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Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:01 am
by mikehodges2
I've been shopping for a laptop for mostly web browsing and office productivity (ie, no real horsepower required).

My current necessities are:

    £1000 budget
    Ideally a resolution of over 1366x768 (but i'm kind of ruling this out, don't think it's possible given the budget)
    Lightweight - I'll be walking 3 miles each day with it on my back.
    Keyboard - I'm going to be typing the majority of my dissertation on it, so it needs to be good!
    Decent battery life, although this probably won't lend itself to the larger screens

With the current state of nearly every laptop running 1366x768, I was looking at 13.3" laptops, namely the Toshiba Portege R700 & R705, Asus U33Jc & U35Jc, but they all seem to have drawbacks with their keyboards and trackpads.

I'm actually tempted to splurge and get the 13" Macbook Air, because it seems to be epic at everything and tiny.

With that in mind, are there any lightweight laptops with higher resolutions? It seems every large laptop is geared towards gaming/heavy workloads.

Does anyone make a 17" Portege/Air?
Thanks :)

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:28 am
by Voldenuit
Big, light or cheap. Choose 2.

Lenovo X201 starts from £830 after VAT. 1.35 kg.

T410s starts from £1200 after VAT. 1.8 kg.

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 1:05 pm
by Flying Fox
To me at 17" it is not a laptop anymore. It is an oxymoron. And I really don't know why you want a 17" for the purposes that you stated. It is simply too big. :-?

That said, if you can get leftover stock from EOL'ed products, then try to get your hands on the ThinkPad X301. It is the last 13.3" that can do 1440x900. It's a shame that we won't see it anymore. Of course, if you can convince yourself to sacrifice a bit of screen resolution for portability, the X201 is great in that it is 12" but at 1280x800 (relatively high density) with CPUs that are actually faster than the X301. And you can outfit the X201 with the "stick-out" battery to get 5+ hours of battery life.

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 1:32 pm
by mikehodges2
Flying Fox wrote:
And I really don't know why you want a 17" for the purposes that you stated. It is simply too big. :-?


It's basically going to be my research tool in the Uni library, because all their computers are usually taken up, and they tend to crash a lot. The more space I have on the desktop, the more I can spread documents, e-books, e-journals etc around, while compiling my essay etc.

At home I have a 24" and a 17" plugged into my desktop, and during my last research assignment, even that wasn't enough - i could do with a second 24" instead of the 17"..

That said, there are too many distractions at home, and the Uni library is an excellent place to work, except for the shoddy computers. Hence, my need for a laptop..

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 2:41 pm
by Skrying
Size of the screen doesn't mean you can have more on the screen. That's all resolution. There's also nothing that exist that is a light 17" laptop. There is a thin one and that's Apple which is $2000+ and not close to being light.

I suggest you try looking at 15" models that offer higher resolution screen options.

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 3:12 pm
by Kurotetsu
Anandtech actually released a Laptop Buyer's Guide recently.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4022/holi ... otebooks/4

The Dell XPS L501x seems to be what you want. Anandtech did a pretty in-depth review on it:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3999/dell ... 01x-review

Core-i5 460M
4GB DDR3
15.6-inch @ 1920x1080 screen (Uses a B+GR LED display which that review praises quite a bit)
Gigabit + 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1
Geforce 420M + Optimus

The config used in that review cost $1,030, which appears to be within your budget going by euro conversion. It weights about 6lbs with the six-cell battery (which I personally don't consider to be heavy at all, but your standards might be different). Gets a bit over 5 hours of battery life at idle, 3.5 hours with Flash-heavy web surfing, and a bit over 2.5 hours with 720p movie watching. Given your usage, you can probably expect to see close to the 5 hour mark. Since you'll be in a library, access to power outlets shouldn't be an issue.

I haven't found this laptop on the Dell UK site yet, but it should pop up at some point.

