Laptop and docking station advice/recommendations.

[Thats Crafty]

Hi,

Its been a while since I looked at getting a new pc and am thinking of a laptop with a docking station that I can leave at home and at our 2 units (it's a pain taking the desktop home and back to the unit each time we want to work from home).

Are there any IT people/businesses here that can recommend any laptops and suitable docking stations? We would probably be looking a 2 laptops and 3 docking stations. The laptops don't have to be super fast but with enough grunt to run `to be useable with email, web browsing and photoshop open at once without being too slow.

Thanks in in advance for any help and advice,

Graham

[Mikey]

Hi,

Personally I'd get one with a solid state hard drive (SSD) as not only are these MUCH faster, they are also much more robust as unlike a traditional hard drive contain no moving parts.

I upgraded my laptop to an SSD and I would never go back to a conventional drive (it now boots/shuts down in under 10 seconds and opens programs like Photoshop, Word, Excel etc. in around 3-4 seconds). The only trade off is that pound for pound you don't get as much storage as you do with a regular hard drive (typically around 256GB), however for what you say you want it for that should be way more than enough.

Also, get at least 8GB of RAM and try and opt for an Intel 'i' processor (i3, i5 or i7).

Once you get the laptops go into: Control Panel> Hardware and Sound> Power Options> System Settings> and under 'Plugged in' change 'When I close the lid:' from 'sleep' to 'do nothing' - this will allow you to be able to close the laptops lids without it going into sleep mode.

Remember it's bank holiday this weekend when a lot of good deals often come-up!!


Mike

[Loxta]

Whilst we have flirted with other laptop brands, we always seem to end up back with Dell for our business laptops, and they have a good range of docking accessories that can be added.

If you planning to go at the upper end then the IBM Lenovo Thinkpads are very good, but I don't much experience with their accessory range.

The outlier is a Chromebook, but the suitability as a business laptop depends on whether you are truly cloud based or not.

[Orlenard]

Chromebooks are excellent for basic use i.e. emails, sorting orders, managing BP and customer services but they fall down on more intensive tasks such as image/video editing as the software isn't there and the hardware isn't strictly optimised for it.
The various Microsoft Surface devices are brilliant for photo and video editing as are the higher end Macbooks but they tend to be fairly pricey.

Intel cpu's tend to be better at productivity, but cost more. Like Mikey said go with an SSD inside the Laptop and get yourself an external drive for storage/backup. Ideally look into a "Home Cloud"(NAS) option that will allow you to access anything thats stored on it, securely, from anywhere. That'd counter the lower storage of a SSD.
Also get as much RAM as you can afford in a laptop/computer, it'll prevent slowdowns from having many programs open at once.