Laptop computers are crap
Occasionally, the crumbs scavenged by the Dabbs clan are supplemented with purchases from a local food emporium, the expenditure being partly funded by product reviews that I submit to El Reg. El Reg, by the way, is a real person in a kind of virtual concept common to all omnipresent beings. The last time I was granted an …
This topic is closed for new posts.
Tim Robinson
I drive a dell precision laptop - it's got a full HD screen, numeric keypad, 1.5TB of disk, 8GB RAM (I think it can go higher). It's possible to buy one with a wide-viewing-angle screen. I can't understand why these aren't more popular because I agree that most of these things are necessary for many IT people to work effectively
what would I change? I'd have a proper block of cursor and home-end keys (probably instead of the numeric keypad), and I'd have a proper macbook-style multi-touch trackpad which really does do away with the need for an external mouse
Wise article
When it's at home, my laptop is attached to a 21" monitor and proper keyboard. The built in 15" feels restrictive by comparison. Even 21" feels too small nowadays.
Desktops are sexiest, most upgradable and generally better at every thing than laptops, which are better than tablets, which are better than smart phones.
Laptops good for DVD viewing ? If you like whirring, clanking, and sitting in an office chair to watch your films.
Re: Wise article
Why does screen size matter? My laptop has a smaller screen than I have on my office desk, but is way more readable and has lots more pixels... One of the best I used was a Dell D600 (IIRC) 14" 1400*1050 screen is wide viewing angles and pin sharp. Beautiful!
Re: Wise article
I'm with you, but for others it's about being able to see. A lot of people with poor sight will run their fancy large 1980x1600 screen at 640x480 in order to "make the words bigger". Increasing the font sizes doesn't seem to compute and as for the resolution, if your sight isn't that good anyway, are you going to care?
My laptop, like most current generation Lenovos, has a screen which wouldn't look out of place a decade ago. It's shit.
On another note, why can't they put a usb port to the left of the escape key? Dongle would stick up, you'd still be able to see the screen, and you'd be able to use it on the train.
Screen Size
I guess that the true problem is all this widescreen craze that has infested the recent batch of laptops. Now you got wide-ass screens that are too short to read stuff. Somehow laptop mfgs think everyone uses laptops to watch 16:9 movies instead of actually working. This is worse on netbooks, where some stuff won't even show up thanks to the height restriction.
Also, there's something weird with Vista and win7, I swear that I can't make the letters small enough anymore. I've seen XP on the same screens and it's noticeable, so much that win7 looks like a Fischer Price "my first PC" baby UI compared even to XP's candy theme.
Re: Wise article
"If you like whirring, clanking, and sitting in an office chair to watch your films."
I personally love to whir and clank while I sit in an office chair watching films. The wife hates it when I do that, though...
Re: Wise article
The reason there are no stick-up USB ports by Esc is you'd probably smash your screen.
How long do you think it would be before you accidentally close the lid (or someone shove by and do it) without removing the USB device?
It's bad enough the number that get ripped off the sides when putting into bags, but at least those usually only break the USB stick.
Re: Wise article
A stick inserted to the left of the Esc key would hit the screen's bezel on many laptops, not the screen itself. However, your point still stands.
If anyone knows of some 1" long, flexible USB extension ribbon cables (that can be bent through 90º and retain said angle) I would love to hear from you.
Sorry to have banged on about them on a few posts, but they seem to be an easy, simple and cheap way to solve both one issue in the original article, and issues raised by fellow commentards.
+Protect your USB device and your computer's USB ports.
+Make use of USB ports that are too close together
+Use dongles where space is constrained, such as on a train
+Sling your laptop into its bag with having to remove your dongles or sticks
+Use dongles more easily on machines that have god-awful industrial 'design' (Older Dell Optiplex, I'm looking at YOU!)
Re: Wise article
I know what you mean, I have a couple of 3" rigid/bendy USB extension cables on the van from some old USB wifi dongles. After doing some searches the closest thing I can find nowadays is the FlexUSB product for about £8
@ Stacy and pPPPP, Re: Wise article
pPPP wrote :- "A lot of people with poor sight will run their fancy large 1980x1600 screen at 640x480 in order to "make the words bigger". Increasing the font sizes doesn't seem to compute and as for the resolution, if your sight isn't that good anyway, are you going to care?"
That last bit is strange logic. A lot of people used to computing are now 50+, and it is a strain for them to read tiny words. You (Stacy) will find that out one day. I am not talking about people with defective vision who might want a big screen with 640x480 res, I am talking about average 50-70 yo's.
