TR Forums

End User wrote:

curtisb wrote:

And here is a good example

That is a dead link for me.

Doesn't work for me either.

Another common way for refurbs to make it into the distribution channel is business leases. When the lease ends, the vendor tests the laptop, performs repairs as needed, wipes the hard drive, and sells it as a refurb. You can get some pretty good deals that way if you don't mind some minor scuffs and dings (since the laptop is typically a year or two old).

I guess it works for me since I went through their process...likely cookie related. It didn't work for me when I tried it in another browser.

It's an Inspiron 15 7559 in the category of "Dell Outlet New" with the following specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 6th Gen i5-6300HQ Quad Core (6M Cache, up to 3.2 GHz)
• Windows 10 Pro
• 1 TB SATA Hybrid Hard Drive (5400 RPM) with 8GB Cache
• 8GB (1x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3L Memory
• 15.6-inch UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED- Backlit Touch Display
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4GB GDDR5
• Grey
• Integrated Webcam
• 6 Cell Battery
• Intel 3165 1x1 802.11ac Wi-Fi Wireless LAN and Bluetooth
• Internal English Single Pointing Backlit Keyboard
• 130W A/C Adapter, 3P
• Power Cord

Under $1000, there are many good laptops with quad core processors which will be best for programming, running server and tonnes of tabs in browser at a time. Here's my favourite - Dell Inspiron i7559-5012GRY 15.6 Inch Laptop. It has 6th gen quad core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD + 8GB SSD and also Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M 4GB DDR5 Graphics. This hardware is perfect for your requirements. There's Microsoft Signature Edition variant available for this laptop on Amazon, so you don't have to worry of bloatware if you buy this laptop. And yes, it weighs under 5 pounds which is good for carrying this laptop easily at different places.
(Still new to this forum can't post links. Search this exact model name on Amazon to see it on Amazon - "Dell Inspiron i7559-5012GRY 15.6 Inch Touchscreen Laptop")

Compu Nerd wrote:

it weighs under 5 pounds which is good for carrying this laptop easily at different places.

I absolutely hate lugging around my 4.49 pound 15" laptop. Ugh.

End User wrote:

I absolutely hate lugging around my 4.49 pound 15" laptop. Ugh.

Lightweight. 17" HP ProBook through the O'Hare 3 hour security line.

Spammer reported.

Captain Ned wrote:

End User wrote:

I absolutely hate lugging around my 4.49 pound 15" laptop. Ugh.

Lightweight. 17" HP ProBook through the O'Hare 3 hour security line.

Just before the turn of the century I had a Dell Pentium 166MHz w/MMX, 4MB or RAM (yes, MB), running Windows 98SE with state-of-the-art 1024x768 24bit screen and three spindles (you could swap out the left and/or right bays to put in any combination of two batteries and a CD+floppy combo drive. You could also easily swap the HD in about 30 seconds, as long you used the proprietary Dell HDs -- I had a 500MB one with NT on it).

It weighed 9lbs. And I flew all over the country with that thing.

It would've had more than 4 MiB RAM to meet 98's system requirements (16 was the minimum).

In any case, Dell's quick swap HDDs weren't actually proprietary in the PATA days - it was just an adapter that slid over the pins to give a card edge. (OK, maybe back THAT far, but I doubt it...)

rMBP FTW IMHO

That's not $1000, though, and at least mine's a bit glitchy running Windows. (Well, OK, a used Mid-2012 one might be, but that's the model I have, that's glitchy under Windows.)

Oh, and it's thin enough that it thermally throttles under high CPU load, IME.

UberGerbil wrote:

Just before the turn of the century I had a Dell Pentium 166MHz w/MMX, 4MB or RAM (yes, MB), running Windows 98SE with state-of-the-art 1024x768 24bit screen and three spindles (you could swap out the left and/or right bays to put in any combination of two batteries and a CD+floppy combo drive. You could also easily swap the HD in about 30 seconds, as long you used the proprietary Dell HDs -- I had a 500MB one with NT on it).

It weighed 9lbs. And I flew all over the country with that thing.

Mine was a Gateway 2000 ( ) P166MMX, and yes, it was also a boat anchor. It also cost my employer roughly $6,000 in 1997 (-ish).

I know OP said laptop only. But you should double check that he understands what he is getting.

A laptop is a bunch of compromises for sake of mobility. He maybe better off with an OK laptop and a good home PC.

I do all my work inside VMs. FYI, very few tasks(graphics work) care whether its a remote desktop session or native.

For one thing, he wont be doing all his work on that laptop. He will eventually realize and get two real sized monitors and real keyboard and mouse for home.

Lastly, there are very good reasons why Apple's laptops are super popular with developers. But, with "Windows Subsystem for Linux(based on ubuntu)" coming soon, those reasons are mostly dead. (I personally spent the effort to use Cygwin to keep Windows huge ecosystem available, versus just want to get some work done crowd)

Just beware of caveats. If he thinks he'll only use that laptop for everything,... no. Not gonna happen, its not early 2000s. Just wont match productivity of anyone else. For school, should be OK with one extra monitor attached.

