3 Reasons to NOT Buy a $400 Laptop

[MstaR35]

Guys, I want to spend about 700 quid on a laptop and want the best recommendation's please. Mainly light gaming and heavy uni work as a paramedic trainee. Please reply asap.

[AlexTheGreatish]

28 minutes ago, MstaR35 said:

Guys, I want to spend about 700 quid on a laptop and want the best recommendation's please. Mainly light gaming and heavy uni work as a paramedic trainee. Please reply asap.

Dell Inspiron Gaming

[MstaR35]

1 minute ago, AlexTheGreatish said:

Dell Inspiron Gaming

THANKSSSSS

[Drak3]

3 hours ago, NumLock21 said:

So I was browsing a new laptop from Newegg...

But do any of them have No, pyo?

[SpaceNugget]

Dropping matlab on the 800 laptop was kind of a strange choice, most matlab work falls more into the workstation category rather than small bang for the buck notebook category. I mean the base install of matlab is over $2000 and if all you were going to use was the base install you would probably be using octave instead. 

[Fiat-Libertas]

9 hours ago, Daniel644 said:

I don't get these TINY TINY laptops, who wants to look at a 11-13" screen when for the same money (except the 200 dollar model) you can get 15" screens with more POWERFUL processers if you give up the point less touchscreen convertible crap.

I wouldn't want this plastic garbo cheap laptop, but sometimes I wish I had gotten a 13" instead of a 15.6" when I got a new laptop last year. I've been flying a lot more and with how small airline seats are now, trying to use the 15" laptop on the tray table is comical and basically not possible.

[Shreyas1]

lol you advertise cyberpowerpc in a dell video

[AlexTheGreatish]

1 hour ago, SpaceNugget said:

Dropping matlab on the 800 laptop was kind of a strange choice, most matlab work falls more into the workstation category rather than small bang for the buck notebook category. I mean the base install of matlab is over $2000 and if all you were going to use was the base install you would probably be using octave instead. 

I was thinking more of all the students that might be using it for a college computer, an i5 will be more than enough to get you through Fluids or Vibrations.

[Daniel644]

4 hours ago, Fiat-Libertas said:

I wouldn't want this plastic garbo cheap laptop, but sometimes I wish I had gotten a 13" instead of a 15.6" when I got a new laptop last year. I've been flying a lot more and with how small airline seats are now, trying to use the 15" laptop on the tray table is comical and basically not possible.

I'm not even sure I'm going to want another laptop once this one dies, now that I've built my desktop I can do work related stuff there, my next portable device may just be something like that Samsung Galaxy View (if something like that exists when the time comes), just a giant tablet, it's really all we use laptops for anyway these days is browsing the web and shit like that, i'll move my SSD's into my desktop and dual boot windows on there (have to run no newer then 8.1 for certain work software that I don't want to have to pay to get the newer version that I don't need, especially since they switched to a monthly subscription model instead of selling the software outright.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

14 hours ago, Daniel644 said:

I don't get these TINY TINY laptops, who wants to look at a 11-13" screen when for the same money (except the 200 dollar model) you can get 15" screens with more POWERFUL processers if you give up the point less touchscreen convertible crap.

The people who don't want to carry a 15" laptop, for example (while needing a keyboard).

 

14 hours ago, Bigbootyjudy said:

budget laptops are starting to get better but I think they still arent worth it. I have always had cheap computers and they just aggravate me

 

The only cheap laptops I think are kind of worth it are chromebooks, for office and school purposes only though,

I don't know if they are getting better, but $400 isn't that low, and I think it used to get it more. I mean, I'm not even sure all $400 laptops are like this one, but this one was bad spec-wise. Maybe. I'm skewed becasue I tend to think €400 instead of $400, so perhaps I have in mind more like a $500 laptop in mind. Still, last time i helped someone in that budget (2012-2013), the end result was much better, especially for people not gaming. Something like non-U i5, run of the mill 15" screen, 4GB...

 

13 hours ago, kk027 said:

This is a review I found of a $400 Dell laptop on the Walmart website: "This Is My first laptop and I don't know if just my internet but so far browsing has been extremely slow and download speeds and extremely slow it says its gunna take 12+ hours to download a 171 MB file so I let it download then about halfway through it crashes. at this point I'm not sure whether* to return it and get my money back or get better internet." I mean, it's a $400

laptop. What did you expect?

 

$400 worth of performance, perhaps? That person isn't running Crysis, but browsing the freaking web. I would expect that to be flawless on the $200 one, let alone the $400 model. In fact, I don't see a reason why any computer in the market would have troubles browsing, when we have tablets and even phones browsing no problems. And I'm not talking $700 phones, by €70 chinaphones.

 

13 hours ago, kk027 said:

The other Dell probably had a higher price.

Again, does that higher price (which is just your conjecture, by the way) be the difference between working and not working at all?

 

The underlying assumption seems to be that people spending $1000 should expect $1000 value, and the people spending $400 should expect $0. I can't see a reason to think like that.

[FeralWombat]

I'm also pretty sure a 200$ 10' tablet will feel speedier than that laptop especially since multi-tasking isn't really a thing it will do. plus the tablet will have longer battery life (galaxy tab E?)

[pipnina]

13 hours ago, FeralWombat said:

2gb ram in 2017, does it even make sense to release this? woulnd't like 20$ make 4gb possible? Both the red and blue look nice tho, if that kind of thing matters.

2GB of ram is perfectly usable in 2017. If you use certain Linux breeds. (I.e. LXDE or LXQT as a desktop environment) You can use as little as 250MB. Although you likely still won't be doing much on it, you'd be doing more than nothing (which is what Windows 10 can manage on that amount of RAM)

[frendlyfirezero]

You have no idea how happy this video makes me.