The solution is simple, a normal (ie high) resolution, for which most apps are designed, on a physically big screen. You don't want to throw away resolution just to make the device smaller and lighter.
People go on about lightness and slimness; I have a laptop, but use a desktop when at home and dont give a f#@K how big or heavy it is. The desk and floor take the weight, and the system unit (a hefty tower in my case) is away under the desk. If I wanted another 12 cubic inches in my room I would chuck away some of these old magazines I have lying around rather than make compomises with my PC.
Displays and keyboards
May I suggest that the reason you feel the need for multiple screens of extraordinary dimensions, number pads and dislike trackpads might all be down to the window manager you are using?
I find with OSX and Gnome, virtual desktops and roll-upable windows really put an end to me feeling the need for multiple displays at all, and modern character rendering means my pixel count goes much further. I prefer a mouse to a trackpad too, but Apple have really made the most of what they have by sensible support for it at an OS level, rather than try and make it emulate a mouse and constrain what it does accordingly.
And number pads are for accountants. ;-)
Re: Displays and keyboards
Number pads are actually for people who buy too much on the internet from retailers who don't store their CC info :)
Re: Displays and keyboards
And number pads are for accountants. ;-)
In jest, I know : D
But the article was about real work. On older CAD packages, the number pad was dead handy for entering translations.
Re: Displays and keyboards
And you'll be forever fiddling around rolling windows up and down and switching virtual desktops. With sufficient screen area you can have several things going at once. Typically when I'm working I'll have an editing window, three browser windows and a VNC session all in active use. If I've got to roll up the browser window with the library documentation before I can make a code change in the editor, then roll that one up so I can run the code in another, and then close that so I can see what the server logs say in the VNC session...
Re: Displays and keyboards
Number pads are very handy if you're using a French keyboard layout - the regular numbers are all on shift keys to make way for accented letters.
Converselyusing ALT+Character Code (e.g. ALT+0232 to get è) for accented characters in Windows on a UK/US keyboard only seems to work with the number pad - regular numbers along the top don't work.
Re: Displays and keyboards
The points you raise are valid: better windowing software can alleviate many of the issues raised (but not all)
I suspect you have been downvoted because you have underestimated the frustration that people feel at only being able to buy laptops with screens inferior to those they had a few ago. Also, I'm not sure as to how better windowing software can make up for not having a number-pad.
: D
Oddly
When choosing a new laptop last night I surprised myself with going with a 14" simply because it was smaller, lighter and easy to take with me than the 15.6" I'd been looking at. I already have a desktop with loads of disk and big monitors so it suddenly occured to me I wanted a laptop to well, have on top of my lap and to travel with me and I was more likely to do that if it wasn't a brick. If only ultrabooks were cheaper though...
Good article though and if I only had one machine I'd agree with just about everything said.
Haha, what a strange article. I was about to tell you you must just have bought shit laptops because even my little (quite customised) Inspiron Mini does not fall foul of much that you noted as long as I don't expect too much from it. But then I read the end.
Nice :) Probably should have put the troll face as the icon though.
I don't think any of the existing form factors will ever fully die out. At the end of the day it really just comes down to personal preference and need.
Netbooks
Had to use the Mrs's netbook last night. Tiny keys, tiny screen, tiny track pad. Felt like a laptop for kids. Horrid.
Re: Netbooks
Yeah! I want to feel my sperm boiling from the heat pouring off my quad-quad-core, 24" laptop monster! I want people to think the world is coming to end when I am playing an FPS through the inbuilt sound system. I want to have to hire a team of very fit Sherpa's to lug it and the spare batteries, external 100PB disk storage units I need for watching my natively stored Blu-Ray collection and FLAC format music library. FInally I want three seats on the train when I sit down and start typing an email to my mates about a drink up on Friday night!
I AM MAN, HEAR ME ROAR!
8943G.
Core i7, 16Gig Ram, 1.5Tb, (or 1Tb SSD.) 18in screen, plus secondary screen 23inch, plus 40in LCD telly over the hdmi.
I have two of them, they're monsters, and two legacy 8930s (both with 128Gig Kingston v+100 and v+200 - the 200 needed new firmware, for both it, and the box.) Mark you. It needs something fast to deal with 100Mbit internet.
I'm not trying to prove the guy wrong, I'm just showing off, see how lucky I am :-)
Joking aside, in normal usage, the twin SSD version is the fastest thing you've ever seen. It sits there using < 0.1% cpu. Unless I'm doing heavy SQL work 4 cores are continually parked. The only thing missing is usb3, which is now present on the 8951. Copying 100 Gig of porn<del><del><del><del> family photos from one drive to the other takes no time at all. I can no longer imagine upgrading.
