Need a new laptop - nothing seems to hit the mark!

[jurassicjim]

Well, just upgraded my laptop.

Dell are offering free delivery, so for an extra £30 I doubled my ram and hard drive space.

Will just send the other one back when it comes. Or refuse delivery.

J

[Johnmcl7]

Good call particularly on the ram and certainly worth a little hassle shipping the other one back.

Was your actual delivery date much short of the estimated one? I've got mine for my machine but it's a couple of weeks away which seems unusually slow for an outlet machine. I'm keen to see what it actually is as there seems to be a few variants which may limit what graphics card I can fit it with.

John

[jurassicjim]

Estimated date was the 20th, first confirmed delivery of the 10th, which got put back to the 13th.

Yeah, def worth the hassle methinks. 256gb msata HDD looked to be around £130, so easily worth the hassle for that alone. Plus, as you say, ram is not upgradable.

J

[jurassicjim]

I have been reading about display port adapters for HDMI connection.

Seems that is doesn't always support audio depending on the spec of the machine. Is this true? And will it be true of the xps 12? I really hope not, but I havent been able to find out.

Also, most adapters I see say they are for macbooks, I assume this is just a universal standard and what will work on an apple device will work on a dell one?

J

[Johnmcl7]

To be honest I don't know about audio and displayport, the connection is getting increasingly common at work particularly but I've only used it for video. At worst you should still be able to use the 3.5mm out for audio? I would hope with the XPS 12 being a new machine you wouldn't have any problems.

As far as I'm aware, mini display port is a standard and the adapter should work on any machine. Apple were the ones that designed the connector and adopted it aggressively on their own machines replacing all over the video out connections so I'd assume that's why they're listed as for Macbooks however it was adopted as a standard in displayport v1.2. The Thunderbolt parts which also use the same connector/port are not compatible although they should be clearly different.

That's good news on the delivery front as I'm keen to get a hold of the X51 to see what is actually in it, there seems to be some varying configurations of external and internal power so I can't order any parts for it until I see what it has. From what I can gather the early X51's were limited to a single six pin connector restricting them to 150W graphics cards but the newer revisions may have two connectors to take more powerful graphics cards. Which makes sense as the original X51's came with 95W Sandybridge processors but the currrent Haswell processor that should be in my machine is a 54W Haswell which frees up headroom for the graphics card however if it comes with the lower rated PSU and a single six pin connector that could be an issue.

John

[Johnmcl7]

So any sign of the second laptop?

John

[jurassicjim]

Well, the first turned up on Monday, so I actually opened it up and played around with it before they picked it back up yesterday.

Still waiting on delivery date for the new one.

I didn't want to install to much and make the laptop "my own" as I would be just wiping it and sending it back, but first impressions are excellent!

Pleasingly solid, really nice build quality and materials. The carbon fibre is lovely and understated and to my eyes nicer and interesting to look at than a Mac book or any other solid silver machine.

Screen is awesome, lovely and bright, sharp, HD videos look great. Nice, cool and quiet in operation.

The flipping screen is wonderful, and the mechanism feels solid and using like a tablet is good fun and not too heavy.

Battery life not great, 3-5 hours by the looks. But that's ok, as wasn't expecting much in that department.

J

[Johnmcl7]

That's great to hear as I was concerned when you hadn't posted anything more that you weren't too impressed with the machine. Hope you get the new one soon as I know how frustrating it is when you have a machine you know you're sending back so you can't really use it.

John

[robbo]

Sony to sell off their PC division? http://www.wpcentral.com/sony-possibly-sell-pc-division

edit - okay, selling off but still a stakeholder.

[Tappy]

Wow, 5,000 jobs lost on top of 10,000 last year.

Those workers should go on strike...

[Johnmcl7]

I'm surprised Sony's PC division has lasted as long as it has, I'm obviously a fan of their machines and I think they've produced a lot of outstanding PC's (responsible for a lot of innovations that other companies are credited for) but the Vaio brand is generally fairly weak and doesn't seem to be considered premium where people will fork out anything to have one (such as Apple, Mini, Bose etc.)

