Good Laptop for on the road

[Yoda]

Not sure if this is where to put this, but as I have the Victron equipment that needs computer for programming I was looking at laptops the other night. Man have things changed in the last 7 years (age of my desk top)

With my bad eyes I was looking at 17" screens. Want something somewhat rugged for travel. I will freely admit I know zilch on what to get, or components such as for accessing the internet on the road, etc. I know I need Bluetooth capability. Battery life is also important, but some can be charged through a USB port, but how do I tell. Would be nice if it could be set up like a desktop - separate screen and keyboard. Being able to play a few games would be nice, so what graphics card are good now.

And of course be able to run the Victron programing. I have always had windows, so have not even considered Mac - not one of my choices either.

Please no brand bashing. I have had Gateway (first one) Dell, Alienware ant the wife has a Toshiba which has been issue free. At work we had HP.

I know right now there is a chip shortage, etc, so I know I should wait a bit as I don't kneed it for now - mostly research at this stage.

Thanks for any thoughts?

Now back to my wiring
Keith

[Country Campers]

I have had an HP Envy x360 for about 3 years now and it has held up well , I even spilt a glass of water on it and dried it out and still works fine. I do take it when we go camping. It has a RYZEN processor and RADEON graphics , for what ever that is worth. I had a budget of $1000 and got what I was told was the best for that money at Best Buy. I use it at home and away as our desktop is probably 10 years old or so. It is also nice for sitting on the porch or any where I want to take it. It has built in WIFI which all will have and has worked well for my needs. There are plenty of others that may be cheaper and do the same thing but I just went off of the person at Best Buy , which they work off of commission so take that for what it is worth. I also have a Microsoft Surface that has been good also , do not remember the model , but they are small. My HP can be flipped around to be a tablet as well as the laptop and also has touch screen which is nice to easily zoom pictures or screen content.
Being as mine is 3 years old I am sure there are better ones with better technology now.

Brian

[pengle]

Thanks for any thoughts?

No back to my wiring
Keith

I just bought the LG Gram from Costco. 17" screen because I have older eyes. Not cheap at $1200. Very lightweight. I've heard it does "wiring" very fast. 2 year Costco warranty comes with it. Wi-fi and Bluetooth In stock. Fingerprint ID, so that when you push the power button to turn it on, it recognizes your fingerprint and logs you in. Oh, and most important of all...I got permission from DW.

[d2reid]

While working I needed a lot of horsepower in my computer. Large database management, lots of photo and video editing. It took me a while to wean myself off of my professional level computers. And then my trusty workhorse laptop got crushed by a slide after it fell off the couch. So I had to go computer shopping.

Like you mentioned things have changed a bunch. I only paid $300 for the last laptop I bought. Not a very big hard drive, only 8gb ram, good WIFI card, I think 802.11 standard is all the way up to N now. You will need to read up on blutooth a bit, there are now variants, I found this out when I got new hearing aids.

With advent of the computer industry returning to server based computing, they call it the cloud these days, and subscription based software the home computer isn't needing as much horse power as they used to. So we are both using run of the mill bought it on sale laptops. The latest one doesn't have a hard drive, it uses static ram for storage. It boots up real fast. They are both Lenovo, have been moderately abused, definitely bounced around in an RV and are 2-4 years old now with good service and no issues.

[Second Chance]

We've had hinge issues with two HP laptops. Other than mechanical hard drives, I think hinges are the weak point with laptops. Our current laptops are both Lenovo ideapad 330 series with 8GB of RAM, Core i5 processors, and 550GB solid state drives. We're extremely happy with them and they are proving to be very reliable. Since my image processing workstation is in storage (mini-tower with about 3TB of storage, color-calibrated monitor, film and flatbed scanners, etc.), I still like to have plenty of storage for the 19,000+ images I carry around (about half of them digitized from vintage family photos from three family branches).

Rob

[Yoda]

Thanks folks

DW is gone for about two weeks. Her sisters husband passed away (Covid complications) and she decided to drive back to Illinois to the funeral. Her whole family (Mom, Dad, Brother and his wife) is driving up from Mississippi and the other sister is only 2 hours away

So researching laptops gives me something to do in the evening to unwind and take my mind off of things.

Thanks again
Keith

[howson]

Yoda
I've been holding off waiting for laptops to get the pcie 4 bus on the CPU. Huge potential for a performance boost with the extra data lanes for a pcie 4-capable SSD and graphics card. To my knowledge at this point AMD's laptop offerings will soon have it but Intel is still struggling to catch up. I haven't looked since Christmas, so not sure exactly what's avaiable today (if anything given the shortages).

For a laptop I'm still lugging around my trusty Lenovo ThinkPad T530 with Windows 7. Works fine for nearly everything I want to do--but definitely not any games.

This desktop I'm typing on is "ancient", too, with an Intel Core i7 6700K CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 video card. Fine for normal work and even light video editing, but I can't run modern games higher than 1080. Yes, still on Windows 7.

Oh--and if you spring for a laptop with a really old 5200RPM spinner of a hard drive, get it duplicated on an SSD before even turning on the computer. It is the single, most cost-effective speed enhancement possible on a laptop (IMHO).

Best stuff out there today is AMD, but you can get a well-equipped (if not as capable) Intel setup for less.

Howard

Edit: Sorry to hear about your family's loss.

[trkester]

Yoda I'll float another option for you. An android tablet or a Chromebook. Victron appears to have an android app for monitor/config (I don't have any Victron devices just noticed it in Google play).


I have a couple 10" Samsung tablets and they are used for probably 90+ percent of my daily activity (like right now as I type this) Light, durable, charged over USB, decent battery life. If you really want, I think you can get a Bluetooth keyboard. You can always use Chromecast to view your screen on the TV if a larger screen is needed.

I still have a plethora of desktops and laptops at home and one 15" basic Dell laptop for the trailer, but the tablet is my "go to" device.

Just throwing out something to spur thought.