Must be laptop? Make sure its one with DP++(so you dont need active adapter to convert DP to HDMI) and or it supports Multi-Stream Transport so he can get two DP displays out of that one port via chaining(via a HUB or if monitor has it integrated).

Active adapters aren't that expensive. I wouldn't rule something out just because it lacks a DP++ port.

Captain Ned wrote:

End User wrote:

I absolutely hate lugging around my 4.49 pound 15" laptop. Ugh.

Lightweight. 17" HP ProBook through the O'Hare 3 hour security line.

6.4 pounds!

End User wrote:

6.4 pounds!

Plus the power brick, plus the personal music devices, plus a lot of crap to avoid checked baggage. Makes for one heavy damn backpack when one's back is a pretzel and one knee has a torn meniscus. By the end of the line I had just laid the backpack on the floor and was pushing it along with my good leg.

Heh... I've probably got you all beat. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I took a business trip with an early Toshiba laptop. IIRC it had a 386 processor, a text-only monochrome plasma display, and weighed... oh, probably somewhere north of 10 pounds. Ahh, the good old days!

Edit: OK, maybe I can't beat Ned's story, given the other hardships involved.

just brew it! wrote:

Heh... I've probably got you all beat. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I took a business trip with an early Toshiba laptop. IIRC it had a 386 processor, a text-only monochrome plasma display, and weighed... oh, probably somewhere north of 10 pounds. Ahh, the good old days!

Was that one of the "Lunch Box" units? I had one in an old job, but it had been retired to desk-only duty.

EDIT: Toshiba, Doh. Lunch-box units were old Compaqs.

Captain Ned wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Heh... I've probably got you all beat. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I took a business trip with an early Toshiba laptop. IIRC it had a 386 processor, a text-only monochrome plasma display, and weighed... oh, probably somewhere north of 10 pounds. Ahh, the good old days!

Was that one of the "Lunch Box" units? I had one in an old job, but it had been retired to desk-only duty.

EDIT: Toshiba, Doh. Lunch-box units were old Compaqs.

That would've been an awfully big lunch... they were closer to the size of a carry-on bag.

I think it may have been one of these: https://www.google.com/search?q=toshiba ... 86&bih=916

Edit: Spent two weeks of all-nighters holed up in a server room in Zurich with one of those, frantically attempting to code the application that I had ostensibly been sent there to "deliver", but which I had not been allowed to work on until two weeks prior to the promised delivery date, when the original estimate was that it would be a two month effort.

Plasma screen and all.

When I said lunch-box, I meant this: http://www.oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html

Captain Ned wrote:

When I said lunch-box, I meant this: http://www.oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html

Yup, I knew what you meant. I used one back in the day; never had to travel with it though. To give you young 'uns out there a sense of scale, that's a near-full-size keyboard and dual, full-height IBM PC-style 5.25" floppy drives. The keyboard could be latched onto the front of it (protecting the screen & floppy drives), and the back panel (not visible in the top pic, second pic shows it) had a handle on it, so you could carry it like a (fairly heavy) suitcase.

That was how Compaq originally made their name -- they built the first commercially produced "portable" IBM PC compatible system. (AFAIK... at least, it was the first commercially *successful* one!)

There were other systems with a similar form factor before it (Osborne and Kaypro), but they were not IBM compatible.

just brew it! wrote:

Heh... I've probably got you all beat. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I took a business trip with an early Toshiba laptop. IIRC it had a 386 processor, a text-only monochrome plasma display, and weighed... oh, probably somewhere north of 10 pounds. Ahh, the good old days!

Edit: OK, maybe I can't beat Ned's story, given the other hardships involved.

Nawp. I used to have a couple of Kaypro II's. Awesome CP/M development environment for Z80 assembly. 26 lbs each. But that gorgeous high-res text screen and TWO high density 5 1/4 " floppy drives.

Pancake wrote:

Nawp. I used to have a couple of Kaypro II's. Awesome CP/M development environment for Z80 assembly. 26 lbs each. But that gorgeous high-res text screen and TWO high density 5 1/4 " floppy drives.

I've used one of those too 1985 timeframe... never had to lug one around though!

(My claim to fame in my younger days -- such as it is -- was that I rewrote the Digital Research Pascal CP/M runtime library from scratch to fix all the bugs I was aware of, reduce its size, and improve its performance... and then wrote a reverse-engineered clone of the UNIX troff text formatting tool in DR Pascal, for CP/M. If you ever heard of "Blaze I/O", "Blaze Pascal", or "TextMaster" in the CP/M days, that was me; the bad "Blaze Pascal" pun was not my idea... that was from the company that tried to market it. LOL.)

just brew it! wrote:

(My claim to fame in my younger days -- such as it is -- was that I rewrote the Digital Research Pascal CP/M runtime library from scratch to fix all the bugs I was aware of, reduce its size, and improve its performance... and then wrote a reverse-engineered clone of the UNIX troff text formatting tool in DR Pascal, for CP/M. If you ever heard of "Blaze I/O", "Blaze Pascal", or "TextMaster" in the CP/M days, that was me; the bad "Blaze Pascal" pun was not my idea... that was from the company that tried to market it. LOL.)