        My school got us the lowest tiers of the red 2-in-1 and they are terrible, most of the 32gb of memory is taken up by the windows install, 70-80% of the 2gb of ram is used by windows at idle they constantly run out of space, especially when trying to update, the delay on it switching from pc to tablet mode is sometimes as long as 10 seconds and half the time when you switch to tablet mode the keyboard and mouse don't disable so you end up typing and clicking accidentally and the only solution is to flip it back to pc mode and then flip it again to tablet mode.

        Besides all of that the single most irritating thing about them is the fact they got them for us to use as textbooks but you can't use them in portrait mode as a tablet (Like you would hold a book) because the viewing angles on the screen are so bad that your eyes see the screen at different brightnesses so you instantly end up with a headache. As the IT class, we have students from every other class in the school bringing us these stupid things to "fix" every day. I cannot tell you how much I hate these things. I haven't used mine as a book at all and I just leave it at home. My girlfriend uses it sometimes for writing but even she has told me about how terrible the screen is and how it lags constantly.

TLDR; Dont buy them.

[Eduard the weeb]

16 hours ago, pesta01694 said:

I'm curious: in the review you said that the 200 $ storage is not upgradable, which makes sense because it's an emmc, but what about the 400$ one? Since it has a normal (I suppose) 2.5'' HDD shouldn't it be able to get a upgrade ? What is the internal upgradability of the 400$ one compared to the 200$ ?

 

I'm looking to buy one and this would be very helpful, thanks!

couldn't you just get external hard drive ?

[Eduard the weeb]

15 hours ago, MstaR35 said:

Guys, I want to spend about 700 quid on a laptop and want the best recommendation's please. Mainly light gaming and heavy uni work as a paramedic trainee. Please reply asap.

 

Omen 17t, dell inspiron gaming or

 

personal favorite Sager Np6850

which is the Above http://www.sagernotebook.com/Notebook-NP6850.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjw0ejNBRCYARIsACEBhDNLV67wCeex9H3fzE4QI2dMgePegYnLCqRWU_i5pFUpjir9VOO6ROUaAk4yEALw_wcB

 

Only problem with sager is the kinda slow hard drive but I would upgrade it.

[AlexTheGreatish]

8 hours ago, Daniel644 said:

I'm not even sure I'm going to want another laptop once this one dies, now that I've built my desktop I can do work related stuff there, my next portable device may just be something like that Samsung Galaxy View (if something like that exists when the time comes), just a giant tablet, it's really all we use laptops for anyway these days is browsing the web and shit like that, i'll move my SSD's into my desktop and dual boot windows on there (have to run no newer then 8.1 for certain work software that I don't want to have to pay to get the newer version that I don't need, especially since they switched to a monthly subscription model instead of selling the software outright.

I thought that would be a good idea at one point, after I had the desktop setup and my laptop died I just got a tablet.  Took about 3 months before I realized that was a bad idea and ended up getting an Inspiron.  Just too many times I felt stranded without a full OS, also a proper keyboard.  

[Bigbootyjudy]

13 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Maybe. I'm skewed becasue I tend to think €400 instead of $400, so perhaps I have in mind more like a $500 laptop in mind.

I have a 500 dollar laptop and Its actually okay for doing most basic stuff, even a little gaming. (overwatch on low at 60-80 fps)

[pesta01694]

On 14/9/2017 at 6:13 PM, Eduard the weeb said:

couldn't you just get external hard drive ?

I don't see any good reason to get one:

 

1) it runs through usb 3 at best, which is much slower than sata3

2) you cannot run your os on it, so no extra ssd performance there

3) you have to carry it everywhere you go, basically defeating the main purpose of this laptop which is portability

[Drak3]

On 9/18/2017 at 10:14 AM, pesta01694 said:

I don't see any good reason to get one:

 

1) it runs through usb 3 at best, which is much slower than sata3

2) you cannot run your os on it, so no extra ssd performance there

3) you have to carry it everywhere you go, basically defeating the main purpose of this laptop which is portability

Most use cases that need only low end laptops don't see much benefit over USB 3.0, rendering your point moot.

 

Any Linux distro can easily be installed on external HDD/SSDs, and Windows just takes a Win2Go tool to make it happen.

 

An external that is powered at the port doesn't realistically compromise portability outside of using it during a bus or car ride, and even then, not by that much.

 

Pyo.

[pesta01694]

21 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Most use cases that need only low end laptops don't see much benefit over USB 3.0, rendering your point moot.

 

Any Linux distro can easily be installed on external HDD/SSDs, and Windows just takes a Win2Go tool to make it happen.

 

An external that is powered at the port doesn't realistically compromise portability outside of using it during a bus or car ride, and even then, not by that much.

 

Pyo.

even then I don't really see the point of buying an ssd to keep it external, it's much more convenient to put an ssd in there and use the hdd for backup/media when needed.

 

I don't see any pros in doing what you suggest except for the fact that I wouldn't have to tinker with the hardware which I'm pretty confortable with.

 

 

[Drak3]

8 minutes ago, pesta01694 said:

even then I don't really see the point of buying an ssd to keep it external, it's much more convenient to put an ssd in there and use the hdd for backup/media when needed.

 

I don't see any pros in doing what you suggest except for the fact that I wouldn't have to tinker with the hardware which I'm pretty confortable with.

 

 

The only real reasons to run a system off an external are:

1) Validation/Rescue OS with tools

2) Run any system that can boot off of USB as you want it, with your files, without changing the system itself.