John

[jurassicjim]

Could Son't problem have been the range of laptops/ devices they had out at any one time?

There were amazing machines mixed in with some tat. You couldn't really trust the Viao brand like you can Apple etc.

I too always like the Sony machines, but I have never actually owned one. Always seemed to be innovating but not always doing the basics right.

j

[Johnmcl7]

I don't think Sony's issue was the range so much as the budget machines they had, like Dells people would compare a £300 Vaio to a £1500 Apple machine and claim Sony/Dell laptops are rubbish. Their brand name wasn't strong enough to convince people to fork out for their premium machines nor for people to overlook faults either - Apple have had plenty of tat in their range particularly the budget plastic range they had and power/thermal issues on the upper ones but they've a strong enough brand for people to overlook this. I was trying to repair a Macbook recently (ram and sata issues), despite the machine causing considerable inconvenience as it kept corrupting an image library the owner's solution was to buy another as Apple are great. To be fair I do remember when Sony used to have that sort of position which annoyed me at the time as well when people were paying well over the odds for very average machines.

Although Sony have been producing some interesting touch designs I think they've lost a lot of what made them special, when you look at their main high end lines there's not much to separate them from the rest any more. My first Vaio was the TX1HP, an 11in Ultralight that packed an incredible amount of hardware into a very small space. Other ultralights made a lot of sacrifices to get the size down such as removing the optical drive, shrinking the onboard battery right down and removing physical ports. Sony however managed to squeeze everything in, the machine had a decent range of onboard ports (no adapters needed), it had a slimline optical drive and its onboard battery was a whopping 7,800Mah bigger than the extended batteries of its rivals with the TX1's extended battery being a colossal 13,000Mah. Yet they were able to squeeze this into a carbon fibre chassis smaller and lighter than rivals and also boasting new technologies, it was the first laptop to feature LED backlighting.

The Z series was also an incredible machine, at the time when Apple had chosen to put a C2D processor in their 13in Macbook it was claimed there simply wasn't enough space in the chassis to fit the three chip solution the i series chips would require. However the 13in Z series did have the three chip solution in a chassis smaller and lighter than the Macbook yet offered the top end i7 at the time and quad SSD's along with an ultra high resolution 13.1in 1080p panel when hardly anyone offered anything over WXGA.

Yet when you look at the current Vaio Pro 11 and 13, the spiritual successors to the TX1 and the Z series there is little exceptional about them. They are very slender and light but otherwise they're almost entirely conventional Ultrabooks, single SSD, no external graphics cards, standard batteries, no optical drive and hardly any ports.

John

[scarbunny]

I'm starting to need a new laptop now, I've had my Macbook for coming up to 6 years now and it had been on the market for nearly a year at the time I bought it, and it is now starting to randomly reboot. So since I have a little more sense than to buy the Retina Macbook Pro I actually want, as £2k is just too much money, I could do with finding a reasonable Windows Laptop.

Ideally I want something that will run some games, Civ V and Civ Beyond Earth and Wasteland 2 plus a few others are really taking my fancy also I've just finished the first Starcraft 2 so would't mind playing HoTS on a laptop.

Looking around I have found this one from PC World, its in stock locally I could have it in my hands tomorrow.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-n ... 5-pdt.html

But I just can't tell if its actually any good. I know the RAM is low but thats an easy cheap upgrade. For £599 after cash back it seems like an okay price.

Would this one be worth the additional £100 for twice the RAM and an i7 over an i5?

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-n ... s~10011532

What else is out there is this sort of price range?

[EviL Ras]

Heart of the swarm is an excellent, but graphically hungry game! My GT555m struggled a bit, but my new GTX 870m glides through it on ultra. i'd say look for a GTX 860m minimum these days. but [the GTX 870m is a good bang for buck!

you looking for a sleek form, or more power? The GS60 is sleek, and powerful. the GTX 860m version is £1199.99. But its oh so pretty with its 20mm thickness!