<irony>
So, in each image that you complain about something being badly designed you post a hacked up image of an Apple Product.
Then for the image you use when you say you're happy with them, you use an image of an Intel Product.
Editorial slant?
</irony off>
For those of you missing the point..It's a joke :)
Re: <irony>
...Apple bought Acer? When was that, exactly? I mean, there's a hacked-up image of an Acer laptop on the first bloody page of the article, either you're thick or you've just got a point to make.
Or hey, maybe both, who knows.
Special to whoever spent an hour yesterday going through my back comments and downvoting each one: lol, u mad?
Re: <irony>
...Acer bought Asus? When was that, exactly? I mean, there's a hacked-up image of an Asus laptop on the first bloody page of the article, either you're thick or you've just got a point to make.
Re: going through back comments
Yes, they clearly are, but look on the bright side; they are now one hour closer to death with nothing to show for it. People like that *could* have been interacting with the rest of us.
Bloody 16:9 screens GRRRR!
I blame everything, well almost everything, on the perverse idea that laptops should have screens designed to play movies.
My trusty old laptop is a ThinkPad R52 with 1400x1050, yes, 4:3, and guess what, it's great. It might be old, slow, and the battery last approx 20 minutes, *but* it's not the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck so is easy to carry from one plug point to the next! I don't need battery life, I need portability. I would by a new replacement, but I don't want to have to purchase a wide load screen just to get a similar vertical resolution to what I've already got. So I'm contemplating a motherboard hack to install a sata SSD instead.
Even on a desktop machine I'm not sure about 16:9. I'm sitting typing this on a 27" 2560x1440, and I seem to have far more slack space on each side then I do top and bottom.
Agreed, and double the GRRRR!
Before it died, the T23 with same size and resolution screen (and ibm thinkpad with trackpoint keyboard) was a joy to work with. Pity that series is prone to hair cracks in the main PCB (and the keyboard bezels, and the back corners of the case, and the display bezels) and so dies too often for inherent design defect reasons.
I'll take a display of that quality, non-glossy, perhaps with the 3qi daylight trick built in, if it can be had in that resolution and aspect ratio. Add a slightly redesigned keyboard, say an ARM core or four, make it a bit thinner and so that it doesn't need a fan, with a bigger battery in a sturdier case, couple other tweaks and I'd have something I'd have trouble stopping working with.
I'd have the desktop provide the extra oomph either locally or in cloud fashion whenever necessary, but most of the time I don't really need it. Editors and test runs on toy datasets to iron out the bugs don't need that much. The large runs on lots of data are what's problematic, and if those get big enough I'd want a gpgpu or something anyway; those don't tend to fit in a laptop.
Re: Bloody 16:9 screens GRRRR!
I don't see why people think there is a choice between desktop and laptop. I do nearly all of my work from home, but because I also travel regularly, I have a notebook. No compromise on grunt (Corei5, 6GB RAM) and when sitting on its docking station I have external keyboard, drives etc. I don't need 500GB of storage on the machine itself - when I travel the 160GB SSD has more than enough.
I have two screens on my desk, and yes, when I travel I find working on a single screen tedious (and I agree that 16:9 is sop to playing movies - which is not why I buy a high-end business laptop), but plugging in a monitor wherever I am working is actually not all that much hassle and I am already planning for the third screen at home (my wife already has this and , damn, it useful for big spreadsheets).
For sitting watch TV with something on my lap - guess what - I have a tablet, but there is really nothing I need a "desktop" machine for that I don't get from my notebook. Plus I have everything with me when I travel. It is the desktop market that should be worried, not the notebooks.
Re: Bloody 16:9 screens GRRRR!
20 minutes my old Dell M1730 is now 4 years old and only last 10, damn I need a new battery.
Re: Bloody 16:9 screens GRRRR!
8Ndeed, I think 16:10 was already wide enough and a reasonable compromise. Unfortunately for the morons that make these decisions they had to take it too far to 16:9.
Why oh why oh why?
Couldn't you find anything worth writing about? What a pointless article.
Re: Why oh why oh why?
You still stuck it out to the bitter end AND still had the time to spare to comment on it, must have been something kept you going?
So, wait...
Are you saying we should use a tablet because laptops don't have a numeric keypad and the usb ports are all too close together?
Sounds like a nice.....
inflammatory article to boost flagging add revenues at the end of the week.
Click click click......
