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My sister has an older laptop and it crashes on her a lot. As such, she wants to upgrade.

She has a circa 2010 toshiba. Her use case will be mainly schoolwork (she's going for her MPH) i.e. office, and internet browsing. I'm assuming that she also wants this to last as long as her previous one. She commutes so having a light laptop is preferred. Also, she made it clear that a DVD drive and an HDMI port were a must. 13-15 inches is also a preferred size and I think that she would really benefit from a decently sized SSD.

Her budget is around $600 US. Oh, and she also lives near a microcenter.

Any suggestions?

New laptops with DVD drives are getting harder to find. She may need to get an external drive.

Looks like I was wrong. Sorry about that:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 814%204021
Here's two of them with a 128 SSD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 0600423157

That's a small budget for a notebook.
Would something like the Asus X555UB-NH51 be satisfactory?
Positives: It's cheap. It includes a Skylake 15-watt dual-core hyperthreaded Core i5-6200U processor. The 15.6" screen has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels ("Full HD").
Negatives: It weighs 5.1 pounds and has a TN LCD display rather than an IPS LCD.

You'd need to spend more to get a thin and light Ultrabook with a great 13.3" IPS LCD screen like the $689 Zenbook UX305CA-EHM1 or the more powerful $834 Zenbook UX303UA-DH51T. Then you'd need to add a $22 external USB optical drive.

pyromaniac2749 wrote:

My sister has an older laptop and it crashes on her a lot. As such, she wants to upgrade.

She has a circa 2010 toshiba. Her use case will be mainly schoolwork (she's going for her MPH).

If she's going for her MPH, then she'll typing lots of papers.

Lots of Papers.

That pretty much means you want to get a Thinkpad.

The lenovo Thinkpad L440 is $647 with a 14" screen (add $50 upgrade to 1600x900) and DVD drive.

It comes with a spinner HDD, but down the road, you can add a M.2 SSD to speed up her OS. Also only 4 GB of RAM, but again, user-upgradeable.

Slightly more expensive than your original budget, but as someone who went through grad school with a thinkpad, I'd never want to type on anything else.

JAE: $600's not unreasonable if you're willing to look around - didn't JBI just buy a 6470b (maybe 6460b?) for $300 refurbed?

I'm not a fan of Lenovo these days (particularly after the Superfish and BIOS malware crap), but I won't lie - their Thinkpads have, quite possibly, the best laptop keyboards in the business. Even the "newer" (really more like 2012 or so) chiclet ones that some people seem to hate.

I'm also going to mention that you can get really solid business laptops, new or open box, on ebay for pretty good prices. For what it's worth, my hp zbook 14g1 workstation machine was $600 when I bought it open box off ebay (it was already the previous model), I dunno, we're nearing a year ago at this point. And the non-workstation version (elitebook 840g1) was more like $500 at the time - even less now. Both of these are 3.5lbs, and get around 7 hours battery life. (I actually don't recommend getting an AMD/Nvidia GPU if you're just word processing - it'll only kick in with games/3D apps, and it's just one more thing to cause problems otherwise.) And should anything go wrong (with any of these - Dell Latitudes, HP Elitebooks, Lenovo Thinkpads), their tech support won't act like a bunch of idiots in India. It might be worth finding something like this for $500, and then splitting that extra $100 between an SSD and some extra RAM (I suggest 8GB total, usually 2 slots for biz, or soldered and non-replaceable in ultrabooks). $80 nets you a Sandisk Ultra II 240GB, and $20 buys you a 4GB DDR3L module. As long as you know what a phillips screwdriver is (and on biz machines, it's physically quite easy in many cases) and you know how to install Windows (I can post directions if you need them), this could get you something quite nice.

I also like the idea of the ASUS UX305, though I wasn't a huge fan of the keyboard on it - and might be stretching the budget a bit.

Do keep in mind however that a lot of laptops, dare I say the majority of new ones, don't include DVD drives anymore. And the ones that do tend to be the bulkier, less portable ones. You can limit yourself to that selection, or you can spend $25 and get an external. And I will also warn you that while business laptops are generally better built, they usually have Displayport instead of HDMI (although you can buy cheap adapters for this - pre-retina Macbook owners will be familiar with this, albeit with mini-displayport instead of full size).