I was a kid in the heyday of CP/M and only picked up the Kaypros as cheap Z80 development systems when they were dumped by the university at the end of the '80s. All I cared about was being able to use it as a software development tool for my Z80 based radio modem. As a kid I was aware of a very rich software ecosystem for CP/M. A sort of earlier, parallel-PC world place that's almost completely forgotten now. I never got into it being a Commodore 64 loving 6502 enthusiast although I played with it some - mainly for Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0 - when I got a Commodore 128 with that bizarre dual operating system, dual CPU, dual graphics setup... Some older hacker friends of mine with 128's wrote a RAM drive using the unused VIDEO RAM for the 80-column display. This was sufficient to load up Turbo Pascal and a bunch of tools.

I've actually got an IBM 5155 - IBM's attempt to fight the Compaq Portable in a hurry.

Thing's built like a tank, and has a far better keyboard than the Compaq (being a variant of the regular PC keyboard, but with aluminum plates internally instead of steel, to save weight), but there's some areas that just weren't well thought out. Like the fact that they used a completely standard XT motherboard, and then mounted the drives and CRT controls such that you only got two full-length slots (one used by the CGA card), one 3/4 length slot (used by the floppy controller), and five short slots. (The Compaq, OTOH, gave you three full-length slots, in addition to the two slots used for its video and its floppy/printer cards.)

When you get right down to it, all of those early "portables" were basically variations on "cram a small CRT into a standard PC and attach a handle to it".

just brew it! wrote:

FWIW the reason I mentioned refurbs is that I've been using a refurb HP ProBook 6470b for development on the go, and it generally works well for this. With refurbs, the main things to keep in mind are that you'll probably want to max out the RAM, and swap in a SSD if the one you buy comes with a HDD; so roll that into the cost.

I'm actually in the process of migrating to an EliteBook 8460p (another refurb) as my mobile dev system, but that's mainly because the ProBook maxes out at 8GB of RAM (which means it can struggle a bit if I run a VM that has a desktop environment installed in it). 16GB will give me a bit more breathing room.

What? No: http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04296097.pdf
2 DDR3 DIMM slots on the 6470b, 2x8GB=16GB. Everything I've seen Sandy Bridge and up supports 8GB per DIMM (and occasionally 16GB DIMMs on the newest stuff).

Mind you... 8460p... the 8=elitebook, the 6=sandy bridge.
6470b... 6=probook (cheaper), 7=ivy bridge.

just brew it! wrote:

Active adapters aren't that expensive. I wouldn't rule something out just because it lacks a DP++ port.

On that note... I think Skylake removed the VGA DAC from the chipset, so no more VGA ports. Guessing that means you *MUST* have an active adapter to get DP to VGA now?

And also... consumer laptops are just that, generally cheap laptops for the masses. You're looking at thin, ULVs with limited cooling (which, honestly, are good enough for most people), or gaming laptops (GPUs and quad cores). Having a higher powered CPU does absolutely nothing for you (except hurt battery life) if you aren't using the power anyway... I suggest looking at biz stuff (quite a few quad core options there), or Dell XPS 15's and the like (maybe the Dell 7559?).

localhostrulez wrote:

What? No: http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04296097.pdf
2 DDR3 DIMM slots on the 6470b, 2x8GB=16GB. Everything I've seen Sandy Bridge and up supports 8GB per DIMM (and occasionally 16GB DIMMs on the newest stuff).

Huh... I'm 99% certain I saw something somewhere else that said it maxed out at 8GB. D'oh! I guess I should've just tried it.

No matter, the plan was to hand the 6470b down to my wife anyway, and the EliteBook is a (marginally) nicer machine. Since they were both refurbs, I paid less for the pair than a single new laptop would've cost.

Edit: Also, I damaged the right trackpad button on the ProBook at some point. It still works, but it's wonky (it is slightly loose, and you have to hit it "just so" to get it to register). So now I can tear it apart to attempt a repair (prior to handing it down to my wife), since I'm not relying on it any more.

Assuming the 6470b is anything like an 840/zbook 14, serviceability-wise (which I think it is, except for being thinner/no DVD drive/clips instead of screws in the screen/lid assembly), replacing the touchpad is a cinch. Remove the bottom cover and a few things, and I seem to recall the touchpad assembly pops out very easily. Doesn't even require removing the motherboard.

The Elitebook is a tad older, but that spun metal design (8460p/8470p) is so nice.

I looked at so many different possibilities when I originally bought the ProBook, it is also possible I got the maximum RAM spec mixed up in my notes with one of the other ones I researched. One of the downsides of buying refurbs is that the selection of available models is pretty random, and changes day to day as existing stock gets sold and new stock comes in.

If you're really worried about compile times for big projects and VMs, your friend may do well to add a cheap distcc and VM server down the road. Slap Debian stable onto it, remote in to fiddle with it as necessary, and otherwise just let it cruise... It'll beat the outright pants off of a dual core laptop with SMT for what he wants to do.