And another thing
One huge disadvantage of a laptop is you dont get an air of smug superiority as you polish the screen to remove that morning's jam, shuffle a few icons around the screen and mess around zooming and panning photos of Great Aunt Ada knowing that, because you have a tablet, you must be considerably richer and important than yeow. Praise the lord I dont have to commute by train into Lundun.
Re: And another thing
Yeah but you can sit on the train, pick pubes out from between the keys, hold them up at arm's length with a screwed up face, then drop them on the floor. You might even get a free seat next to you to put your bag on.
Anonymous because I'm being hypothetical. Honestly. :-) I'm also clock-watching, it being Friday.
Please! Spare us the mobile device willy-waggling!
Yeah mildly entertaining article that is occasionally original. But...
"My laptop is so fab it's better than your telly and has a hard drive so big that I backup the internet...yadda yadda yadda... *snore* ...and it's even colour-cordinated with my iPhad and has a dock for my iDrone and a slot for my coke spoon and..." Oh fuck off and die already.
My laptop comes in a large metal box with screen attached by a flexible cable rather than outdated fragile hinges, contains standard components that are fast, quiet, reliable, cheap to replace if they go wrong using a single standard screwdriver, it connects to a multiplicity of peripherals (full-size spill-proof keyboard, mouse, etc.) connected via standard interfaces without need of hubs or expansion cards. Oh and it has the unique property that I cannot take it to the sofa/pub/party/anywhere else and thus fails to annoy my friends/family by intruding on the time I spend with them.
I should add the my use-case is defined by the fact that I am not so important that the entire population of the internet has to be able to contact me 24/7/365 via Twatter, Farcebook et al so clearly my laptop would be no good for individuals less insignificant than me.
Re: Please! Spare us the mobile device willy-waggling!
"standard screwdriver" - what's one of them - any kitchen knife maybe?
"a slot for my coke spoon"
Well done, sir! To whom should I address this invoice for a replacement laptop keyboard?
Re: Please! Spare us the mobile device willy-waggling!
My laptop is 13 years old. I won it in a competition.
Re: Please! Spare us the mobile device willy-waggling!
Alistair: just in case it wasn't obvious my futile rant was not directed at you :-)
And Aaron, did I mention spill-proof? Assuming you've not also flooded your USB ports I recommend a Cherry keyboard - made by serious Germans with plenty of that vorsprung durch technik thingamabob that they have.
Re: Please! Spare us the mobile device willy-waggling!
"serious Germans"? You mean there are other kinds?!
Baseless Rant
I can counter most of the points made. My ThinkPad T60 has a 2048x1536 15" screen, which is about the 4th highest resolution you are going to get on a monitor (after IBM T221 at 3840x2400 like the one on my desk
(See: http://www.altechnative.net/2011/06/05/wquxga-a-k-a-omgwtf-ibm-t221-3840x2400-204dpi-monitor/ ),
and various 30" 2560x1600 models like the one that my T221 replaced and the handful of mailslot-view 2560x1440 models). In other words, you can get more than sufficient resolution for real work on a laptop.
With a bit of a compromise (ARM instead of x86), you can have decent battery life, too. My Toshiba AC100 is thinner than a Macbook Air and has a 10" 1280x720 screen, a decent SSD and other tweaks (See: http://www.altechnative.net/tag/ac100/ ) - and it manages 6-8 hours on a full charge (depending on the screen brightness you set, power settings, and how hard you are hammering the WiFi and the CPU). The upcoming Asus Transformer HD (1920x1200 10") will be even better when it actually arrives and gets cracked for a full-fat Linux possibility.
Re: Baseless Rant
Yeah, T60 is still available?
Readers: Please suggest 1920 x 1200 + midrange laptops. I'm aware of some pricer Lenevos and Apple of course, but they seem extinct at lower price points. Of all the points in the article, the 1st, screen aspect ratio, is the most important to me, and the hardest to rectify.
: D
Re: Baseless Rant
There are many, many T60s on ebay.
You are unlikely to find one with 2048x1536 panel in it, but you can upgrade it yourself - that's what I did. Just make sure you start with one that has the 1400x1050 panel in it or you'll also have to change the inverter when going up to 2048x1536. Google "T60 2048x1536", it's a reasonably well documented mod for those of us that can never get enough pixels.
Way way way back
I was also peeved with the range of craptops, so I build my own using a brief case and standard MB and PSU.
The most expensive was the 17" screen that I retro fitted into the lid of the case.
It was still cheaper than a laptop of similar spec, the only downside was the battery, I had to use a large car battery and inverter. It would last for about 3 hours.
This topic is closed for new posts.