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:23 pm
by SNM
Flying Fox wrote:
That said, if you can get leftover stock from EOL'ed products, then try to get your hands on the ThinkPad X301. It is the last 13.3" that can do 1440x900.

Ah-ah-ah.

To the OP, you may be able to find a high-res 15" laptop at that price. I'm not a big fan of Dells but going be dell.co.uk it looks like there are a few 15" XPS models with 1080p screens ranging from 800 to 1000 pounds.

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 3:46 pm
by mikehodges2
Skrying wrote:
Size of the screen doesn't mean you can have more on the screen. That's all resolution.


Err..yeah I know :)

Kurotetsu wrote:
The Dell XPS L501x seems to be what you want. Anandtech did a pretty in-depth review on it:
.


Thanks for the links. That does look good, but its pushing 3kgs. I don't need an i5, or a DVD drive, or a discrete GPU. SHAVE IT ALL OFF DELL! Like I said, the walk from where I can park to campus is just over 30 mins, and I need travel light, back problems from 6yrs in construction :).

I've just realised I can get a pretty decent student discount from Apple, which brings the 13" air, with 4GB ram upgrade (as its all sealed on the bottom, and not user upgradable, bastards!) down to £1014 delivered. I'm gonna have to play with one in the flesh, to make sure I'm happy with the screen size+pixel density, and that it's not gonna ruin my eyes after 8 hours use...

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:21 pm
by elmopuddy
I just picked up an HP DM3 for my couch-bed surfing duties.. nice screen, easy 5hr+ runtime, only thing I had to do was install a fresh copy of W7 on it. I wasn't really expecting snappy performance, but its quite nice.. a crap-ton faster than my wifes Atom powered HP Mini. I was tempted to install an SSD, but it will be nice to have the stock 640gb HDD to load with movies for the kids when we go on vacation.

You can get cheap 15.6" laptops, but I'm morally opposed to large screens with 1368x768 resolution.

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:47 pm
by Blazex
i'm just going to say, maybe look at outlet products on the companies websites
maybe you can find a gem for a little less than retail :)

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:53 pm
by Tamale
be forewarned that any macbook is going be missing plenty of 'givens' that I wasn't even aware of before using a macbook pro from work...

1. no home/end
2. no insert
3. no forward delete key
4. no pageup/pagedown
5. no hardware radio switches (bluetooth or wifi)
6. no video out ports (without expensive adapters)

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 5:15 pm
by mikehodges2
Tamale wrote:
be forewarned that any macbook is going be missing plenty of 'givens' that I wasn't even aware of before using a macbook pro from work...

1. no home/end
2. no insert
3. no forward delete key
4. no pageup/pagedown
5. no hardware radio switches (bluetooth or wifi)
6. no video out ports (without expensive adapters)


I didn't know that, and the only one there that'd do my head in is the forward delete key. Just jumped straight on google:

Control-A Move to beginning of line/paragraph
Control-E Move to end of line/paragraph
fn-Delete Forward Delete (on portable Macs' built-in keyboard)

Page up/down should be covered with multitouch on the pad, not fussed about hardware switches for wifi/bluetooth, and my GPU came with a mini display port -> HDMI adapter, and any others i need are on ebay for peanuts.

Good spot though, thanks for the heads up!

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 5:26 pm
by SNM
Tamale wrote:
1. no home/end
2. no insert
3. no forward delete key
4. no pageup/pagedown

These are actually all present via the Function key in combination with the arrow keys. (Forward delete is Fn+Backspace.) :)

But, yes, Cocoa apps also support the basic *nix navigation options, which are much faster indeed. Based on what we've heard the last few posts I'm cheering for the Macbook Air -- I've been lusting after one myself. :D

Re: Thin, lightweight 17" laptop

Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2011 1:31 pm
by madonnell
The subject says 17" but the body of your post talks about 13", so ...

If the price works out ($1100-1800), look at the Lenovo T420s.

It is a ~4lb 14" 1600x900 i5 machine with a great full keyboard and well built.