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Laptop/Chromebook Advice


Craigyh74

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3 hours ago, leviramsey said:

(this is my first UEFI system, and it's nowhere near as bad as I feared)

It makes you wonder why they bothered with it. It seems to have simply been Microsoft taxing the hardware manufacturers (and therefore the users). At least it drove/created the Chromebook market.

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  • 3 months later...


Decided to take a punt on a chromebook as a secondary computer for round the house, ended up getting the 2015 Toshiba Chromebook 2 (1080p 4gb RAM model) from eBay for £230, seems like it's in pristine condition and if a couple of weeks of following auctions are anything to go by are anything to go by I could probably flip it immediately for a small profit, and I'm initially very impressed. This post is my 'is there anything a total noob should know' post though. I've only really got experience of Windows, Android & iOS and I'm perfectly happy in treating the chromebook as a web browser with a very nice screen but are there any interesting if not immediately obvious things you can do with these machines? 

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  • 1 month later...
On 5/4/2016 at 22:31, leviramsey said:

Was feeling a little flush a while back, so purchased a new ThinkPad.

  • T560 model
  • 15" 3K screen
  • 3 cell front battery & 6 cell removable rear battery (which also puts the keyboard at a nice typing angle)
  • Core i7-6600U (4 cores, 8 threads)
  • 256GB NVMe SSD (the SSD is basically directly attached to PCIe; I'm getting sustained 900 Mbyte/sec reads)
  • 32GB RAM

Installing Linux (Mageia for me) was surprisingly easy. The only real issue was the installer not recognizing /dev/nvme0 as a device which Linux could be installed to, which necessitated an install to USB stick, boot to USB stick, go to single-user mode, partition and mount SSD, copy files from stick to SSD, chroot, and install grub to the UEFI partition (this is my first UEFI system, and it's nowhere near as bad as I feared) dance. Beyond that, everything just worked. I run X at 1920x1080 because for now the 24" monitor at work that I hook up to this maxes out at that resolution and I don't see the point in having a laptop screen display more than the external monitor. The keyboard is fantastic (and the pointing stick is, as expected, superb; it's also amazingly nice to have middle click on a laptop again). Battery life has been amazing (despite Linux apparently not doing power management properly for this chipset). Everyone else on the team is a MacBook user, but I've caught some envious looks (I passed up an offer of a company-paid $2500 MacBook (not long after we separated from the laptop and printer guys, we were suddenly able to buy nicer laptops...) to buy this on my own... I can deduct it on my taxes and avoid having IT enforcing policy on me).  It came to $2,000 or so.

Heartily endorsed.  The Intel GPU isn't spectacular (but Intel GPUs are the best-supported in Linux), but anyone like me who needs something between something ultraportable and a mobile workstation can't do much better than this.

The kernel now properly scales the CPU clock (before, every core was always running at at least 2 GHz; now with just web browsing active, all 4 cores are sub 700 MHz).  At work I've been able to use it for 10 hours solid without needing to plug in.  Meanwhile my Moto X from 2014 dies after a few hours of use and maybe 8-9 hours of idle.

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I've not used my Windows (10) laptop since I bought my Chromebook.  The only time the Windows machine has been on has been when the daughter needed to used Skype a couple of times.

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48 minutes ago, The_Rev said:

I've not used my Windows (10) laptop since I bought my Chromebook.  The only time the Windows machine has been on has been when the daughter needed to used Skype a couple of times.

You can install Skype on a Chromebook but it's a faff. You'll soon have access to the Android app though.

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  • 2 months later...
3 hours ago, This Could Be Rotterdam said:

Im after a new laptop, quite tempted for one of these that are 2 in 1 which convert into a tablet. Any suggestions? Hopefully get a good deal today!

If you want a 2 in1, make sure you get one that detaches the keyboard instead of folding it. They tend to get too heavy and thick to be any use as a tablet.

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  • 1 month later...

My HP14 chromebook died this week so I've replaced it with an Acer R11. It's smaller but it's got a touch screen and the screen flips round to turn it into a tablet (kinda)

Seems pretty good so far. Not noticed any performance issues compared to the HP, and the touchscreen is a nice addition. Turning it into a tablet is a bit pointless imo, and the operating system isn't really optimised to work as a tablet. You can't adjust the volume easily, for example, in tablet mode because it turns the keyboard off. 

