Laptop for Engineering Dept. Need Horsepower

mikey71497

Limp Gawd
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Sep 27, 2004
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I work for one of the major MSOs in the country, and our IT department issues out Dell Laptops, typically running XP or Win7 depending on how old your machine is. The Dells they give out come with 4gb of memory and are really just low grade, crappy, sit in the office type laptops. My department will be asking IT if we can purchase another brand laptop with some horsepower. I heard the term, "desktop grade laptop." The laptop would need to have at least a 15" screen, would prefer larger, 8+gb of RAM and HDD space is not as crucial as all docs are stored mostly on the server. We don't need any type of high graphics card, or audio speakers. PCMCIA slot would be nice as we use these for serial adapters to console into devices. We use our laptops for Viso, SecureCRT, Excel, sharepoint, and other networking applications. My team is a team of Metro Ethernet Techs and we could at any time, have 12+ applications open at the same time. We also open and shut the lid numerous times a day. Our current machines bog down and choke. I currently have a Dell E6410 with 8gb of RAM and Win7 Pro. It's OK at best.

My ask is, what brand/model laptop would fit the needs listed above? We were thinking Lenovo or HP. Anything else you can think of? Our IT guys love Dell because we get a discount for buying so many, but we are constantly having to fix our machines.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
HP Elitebook line, cant remember the model off the top of my head, or the Lenovo X series. On the Dell side look at Latitudes, each line i mentioned will have some lower levels like you described, however they will have their more powerful (albiet more expensive) options, which would be the "desktop grade laptop".

Regardless of what you end up with, I would suggest getting a business level machine (one of the three lines listed above) since it sounds like you go out in the field on occasion (or at least they get alot of use, business level machines are made better on average over consumer ones)
 
We are in the field 90% of the time, on and off air-card. The machines they give us are usually geared more toward the in-house user. I just went to Lenovo.com and saw the W520...seems to be what we are looking for, or am I off base here??
 
To my knoweldge, the W line is not a "strong/durable" as the X line. I have no idea on the durability of the W series from lenovo, the only series/line i can speak of from experience is the HP Elitebook, those suckers can take a beating :D (2 yrs daily use of a tablet [single hinge rotating screen], multiple power ups daily .... took 2 yrs to damage it on a college campus)

From my research when i got my elitebook, the X series was on par strength wise, did not look at the W series. Maybe others can fill in this.

Spec wise you will find what you want from any OEM, I just suggest looking at the more durable machines, assuming it works in the budget)
 
We are in the field 90% of the time, on and off air-card. The machines they give us are usually geared more toward the in-house user. I just went to Lenovo.com and saw the W520...seems to be what we are looking for, or am I off base here??

I have this laptop (@see sig).

I love this laptop.

One of the main reasons, and one that could quite possibly help your current laptop, is because of the SSD. They're absolutely worth the investment. I work on a 12 year old .net codebase ("wait a minute, .nets only been around 10 years." yes, we ported from vb6), on a laptop with this same CPU and a disk it took 5 minutes to build core and 2 to build our plugin. On the W520, with a kingston 128GB SSD, it takes a little over half that.

It recently took its first serious tumble too, dropped it from about desk height onto thin carpet. Battery popped out and one of the keyboard hooks got disloged; popped both back in and you'd never know it took the fall.

The setup at my office is a W520 with one of Lenovo's proprietary base stations powering two 23" monitors. Along with a keyboard and mouse. Its a great setep, with the most annoying thing being the difference in DPI between the monitors and the laptops own screen --which is 1920x1200, and that makes using a 1366x768 laptop totally unbearable.
 
Lenovo W series is their workstation (which means you get mid to upper mid level graphics...the high end GPUs only come in 17" workstations...which Lenovo dropped a few generations ago. If you don't need a GPU, the T520 should offer everything you need. The X series is their portable lineup, which might be nice given the time in the field (but small screens).

From HP, I second the EiteBook line. The ones with "w" at the end are workstaions (like the W520) so you don't need that. You probably want the 8560p. Note that they are configurable, you just have hunt down the configuration page.
 
I had a W700 and it was all horsepower. W520 would be a good choice.
 
To my knoweldge, the W line is not a "strong/durable" as the X line. I have no idea on the durability of the W series from lenovo...
The W-series is just as high quality as the X-series. It's the W, T, and X series that are the traditional strong/durable ones as you say.

W is the workstation and are the most powerful. T series are the standard ones. X series is the small/light series.

I strongly suggest looking at either the T or W series for your needs. The X-series doesn't meet your requirement of having at least a 15" screen.
 
Ahh, makes sense, good info to know on the lenovo line break down, thanks Orange.
 
I have two HP Elitebooks. The first one is an 8540p. It has Nvidia graphics, and a core i7 quad. It is a 1600*900 display. The quad core models are the only ones that have 4 memory slots. For the 8540p you can put up to 16GB of memory.

I also have the newer model 8560w with a DreamColor display (1920*1080 IPS). It has an ATI graphics card. It is also a core i7 quad and supports up 32 GB of memory. I only have 16 in it currently. I may upgrade to 32 sometime this summer. It is heavy and does not have great battery life, i.e. 3-4 hours with the settings turned down. I also have the 9 cell battery option, but not the extended one which raises it up. It has 3 USB 2.0 ports, 1 is a always on charging port and 1 is an esata combo, along with 2 USB 3.0 ports, a mini firewire, and an sd/mmc slot. It does not have a PCMCIA slot though.

The difference between the "P" and "W' for HP is Personal / Workstation. They are both excellent machines. The 8540P does a bit better on battery.

I would definitely recommend either model. You may have a bit harder time finding the 8540 though.

One thing to remember is that the Elitebook line does not have an HDMI out, rather it has Displayport. The conversion cable is not all that expensive on Monoprice and goes with me everywhere.

Just as a side note, MonoPrice also carries a DisplayPort to VGA cable which I also have. The nice thing is I can connect 2 external monitors to the machine. I currently have an old HP 15inch connected via VGA and a SOYO 24 inch Topaz S connected via the DisplayPort to VGA cable. It is nice having three screens. The monitors display in native resolution, so the 15inch is 1024*768, the Laptop is 1920*1080, and the SOYO is 1920*1200.


If I had one gripe about the 8560w it would be that it does not have a keyboard light like the 8540 does. There is an option to get a backlit keyboard, but mine did not come with it. I can't seem to find one anywhere, otherwise I would just swap mine out.
 
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Lenovo W series or Dell Precision series. Both are due for Ivy Bridge refresh very soon, so if you can hold off I would.
 
Lenovo W series or Dell Precision series. Both are due for Ivy Bridge refresh very soon, so if you can hold off I would.

Looks like Lenovo finally has the W530 up for purchase... looks like shipping date is only 1 wk out as well. Have at it! :)
 
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