Recommendations for laptops to buy for teachers.

[Razzor1999]

Hello there,

 

I am a system administrator at a semi big high school (~500 students) in the Netherlands. Currently we have very old Dell optiplexes in every classroom where the teachers have to log into every time they start there lessons. This (obviously) reduces productivity for the teachers, because of this management decided it was time to buy laptops. When I started asking around at neighboring school I learned that almost all bought there laptops for the teachers at the some extremely overpriced company. To give you a sense: this company claims the base price for the Macbook air is 1.500 euro without tax while the real price is 1.130 euro with tax. Because of this we decided to look around in the consumer market. 

 

The main thing the school is looking for is longevity, and weight. 

 

The laptop we are currently planning to buy is the HP Pavilion 15-eh0947nd mainly because of:

- a aluminium housing

- upgradability (this way we can, for example, upgrade the RAM of the laptops in a couple of years when the laptops run slowly)

- a very fast AMD CPU

 

Do you people have any other suggestions at what I should look at?

[Freakwise]

1 hour ago, Razzor1999 said:

Hello there,

 

I am a system administrator at a semi big high school (~500 students) in the Netherlands. Currently we have very old Dell optiplexes in every classroom where the teachers have to log into every time they start there lessons. This (obviously) reduces productivity for the teachers, because of this management decided it was time to buy laptops. When I started asking around at neighboring school I learned that almost all bought there laptops for the teachers at the some extremely overpriced company. To give you a sense: this company claims the base price for the Macbook air is 1.500 euro without tax while the real price is 1.130 euro with tax. Because of this we decided to look around in the consumer market. 

 

The main thing the school is looking for is longevity, and weight. 

 

The laptop we are currently planning to buy is the HP Pavilion 15-eh0947nd mainly because of:

- a aluminium housing

- upgradability (this way we can, for example, upgrade the RAM of the laptops in a couple of years when the laptops run slowly)

- a very fast AMD CPU

 

Do you people have any other suggestions at what I should look at?

What is the use case for the laptop?

Is it just normal general use like browsing, ms word, video meeting, etc

Or it also for something heavy task, like blender, editing video, etc

 

The one tou listed is kinda ok

Just read and watch review for it if battery life is also important...

[Razzor1999]

Thank you for your response.

It is mostly a general use case, but I would like to overbuy on the CPU and RAM. My hope is that the laptops will last a lot longer if we buy those kinds of laptops.

 

Battery life is not important because the laptop because there will be chargers in all Classrooms. 

[EL02]

Yeah that one is pretty good. I've got a laptop with a r5 4500u and 16gb of ram(8gb is enough), which i use for like browsing, MS teams, auto cad and some gaming and it works pretty well.

4 hours ago, Razzor1999 said:

- upgradability (this way we can, for example, upgrade the RAM of the laptops in a couple of years when the laptops run slowly)

I would suggest to get a laptop with only one stick of ram as opposed to this one which has 2x4gb, so later you will only need to buy only 1 ram module.

 

Can you link any website youre planning to buy from so i can take a look?

[Razzor1999]

Thank you for your reply. 

 

The site we are planning to buy the laptops from is https://www.coolblue.nl/en/product/871177/hp-pavilion-15-eh0947nd.html. 

 

31 minutes ago, EL02 said:

Yeah that one is pretty good. I've got a laptop with a r5 4500u and 16gb of ram(8gb is enough), which i use for like browsing, MS teams, auto cad and some gaming and it works pretty well.

I would suggest to get a laptop with only one stick of ram as opposed to this one which has 2x4gb, so later you will only need to buy only 1 ram module.

 

Can you link any website youre planning to buy from so i can take a look?

 

[EL02]

The only laptop with a better cpu and more storage i found is this one. Its quite a bit cheaper but yeah other than the cpu and storage its inferior to the other one. 

 

Yeah there were cheaper laptops with similar specs to the one you chose, but they had windows 10 s, which you would have to install windows home/pro in order to to use apps outside the microsoft store, which wouldnt be convenient considering a school needs more than 50 laptops.

 

I would go with the one you chose earlier.

[lboolaka_33]

I'd buy a ThinkPad T/X series, HP ProBook/EliteBook, or Latitude 5/7000 series. You'll get better durability and reliability than a consumer-grade PC. 

The downside is cost, however you may be able to work something out due to the education setting and bulk order. 

Most schools (at least here in the US) use business systems like these (or Macs).

In any case, I'd go straight to the OEM for an order like this. 

[Selle]

You want comercial grade laptops like the ones lboolaka_33 listed. 
 

if this is a public school I will be very suppriced of there is no anti curruption laws requireing you to get quotes from a few differen retailers on a big bulk order like this. Dont by anything without talking to a sales person at the retailer you go with, especial retailers that are used to work with comercial customers will be willing to negotiate pricing on a big bulk order

[Razzor1999]

@lboolaka_33, thank you for the response; I will definitively look into those series laptop more. 

@SelleThank you for the reminder that the EU anti corruption laws are a think. I am not the person responsible for following those but I will remind the person who is. I know that in almost all the schools I know people at these laws were not followed. They just directly went to the overpriced company.