Are there any laptops with both DisplayPort and HDMI?

A few. But they're mostly expensive stuff (XPS 15, Retina Macbook Pro). Although I'm starting to see it more (particularly on biz stuff) as they keep the Displayport connection, but remove VGA in favor of HDMI.

Refurb/off-lease HP ProBook or EliteBook. Microcenter tends to stock these. Do you live close enough to her to help her with an aftermarket SSD upgrade?

just brew it! wrote:

Refurb/off-lease HP ProBook or EliteBook. Microcenter tends to stock these. Do you live close enough to her to help her with an aftermarket SSD upgrade?

No. I'm in PA she's in TX. Lol I think that she would be able to do it herself if she could find a decent enough guide. It's not that difficult. I may be able to skype/facetime/hangout with her to upgrade it.

I was thinking something like http://www.ebay.com/itm/Brand-NEW-Sealed-14-Dell-Latitude-14-5000-series-E5440-i5-4GB-RAM-500GB-HDD-/281907931996?_trksid=p2141725.m3641.l6368. It's well within her budget and leaves room for upgrades. What do you guys think? Although I think that it lacks a dvd drive she can just get an external one.
I also found something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-ASUS-Zenbook-UX305FA-USM1-M-5Y10-2GHz-13-3-FHD1080P-IPS-8GB-RAM-256GB-SSD-W8-/391368044038?hash=item5b1f5a6e06:g:1okAAOSwNSxU7LDO

.... Wow. That is one good looking laptop. Although it still lacks a DVD drive

Also, I really think that she wouldn't be able to tell the difference between nice keyboards and bad ones, and she probably prefers portability over a good keyboard, so I think that thinkpads are out.

Thank you all for your help.

If she's non-technical I'd get her a second hand macbook, may be a little bit over budget but it should be worth it. It's what I gave my sister after she broke her pc laptop about a zillion times and I had to fix it. The macbook just works.

TwoEars wrote:

If she's non-technical I'd get her a second hand macbook, may be a little bit over budget but it should be worth it. It's what I gave my sister after she broke her pc laptop about a zillion times and I had to fix it. The macbook just works.

Her programs for school won't work OS X.

Double check the warranty on the Dell, but that's exactly the sort of stuff I'm talking about.

Note: Dell links the warranty with the owner, and you need to know the previous owner's info (name/company anyway) to transfer it. HP and Lenovo don't care, and link it with the machine/serial number, so this isn't an issue. Though check how much warranty is left (often 3 years total on biz, so there's still plenty on eBay).

Can also vouch for the HP Elitebooks regarding the keyboard. Bought a refurb 2560p (i5-2540m, 8GB, 256GB SSD) last year for $300 and the keyboard is excellent especially for such an old (4yrs?) specimen. Would be nice if it was backlit, but instead this one still has the little light beside the webcam that was popular back then.

I would check Newegg or Amazon first before buying something off Ebay. I've seen some sweet deals on techbargains.com as well.

On that note - my zbook 14 g1 (basically an elitebook 840 g1 workstation) has a thin, but otherwise good keyboard - almost reminds me of some macbooks actually. Probably not as good as the older, fatter models like the 2560p though (but it does have better battery life, Haswell ULV at work). It does have backlighting (some models), though it leaks through a lot (and I don't personally use it).

And again, let me remind you guys that the newer machines on eBay often do have a warranty, because this kit tends to ship with 3 years (both of my HPs did, and I'm not the first owner). See if you can find a serial in the listing and look it up.

A note: I think some of the previously-linked options have "clickpad" style trackpads, which are devil-spawn as far as I'm concerned. Avoid.

Dell's Lattitude E-Series are pretty solid business-class notebooks, and there a ton of off-lease/refurb models available with relatively low wear-and-tear. You can buy the docks and power adapters all day long for about $20 each on eBay, which is a nice plus, and it doesn't need to be the current generation part since Dell has been using a standard dock and a standard range of adapters (typically 65W and 95W for midrange models) for the past 8-ish years.

My youngest sister has an MPH and has been working in a related field for about five years since. She originally got through school on a DTR-sized Lenovo but replaced it with a Dell Vostro from the refurb store, and has been pretty happy with it.

