Laptop/Tablet Recommendations?

[panladea]

Hi everyone!

 

I'm a student going into Production LX/Lighting Programming and I'm looking to buy a new laptop or tablet soon, but I don't know what to get. By the time I've saved up I should have a budget of about £800 to £1000 (although obviously the cheaper the better!).

My requirements:

• Light and portable
• Can run CAD / ETC Eos software / other stuff that I might need as a Lighting person (sort of new to this!)

Please let me know what you use, what your friends use, what you like about certain laptops, and any other recommendations you have. I'm not against Apple but I know Macbooks are pretty expensive and I'm very used to Windows so I haven't really even been looking at that as an option. If you can convince me that it's entirely worth my money and the hassle of learning a new system, I might go for it.

 

Ariane :)

[peza2010]

What are the chances of you getting into visualisation?

 

It would be a shame to by a pc having not thought about it and then need to do it and your graphics card isnt upto the job

[chelgrian]

My requirements:

• Light and portable
• Can run CAD / ETC Eos software / other stuff that I might need as a Lighting person (sort of new to this!)

Please let me know what you use, what your friends use, what you like about certain laptops, and any other recommendations you have. I'm not against Apple but I know Macbooks are pretty expensive and I'm very used to Windows so I haven't really even been looking at that as an option. If you can convince me that it's entirely worth my money and the hassle of learning a new system, I might go for it.

 

Unfortunately light and portable and ability to run say AutoCAD or Vectorworks in 3D or say WYSIWYG for lighting visualisation well are mutually exclusive even if you have much more to spend than you have budgeted.

 

Outside of a educational setting you'd also find the the price of such software is tremendous far more than your laptop budget.

 

Therefore I'd concentrate on the software that you know you'll be running which you'll know you'll be running which are free or low cost, by the time you have the budget to buy the expensive software you'll have the budget to buy the expensive computer to go with it.

 

Things you might be running:

 

- Office software for paperwork

- A variety of offline software for preplotting from ETC,MA,Zero88,Strand etc.

- Possibly MA 3D if you are programming for GrandMA as it's free.

- Draftsight for 2D CAD as it's free

 

In terms of Apple as you are a still a student you can get a substantial discount on Macbooks and you will also get a 3 year warranty, that is actually worth something in that they will still have the bits to repair it after 3 years and it's as easy as taking it in to an Apple Store rather than having to post it off to some repair centre at great expense.

 

If you want a Windows laptop there are a very few OEMs that actually design their own and are worth buying from these are:

 

Dell

HP

Lenovo

Asus

Acer

Toshiba

 

The market generally moves too fast to give good recommendations. One think I would say is that to entirely ignore 'consumer' laptops and head straight to the business sections of the manufactuer's website. You'll usually be able to specify a machine with less pre-installed gumph this way.

 

General recommendations are:

 

- Get as much RAM as you can afford

- Get the largest SSD you can afford, don't buy a machine with a rotating hard disk in it.

- Don't worry too much about the processor specification as long as its in the 'Core i3,i5 or i7' range rather than the 'Pentium' range or 'Celeron' range.

- If you are buying a machine with built in Intel Graphics look for the words 'Iris' or 'Iris Pro' for better graphics performance.

 

Configuring up a Lenovo T440p, which is what we buy hundreds of at work, I get to about £1200 with the following choices

 

Processor - Intel Core i5-6300HQ MB

Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64

Display - 14.0 FHD(1920x1080) IPS Non-Touch

Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 2GB

Memory - 16GB(8+8) DDR4-2133MHz SODIMM

Camera - 720p HD Camera

Keyboard - Keyboard Backlit - English UK

Pointing Device - UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) with Fingerprint Reader

First Hard Drive -512GB SSD SATA3 OPAL2.0

Battery - ThinkPad Battery 6 cell Li-Ion (72Wh) Cyl HC Rear

Wireless - Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC(2x2) 8260, Bluetooth Version 4.1 vPro

Office Productivity Software -Microsoft Office 365 Personal Activation Card - 1-year Subscription, 1 PC

 

You could cheapen this up to within your budget by specifying a smaller SSD or and less RAM but I really wouldn't recommend it.

 

A 13" Macbook pro with a similar spec with the educational discount is going to be in the same price range.

[ANDYLASER]

For professional use, I like Dell Lattitude series. They were designed for business use and you can get a 3 year on site warranty (extendible to 5 years) and you can sill specify them with Windows 7 as opposed to the nasty Windows 10.

 

Find one that has the required spec you need.

[J Pearce]

Consider whether you want touch screen to run with dongles/wings or for remote programming; or whether you're just doing a bit of prep and editing and can use mouse and keyboard shortcuts.

[Bobbsy]

My interest in laptops is 90% sound but I do play with Auto CAD and Video Editing a bit. I've been through HP, Dell, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Lenovo. Yeah, I am that old.

 

The only one I've bought a second time is Lenovo--they seem to me (on the basis of only two purchases of course) to be very solid and reliable, not too badly cluttered with the useless extras and modifications a lot of the others seem to. The other advantage is the ability to buy a very customised machine on line which has allowed me to up the RAM and processor and have a PCI Express slot for my Firewire.

 

Not the cheapest but, after trying several others, I'm back to Lenovo.

[nickb12345]

It's the higher end of your budget, but I love my Surface Pro 3. Got the spec and performance to do vis, cad and video editing but can use it as a tablet, laptop (with the type cover) or as a full PC (with the dock, 2 monitors and keyboard mouse etc)

 

Just need to get OSX working as a VM properly so I an run Qlab on it too, but that's a job for a rainy day.

 

Nick

[richb]

More of a warning than a recommendation, but don't buy (on purpose or inadvertently) anything with and Ultra HD (4K) monitor, as CAD has real issues working at that resolutions (with many UIs completely unusable), and there are no known fixes, nor anything on the horizon.

[Yorkie]

I recommend a trip to your local PC world. For no other reason except you will be able to suss out which keyboards suit you and which don't.

[DrV]

I recommend a trip to your local PC world. For no other reason except you will be able to suss out which keyboards suit you and which don't.

 

That's very good advice. One of the things you can't tell from a written spec is what the "feel" of a keyboard is like. You can also get an idea of the robustness of a laptop by simply opening the lid. The less hardy units tend to feel flimsy and flex as they open - a tougher unit will feel more rigid like a proper case. (vague words I know but that's really the point!)

[musht]

Another vote for Lenovo and Dell on build quality , HP`s recent offering a bit too on the yoghurt carton shell feel.

[ninjadingle]

If you ever want to use a touchscreen - forget Apple. (And I say that as a hardcore Mac addict!) You can get them to work, but only with a third party driver that'll cost you around £100 :-(

 

That said if you want to get a shiny thing, once you've played with them at the Apple store get onto the refurbished section of their website. You can grab a Macbook Pro with 8GB of RAM, 128GB Flash drive (hard drive) and Iris graphics (recommended above) for £849. Don't worry about the refurbished label - they're as good as new. I bought my Thunderbolt display that way and haven't regretted it once.

 

You may have to keep looking as their stock changes rapidly, but if you know what you want and are prepared to wait until it appears you can save a bit of cash, or get a bit more machine!

[J Pearce]

If you ever want to use a touchscreen - forget Apple. (And I say that as a hardcore Mac addict!) You can get them to work, but only with a third party driver that'll cost you around £100 :-(

 

I have my ELO touchscreen working on my mac without needing to have paid for drivers.