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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
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Asus - absolute worse
High street Lenovo and Dell's are better but not great. Lenovo ThinkPad and Dell Latitude are better but more expensive
Very much machines built and sold to a low price rather than any thought to longevity. No official parts channel for anything other than batteries and chargers.
Some Dell's are OK but some of the Cheaper Inspirons are terrible anf not much better than Asus .... Dell don't really make anything themselves, the basic laptops are built by the usual suspects in China and configured by Dell when you order.
The only really good laptops I see these days are the expensive corporate models but they edging towards Macbook money but are still a long way off Apple build quality.
I bought this to replace the Acer Ive had for 9yrs. Acer still going strong apart from the inlet for the power cable is damaged and so remains connected .
So I have two immobile lap tops. One at home and one in work. But They don't need to be mobile for what i use them for. The one with the broken hinge works fine for my Ampliube 5 Tonex etc as does the one in work.
I actually can't get a good signal on the one at home (In the Back Bedroom even though we are on Virgin media ) But that's not an issue for what i want. If the screen was to snap off completely i could hook up to a monitor as long as the computer is still working.
The Acer imo is better than the Asus But my needs are really simple as AM i .
Then around 2012 Apple introduced the thin line of Macs. These had no optical drives and internal pouch batteries. These models were very thin compared to a normal laptop. They could make the laptops thin because they don't use the cheap brass insert and plastic pillar method. They don't need to because the whole laptop is made from Alloy which can be drilled and threaded directly. There is no brass insert to pull from a plastic pillar.
So Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP and all the others wanted thin laptops to compete with the sleek thin Apples but they can't make them out of alloy at their price point. So they just made the brass inserts and plastic pillars shorter and accepted they would break relatively soon, sometimes within 15 months or so of normal use.
The trouble is Dell and other OEM's are claiming all the broken hinge mounts are down to user rough handling and in many cases won't repair under warranty. I've been buying top end plastics for Inspirons at £90 on Ebay for some of my customers and repairing their laptop that's only 18 months old. BUT the worse thing is I know it will happen again because it's a design flaw caused by trying to copy a design that is only achievable with all metal construction.
Someone needs to build a Windows laptop that's all alloy. Some of the better ones have a kind of metal impregnated plastic but it's still not as strong.
After working for a few different clients over a period of a few years, all of whom used Lenovo T-series machines, that's what I bought for myself.
Corporates buy on the basis of total cost of ownership, and reliability is a big part of that, rather than £50-off-at-Currys deals.
Both Lenovo and Dell have business-focused websites, so I'd be looking at the machines/specs that they offer there.
Now the Lenovo range is filled with IdeaPads and other cheap machine that kinda use a similar name but only the actual Thinkpads have the IBM quality .... sadly that's been watered down a bit too with cost cutting changes like using AMD processors.
running Monterey £199.
So far I have purchased a nice and fast external SSD for music project storage and got all the cables to connect my Behringer AI and HX Stomp XL. I've installed a clean an up to date version of Reaper, Helix Native, EZ Drummer 2, and NI Maschine 2. All that went well.
Issues wise, the main one is dealing with a few legacy VST plugin's that I haven't been able to find or install on successfully on the Mac. Amongst these are TAL delays and instruments, a reverb called Ambience I was fond of, and CMorg Compact organ. I've used these in a few projects, so I need to decide if I want to replicate my old Windows Reaper set-up, or use this as an opportunity to re-fresh my sounds, in which case I'll need to think about archiving my old songs so they can be ported across in some way from the Windows machine. I've also got issues with the stability of NI Maschine 2, although I could probably live without running that as a plugin within Reaper.
And if I decide to archive old Windows Reaper projects by bouncing tracks to audio, I need to decide how many projects are worth archiving....
Will post updates if/ when I make progress.