Business Laptop Recommendations?

[LeviathanProdeG]

I am a junior systems administrator in a small IT team at my company. Currently, we are using a mixture of Thin Clients and these laptops, as well as some extremely old Dell E6520 laptops that are still in circulation (there is a story behind that which I will not get into right now). Most of our office workers across 7 different offices in 3 states work on a VMWare Horizon VM for their daily workflow currently. We also have about 150 field technicians across these branches who do complex wiring and building technologies installations and maintenance (think fire alarms, door access control systems, cameras, etc.).

We have been ordering some Dell Latitude 3520s (3 year lease with Pro Support plan) with VisionTek VT7000 docking stations for our users for about a year, and have been getting quite a few complaints from users regarding the seemingly cheaper build quality and USB-C issues with the docking stations (not sure if it is the docking stations or the USB C ports on the laptops at this point to blame). At this point, we have stopped all laptop orders for these and are looking at re-evaluating our rollout plan and laptop choices. We are going to pick a couple of different models that will suit each environment's needs more specifically and can reliably handle the majority of their workflow locally, transitioning away from working full time in the VMs and more towards working locally on their endpoint devices, with occasional VM access for internal network resources as needed.

We are looking for 4 different models to standardize around:

1. Sales and basic office workers: Preferably light weight, used mainly for office suite and browser apps. We are looking for something a little less expensive here, but still reasonably robust build quality. Highly preferred to support Thunderbolt so as to hopefully avoid docking station instability we have been seeing. Our current Latitude 3520 has USB-C with DP-alt mode support, but no Thunderbolt. We will most likely opt out of purchasing extended warranty packages for these, opting to purchase extra stock for internal replacements instead of dealing with manufacturer support for these.

2. Accounting and power users: Looking for a bit more processing power here with a bit more RAM than average. Also a 10key keyboard is a plus (although not required as they will be working on a docking station with external mouse and keyboard). Thunderbolt support also preferred here for docking station compatibility and stability.

3. Technicians: These will mainly be for accessing Serial connections on building control panels, and uploading and downloading datasets. Excel will be involved. These are BY FAR our most frequently damaged machines, so durability and an extended support plan being available is a strong consideration here. They also need to frequently run VMs of older OS's for software compatibility for older building systems. These will need a bit more processing power than the basic office workers, and be more heavy duty.

4. Engineers and Developers: These will be in the office connected to docking stations, and will be our highest end machines we purchase. Working on software development, AutoCAD, BlueBeam PDF editing of building designs, etc. Prefer strong Nvidia graphics for CAD, significantly more RAM (I suspect 32 GBs or more).

 

I have been looking at Dell's business offerings again, but was curious if there were other recommendations for other brands / suppliers you guys have out there. We have been very pleased with their Pro support, as it has been timely and effective when we have called for replacement / repairs. However, the cost for the Pro support is very high on these 3520 laptops, so we are curious if it makes sense to continue on the next round. 

Any other recommendations or experiences you guys can chime in on would be appreciated.

[8tg]

This is something you’ll want to speak to a Dell, HP or Lenovo sales rep over. This is what they do. You’re talking about a large enough scale of operations buying things directly from these manufacturers of business equipment and their support systems, you need to contact them.

This is a consumer tech forum, we can provide information based on what experiences we have, but what works best for a company is a different ordeal.

 

That being said, I’m a thinkpad nerd.

 

Group 1, sales and office workers. You’d want the Thinkpad E series. They’re cheap, they still have the enterprise management features of any other thinkpad, basic specs and number pads. Intel or AMD options, E14 and E15 for 14 or 15 inch displays.

Group 2, accounting and power users. T series. It’s the same thing but overall better in available options. T14 or T15 for the same screen size differences.

Alternatively if you’re somewhere between needing a mobile workstation and a business laptop, like you have some use cases that genuinely need a more powerful cpu or lots of ram, the P15v is between the T series and P series, offering the higher wattage processors and upgradable ram up to 64gb, but not going all in with the P series options like mobile Quadro gpus.

Group 3, technicians. If durability is a concern, like these are the most portable machines that are commonly damaged, Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged. It’s a latitude 5430, regular 14” business machine, except you can drop it at will with no issues. Lenovo doesn’t really have rugged equivalents, though they are just generally durable. But any higher end professional laptop is durable if you don’t drop it.

 

Group 4, engineers and developers. Thinkpad P series, P17 in particular for the size. High end mobile workstations designed for function first. But in the same realm the Dell Precision 7770 is also a great choice. You can’t really go wrong with high end workstations as they’re all on a similar level to eachother. When you’re buying a $3000+ laptop from these companies they’re not messing around with features, you just get all of the features.

 

[ToboRobot]

38 minutes ago, LeviathanProdeG said:

(not sure if it is the docking stations or the USB C ports on the laptops at this point to blame).
 

Figure out if its the docking stations or not.

[LeviathanProdeG]

13 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

Figure out if its the docking stations or not.

At first we thought that it had to do with the lack or thunderbolt support on the laptops, leading to a potential mis-match of supported USB-C standards. We were hoping transitioning to Thunderbolt certified hardware all around would alleviate that issue.

However, researching today, I am beginning to wonder if the issues have to deal with Displaylink. Apparently, from what I understand, Displaylink is bypassing the GPU entirely and is running a virtual screen space off of the CPU, compressing the Display streams, then decompressing them in the dock on a Displaylink chip and rendering them to the displays. Our current docking stations use Displaylink compression for 2 displays, then DP-alt mode for the 3rd display which I believe runs off of the laptop GPU. I am curious if the USB peripherals, dual monitors through Displaylink, third monitor through DP-alt mode, power, and gigabit ethernet are potentially overwhelming the bandwidth on this USB-C port.

I am beginning to wonder if cutting out Displaylink might be the next thing to test, as Thunderbolt supports dual displays natively using the onboard GPU, then can use the onboard HDMI port on the laptop for the third.

However, further testing on that front is still required.