"Best" Notebook

[marcplante]

Loaded title. My wife has had a Samsung ATIV9 15" notebook that she loved, which is great since she's a tough sell when it comes to notebooks. Unfortunately, their design is flawed, and the screen/top are literally coming unglued, so it appears that she's going to need something new. She's currently holding the notebook together with a binder clip and not moving it, as she doesn't want to invest the time in shipping it back to a Samsung service center for repairs.

Which leads to my question. There are a lot of feature rich notebooks to choose from these days. Dell XPS, Microsoft Surface books, HPs, Lenovo Yogas and thinkpads, etc. Which if the contemporary models are holding up from a durability perspective? Which ones are built to accomodate reasonable HD and battery swaps to prolong their useful lives?

She wants another Samsung, but I suspect their fundamental design hasn't changed.

Any opinions, or pointers to laptop "guides" that address these questions?

There are articles like this from Laptop magazine, but I was wondering who does the most thorough research.

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptop-brand-ratings

Thanks,

 

[mlhm5]

My #1 requirement for a laptop is the screen resolution, 1080p. Second is the memory, at least 8GB, and third is the processor. Lots of deals on i5's but few on i7's. I check Dell factory outlet often and have bought several there. You can always swap out the HD for an SSD. Lots of those for sale on almost any computer website. Of course if you are a gamer, that completely changes the scene.

 

[IntelUser2000]

You can change storage on most devices quite easily.

Battery? Depends heavily on the device. The devices you were saying as examples don't make it easy to replace the battery. You have to disassemble most of the laptop to do so. They are built for utmost portability anyway.

The Lenovo laptops seem to really suck on the low end. They are decent on the high end.

If you want component swaps you'd want to go for bigger, thicker laptops using 35/45W -H parts and shun the 4.5W/15W chips. The low power CPUs are all BGA by nature. Some laptops don't even let you upgrade the memory, because it uses the more compact and lower power LPDDRx which are soldered on the board. There's still no guaranteed way to know whether they are easily swappable until you read reviews.

Personal experience with two Dell systems tells me they are quite decent. Don't know much about the rest.