dock. Plus, there is a slightly better chance a desktop will not 'walk off'. There's also equipment that needs special interface cards, which would make a laptop impractical.

 

[inachu]

Still, it's nice to have portability.

Ahhhh! The good ole days!