Still, first impressions are good. For £220 it seems a bargain.

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  • 3 months later...
On 1/2/2017 at 22:30, Stevo985 said:

My HP14 chromebook died this week so I've replaced it with an Acer R11. It's smaller but it's got a touch screen and the screen flips round to turn it into a tablet (kinda)

Seems pretty good so far. Not noticed any performance issues compared to the HP, and the touchscreen is a nice addition. Turning it into a tablet is a bit pointless imo, and the operating system isn't really optimised to work as a tablet. You can't adjust the volume easily, for example, in tablet mode because it turns the keyboard off. 

Still, first impressions are good. For £220 it seems a bargain.

3 months usage on this now and there are good and bad elements.

The bad is performance. It's noticeably slower than my previous Chromebook, particularly with multiple tabs open. Or, for example, if I'm casting one tab and trying to browse on the other it slows down.

Even single tab browsing is noticeably slower than my HP was.

 

On the plus side, the touchscreen and "tablet" functionality is way more useful than I thought it would be. I use it in tablet mode a lot more than I ever thought I would, despite it not really being optimised for that usage.

 

It's not bad for £220 but it being noticeably slower than my previous one has put me off. Still, at that price I could probably sell it now and buy a replacement and only be about £100 out of pocket (which I'm tempted to do!)

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8 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

 

So... good people of the VT IT crowd....

I need a loptop for the Mrs for business purposes, as cheap as possible.

Suggestions please.

It's hard to recommend anything other than a Chromebook. But perhaps the enigmatic "business purposes" means something more than word processing, spreadsheets and presentations :)

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8 minutes ago, limpid said:

It's hard to recommend anything other than a Chromebook. But perhaps the enigmatic "business purposes" means something more than word processing, spreadsheets and presentations :)

I've not looked at Chromebooks and don't really know much about them. Are they compatible with Apple devices (phones) and do they have word and excel?

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2 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

I've not looked at Chromebooks and don't really know much about them. Are they compatible with Apple devices (phones) and do they have word and excel?

No and no.

They are a laptop with only chrome installed, so if you can't do it in a browser, you can't do it.

That said, it's amazing what you can do in a browser these days.

I've had a Samsung series 3 from when the Chromebooks were first released and it's still going strong. Brilliant devices.

So you're probably looking at Windows only if you want 100% compatibility with Microsoft office.

I'd steer clear of Toshiba and HP. Dell and Lenovo are on the better side.

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39 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

 

Cheers, thats Chromebooks off the list then.

Will look at Dell and Lenovo, the later seem quite cheap I just wasn't sure how good they were.

Lenovo made the laptops for IBM which IBM just rebadged as thinkpads. That's why they still have the same nipple and trackpad layout. IBM eventually stopped bothering to rebadge them. 

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54 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

Are they compatible with Apple devices (phones) and do they have word and excel?

What does this mean? Why do you need a computer to be "compatible" with an iphone? Most people I know with a Chromebook have an iphone - what do you think you won't be able to do? Music comes from Spotify / Amazon / Google. Apps / backups are over the air.

For word and excel, use Google Docs. Both formats can be imported and exported.

The only requirement you had was "cheap" and now you need to buy Windows, end point protection and backup systems. So cheap wasn't even important :) 

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56 minutes ago, limpid said:

What does this mean? Why do you need a computer to be "compatible" with an iphone? Most people I know with a Chromebook have an iphone - what do you think you won't be able to do? Music comes from Spotify / Amazon / Google. Apps / backups are over the air.

For word and excel, use Google Docs. Both formats can be imported and exported.

The only requirement you had was "cheap" and now you need to buy Windows, end point protection and backup systems. So cheap wasn't even important :) 

Not commenting on Trent's situation, but a question if I may.

If you use a chromebook and want to listen to (and manage) music via an Iphone (or an Androids) don't you have to pay for the music service on the phone? foir Spotify, Amazon etc?, thus adding (over say 3 years of use) several hundred quids to the cost of the lappy? plus whatever data you use streaming or downloading tunes and podcasts etc.to the phone?

In essence, as much as it's the way things are going, aren't there drawbacks of the whole cloud music services/chromebook combo as well as advantages?

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