My real story with Dell computer, hope my experience can be used for reference.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Yeah, honestly given how expensive literally every component is now it's never made more sense to go pre-built even just for the support. Even Origin doesn't seem crazy to me at the moment.

[jwslam]

Originally Posted by pseudoreality

Funny, I was just about to buy a dell. The nine-year-old HP I got at Staples for $500 is showing its age. I have to boot it up 10 minutes before I try and do anything. It is somewhat embarrassing when I am chairing meetings from home and loading a document to share takes 3-4 minutes.

Any recommendations? I'm not planning on doing any PC gaming, but I may start to get into a little video editing.

There's probably a lot of life left in it if you're willing to put in a bit of work to reformat. Most people carry too much crap.

Could go further and upgrade more RAM / SSD but that's money better used elsewhere.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by jwslam

There's probably a lot of life left in it if you're willing to put in a bit of work to reformat. Most people carry too much crap.

Could go further and upgrade more RAM / SSD but that's money better used elsewhere.

Putting a $50 SSD in is the most effective way you can bring life back to old systems. 4GB of ram and an SSD will make almost any 10 year old machine fast enough for basic web browsing and usage. I've done many of them.

[TorqueDog]

You may want to spend a biiiiit more than $50 (even on a SATA SSD) to make sure the SDD has a DRAM cache built-in. Something like this will turn that 9 year old HP into a rocketship compared to what it is now.

[Fuzz]

I was mostly using these, I did about 10 office machines and several laptops when they needed the Win 10 upgrade, they have DRAM:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01...?ie=UTF8&psc=1


240GB was enough because local storage isn't needed. Anyway, just a rough example that it is cheap.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Putting a $50 SSD in is the most effective way you can bring life back to old systems. 4GB of ram and an SSD will make almost any 10 year old machine fast enough for basic web browsing and usage. I've done many of them.

Excellent call Fuzz. I was at a college that was running into a budget crunch and we had to make some hard decisions on spend. The desktop fleet had grown beyond control and was getting long in the tooth, but the network infrastructure was also 12-15 years old and needed a severe makeover. While I tend to focus on user experience as the main driver behind divisions I run, I couldn't ignore the larger need. Enter the SSD and RAM solution. Maxing out the RAM and adding small SSDs in place of the spindle drives made all the performance difference in the world. It appeared like 60% of our fleet was replaced, because of the performance upgrade, but it was only a minor expenditure ($180K vs $2.4M) that allowed us to improve both the user experience and the core network infrastructure. We got an extra 2-3 years service out of those machines, allowing us to spend on the more important underlying infrastructure, get it upgraded and on a proper replacement cycle. "Inside the box" thinking really helped us out of a pickle.

[Wormius]

If you can live with a Linux OS, it also provides a surprising bump to performance. It is a little hard to get used to, but depends in what users are doing with the computers, maybe not a problem.

[Galakanokis]

We were nothing but Dell for 20 years and didn't have any problems. When we purchased Latitudes and Optiplexs back in the day we did the RAM and SSD upgrades around 2012/13 and it added a few years to the end of the systems. Switched to two year leases after that. We were a pretty big corporation and probably paid through the nose for support but it was top notch support. Loved having the systems shipped with our pre loaded image, saved so much time. An older 13" XPS runs surprisingly well even for an i5 chip but it's not my main system.

My main windows laptop is an Asus Zenbook Flip S and it is a great little machine. Currently running Win11 and I really like it. I only went with it as i wanted a 2-in-1 and Dell's offerings seemed dated and expensive. But I tend to go Dell on the business side as they have yet to let me down.