Let's see... I see a lot of consumer-grade machines using the devil-clickpads these days. As I recall, Dell Latitudes generally use the traditional style (pointing stick optional?), HP Elitebooks have always been traditional (often with pointing sticks), while Lenovo Thinkpads had a really whacky clickpad (the entire thing depresses) as of the Haswell/4th gen Intel/T*40 series. They even used those buttons for the pointing stick (which makes it unusable - they were top of the game for that, and yet my HP synaptics unit beats that now). As I recall, they added back real buttons for the stick with the T*50 series, not sure about the trackpad though.

As for power connectors... HP's been using the same barrel connector since '06 or so, and many of their consumer units used this as well. Though they're starting to move over to a smaller connector, first with the consumer stuff, and now with the most recent/thinnest biz stuff (my zbook 14 g1 has the older one though, good since I have tons of chargers lying around). Dell's similar. Lenovo had a long standing one for Thinkpads, and then changed it with the T*40 series and up. No idea what their consumer machines use.

I think HP and Lenovo change their docks a lot more often though. (i.e. Ever since the elitebook 820/840/850 series, the dock connector is on the side, not the bottom. No idea about the compatibility of the previous ones.)

If you don't necessarily need the latest chips or massive graphics power, refurbished Dell Latitudes are fantastic systems for the money. I recently picked up this Dell E6430 for someone:

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Refurbished-D ... l/43051800

That i5 "M" CPU will run circles around anything in that price range, and will compete well with newer "U" series i5s (beating most of them in single threaded performance), and the 128GB SSD turned out to be a 160GB Intel drive... I think it was a 320 series.

The screen is nothing to write home about but for a 14" system with specs like that, its a steal for under $300. And the build quality is fantastic compared to anything else I've seen under $600.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, there is a real, full size HDMI port on that particular model. A lot of similar models from HP and other companies use displayport, which is "neat" but not ideal for 99% of home users. It also has a DVD drive that has this nifty quick swap mechanism... you just push a button and a little arm pops out that you can use to pull the drive out. I assume you can get a caddy that lets you put a second hard drive\SSD in there instead of the optical drive.

Ooh, nice find. And ha, funny how we all ended up talking about refurb corporate systems. The one thing I forgot to mention with these is that the battery life is good enough, but usually not as good as newer machines - the battery probably doesn't have that much wear on it, but those older CPUs just aren't as efficient. Still better built kit though.

Food for thought: I bought a base model Toshiba CL45 14" for $200 (I had to do something with the warranty credit from the SSD, use it or lose it, stuck to my name). Cheapo SoC-inside, eMMC, 2GB RAM soldered, minimum specs to run Windows 10 sort of thing. There's hardly anything in the base (no, it's not a tablet convertible), so it feels like it wants to fall over. And while I'd much rather have an older Latitude or Elitebook in that price range (for getting work done, for one), and my Probook-before-probooks 6530b has more CPU power (full voltage Core 2 Duo) and more RAM, this machine does beat it by a huge margin in the battery life department. 10+ hours while idling, probably around 7 with light web browsing, with a fairly small battery. Runs cool as can be. Though Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge were significantly better than the Core 2's, and Haswell (which is already 2 generations out) is actually pretty good in this regard. My zbook 14's battery life probably isn't much worse (little more capacity but tad less efficient) and it's just as light, so I'm sticking with that one.

localhostrulez wrote:

Ooh, nice find. And ha, funny how we all ended up talking about refurb corporate systems. The one thing I forgot to mention with these is that the battery life is good enough, but usually not as good as newer machines - the battery probably doesn't have that much wear on it, but those older CPUs just aren't as efficient. Still better built kit though.

I get about four hours of battery life in average Internet/office use from my E6420, which has an i5-2520m (Sandy Bridge, dual core with HT). That's with the standard battery (purchased used); there's an extended option that should get that up to six-ish.

Dell Latitude 15 3000 for $701.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/2016/01/dealmaster-get-a-dell-latitude-15-3000-with-core-i7-and-nvidia-graphics-for-701/

No optical drive, but 8 GB of RAM and discrete GPU (which she doesn't really need).

Keyboards on Latitudes can range from good to god-awful. No idea how this one measures up. The keyboard on my work Precision 4600 was terrible, and the one on my newer 4800 is merely acceptable.