new laptop questions
 

I have been thinking of getting a new laptop in the near future but am not sold on many of the current Windows models. Chromebooks are out because of their lack of PDF editing capabilities.

I have looked into the MacBooks but not sure I’d be able to master the layout considering I have used Windows for nearly 25 years. They also don’t have the PDF editor/viewer that I use regularly.

any ideas/suggestions?

Huh?


Get a laptop and install Linux Mint, or get a Chromebook and install MX Linux.

I like Windows for the versatility, but it may depend on what you are doing.

I do suggest a solid state drive. Booting up is so much faster.

There are many PDF editing software apps for Mac. Maybe you can get used to one of them.

Someone gave me a MacBook Air two years ago. Even though I had spent my whole life with Windows computers and laptops, I got used to the strange interface.

Just get an external mouse with a wheel on top because sometimes the scrolling bar disappears. Also, Macs are a little more secure when you download software outside of their store, so you might need to give it permission to install various things.

If it was my own money I'd have just settled for a cheaper Windows laptop. Macs cost a lot of money for roughly the same horsepower. But otherwise, I have little knocks against the MacBook Air I'm using.

define PDF editing?

I'm very picky when it comes to devices but I sprung for a Surface Go about 18 months ago and have not regretted that. I have to say I really like this device. I bought the detachable keyboard and the stylus with it at the time so the whole thing came to maybe $600-ish not sure. It's running Windows 10 and Edge for the browser. When I open a PDF it opens within the Edge browser and I can mark it all up with the stylus. If you pull off the backlit keyboard (it's magnetic) you can just use the device like a regular tablet with touchscreen, onscreen keyboard, watch youtube whatever. Stylus is magnetic too, just snaps onto the side.

What else, hmm, it logs me in with facial recognition, pretty slick. I was able to install the full office suite which I have fully licensed from prior years, I run Office 2010 still which is fine, you need to be careful with Office though because they default to wanting you to use the web-based office stuff, I forgot what I had to do so it doesn't bug me about that anymore. It also may have been shipped with Windows 10 in S -mode which I switched out of ASAP into regular windows mode. Depends what you want to do with it but I really like the device for the price. Just the whole thing as a package, build quality etc. Really no complaints and this was a low spec model, higher spec variants are probably all the better.

I have dithered on getting one. I have seen some refurbs with keyboard and pencil in the $300 dollar range. The specs look like the processor would be under powered………any complaints on the speed?

Hi Ralph. I don't have complaints on the speed but I'm honestly not asking it to do much. For an excel sheet I might have my daily double probables spreadsheet that will give me the likely final odds. I can synch that over to it from my desktop PC with dropbox. Stuff like that it runs fine, web stuff it does smoothly. My first priority when shopping for this type of device at the time was the pdf markup experience, I watched a couple of reviews on the device and was hands-on with the ipads and other tablets and marked up some PDFs in best buy. This device to me was the better experience between the few that I played around with. Could the markup experience be better? yes there's some room for improvement but relative to what's out there it does it well with the pen. Once I got it home and fiddled with the setup it has been a pretty solid device for my needs. Again though I want to stress that I'm not doing heavy number crunching with this device, it's by no means a desktop replacement that I would write code on, it's more of a netbook/tablet experience. For a full laptop experience I'd probably suggest looking elsewhere. If say for example money were no object and I really needed a laptop for extensive travel or running something heavy I'd be looking into a Toughbook55 or something along those lines.

Thank you!!

Great info!

You want good advice on buying a pc and it requires a detailed list of everything you need it to do with it just like any tool you'd buy.
You wouldn't buy a Miata if you carpooled. You wouldn't buy a Prius to race. You wouldn't buy a Ford 250 truck to pick up a few groceries weekly.
Without that list you'll only get general advice that may not apply to your situation.

I just picked up one of these because my MS Surface Book (original) was getting way long in the tooth:

https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flo...3-2022-series/

Didn't buy the XG Mobile stand-alone graphics card, because that's insane.

But what I really kinda wanted was this, which was more like my Surface Book (detachable tablet):

https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flo...3-2022-series/

But...there wasn't one available in the timeline that I needed it...but I don't really use my laptop that much to justify the higher price, although it was only $200 more...

That’s some nice equipment there.

Looks blazing fast on paper

It's quite capable and fast...but there are much faster gaming laptops out there...the problem is they all weigh 4-5lbs and I'm not lugging that around...lol

Oh, and their battery life (when gaming) really really sucks.

Nice rig, do you game or is this just to run horse-related stuff?

I had an Alienware 12 or 13 which was a smaller lower budget gaming laptop a couple of years before Dell acquired them. Decent build quality but I got rid of it because I mostly gamed on console anyway back then.

For laptops I've always been a big toughbook fan over the years because of the more rugged build, the built in handle and daylight-readable. They're on the heavier side but the handle helped. Expensive to buy new though. Good for horse related stuff but not much for gaming, I don't think there's much graphics horsepower, it's more of a business laptop.

At my last job which was at a software dev company they bought the sales team these massive sager gaming laptops to run our software for demo purposes. I had to configure these things for the sales team and I believe we had 3 physical SSDs in them that we installed. I had several VMs running on it with VMware workstation, a windows domain controller, a video recorder and a SQL server I believe were the VMs and our client software ran on the Windows host OS so it could leverage the graphics card for that video viewing piece. Those things were so heavy though and ran really hot so the sales guys nicknamed it the sterilizer. lol

I game but not on a laptop...I could probably get away with a really cheap laptop with a decent sized screen for my needs...but when it comes to tech, I'm stupid like that and always want a gaming rig be it a laptop or desktop...because they are usually the fastest for everything