[Hemi-Cuda]

We had Microsoft Surface Book Pro's for our mobile users for awhile but man those things are trash, display drivers stop working randomly and the docks are absolute garbage. Swapped them out for Dell XPS with thunderbolt docks and all of our issues went away. Dell really is king of Windows laptops at the moment

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

We had Microsoft Surface Book Pro's for our mobile users for awhile but man those things are trash, display drivers stop working randomly and the docks are absolute garbage. Swapped them out for Dell XPS with thunderbolt docks and all of our issues went away. Dell really is king of Windows laptops at the moment

What is a Surface Book Pro? It's either a Surface Book or a Surface Pro.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

What is a Surface Book Pro? It's either a Surface Book or a Surface Pro.

The book one with a detaching tablet screen. Too many qualifier names

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

What is a Surface Book Pro? It's either a Surface Book or a Surface Pro.

Well when a mommy book and a daddy pro get together...

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by Galakanokis

We were nothing but Dell for 20 years and didn't have any problems. When we purchased Latitudes and Optiplexs back in the day we did the RAM and SSD upgrades around 2012/13 and it added a few years to the end of the systems. Switched to two year leases after that. We were a pretty big corporation and probably paid through the nose for support but it was top notch support. Loved having the systems shipped with our pre loaded image, saved so much time. An older 13" XPS runs surprisingly well even for an i5 chip but it's not my main system.

My main windows laptop is an Asus Zenbook Flip S and it is a great little machine. Currently running Win11 and I really like it. I only went with it as i wanted a 2-in-1 and Dell's offerings seemed dated and expensive. But I tend to go Dell on the business side as they have yet to let me down.

Dell Business was fantastic. I had a server drive fail, they couriered me one that day.

[Galakanokis]

Originally Posted by Shazam

Dell Business was fantastic. I had a server drive fail, they couriered me one that day.

Oh yeah, their servers are great. For the cost the R440 is fantastic. Built my VM stack out of those and no issues after a few years.

[Samonadreau]

Love the Dell precision workstation laptops. had a 7730 and now a 7750.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

The book one with a detaching tablet screen. Too many qualifier names

Hilariously, they both do that, so we’re no further along than when we started, but I’m going to assume the one with the electronically-detaching screen (Surface Book) is what you meant rather than the one that clips on with magnets (Surface Pro).

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Hilariously, they both do that, so we’re no further along than when we started, but I’m going to assume the one with the electronically-detaching screen (Surface Book) is what you meant rather than the one that clips on with magnets (Surface Pro).

Surface Pro is a tablet that attempts to masquerade as a laptop, and the Surface Book is a laptop that masquerades as a tablet. Both do a terrible job

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

Surface Pro is a tablet that attempts to masquerade as a laptop, and the Surface Book is a laptop that masquerades as a tablet. Both do a terrible job

We have one Surface Pro 7 at home, but have paired it with a Dell docking station and it performs really well with dual monitors and running some animation software we needed for a Quickdraw Animation class. No complaints with other stuff like simple games like Minecraft and Roblox, but those aren’t very intensive.

[TorqueDog]

I used to play Killer Instinct on my original Surface Book with the dGPU when I would fly to Toronto for work.

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

Surface Pro is a tablet that attempts to masquerade as a laptop, and the Surface Book is a laptop that masquerades as a tablet. Both do a terrible job

My wife (Surface Pro) would disagree, as would I (Surface Book 2) as a long-time user. Though I may be biased, she has no reason to be and she came from a Macbook Air. She loves it.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

I used to play Killer Instinct on my original Surface Book with the dGPU when I would fly to Toronto for work.
My wife (Surface Pro) would disagree, as would I (Surface Book 2) as a long-time user. Though I may be biased, she has no reason to be and she came from a Macbook Air. She loves it.

For personal use they're great, I actually have both a Surface Pro and Surface Book I took home from work when we swapped everything. The issues with them only really come about in a corporate environment, with the official Surface docks being terrible and Microsoft using a bad wifi chip that stops connecting to certain wireless networks after a driver update. The Surface Book also suffers from the "main" GPU disconnecting randomly since it sits in the keyboard portion, while the secondary Intel GPU is in the tablet portion. A home user probably wouldn't even notice that happen unless they're gaming on it