I’m looking for suggestions on a QUIET laptop, probably a notebook. My thought was to go with a SSD drive, to minimize the noise, especially over time when laptop fans wear out after a year or so.
I’m leaning towards notebooks due to their physical size. They seem about right for what I’m looking for. I don’t need a killer gaming rig and will most likely not play CPU intensive games on it, but I do want 4g RAM.
I was able to use a friend’s Aces Aspire 1830T and thought it was great, and pretty quiet for a non-SSD system, but for the +~$150 or extra I thought SSD would be a good and QUIETEST route.
Maybe I’m confused: is it the fan noise or the HDD noise you’re trying to eliminate? If it’s the former: even without a HDD, won’t your laptop still have a fan for the CPU etc.? I don’t think the HDD is what makes the most heat. If it’s the latter: aren’t there plenty of laptop HDD which are virtually silent? I certainly can’t hear the one in my work laptop (garden-variety Inspiron), although maybe it’s just being drowned out by all the background noise in the office.
I’m just looking for something quiet. I’ve noticed a lack of laptops with SSDs. Anyone why this is? Do they have a high failure rate within warranty periods?
X-Series from Lenovo are whisper quiet. My old X31 still doesn’t make a sound. My current T410 is pretty quiet, but in a completely silent room I can hear the CPU fan.
Stay away from HP and Toshiba. Haven’t found one of these that’s quiet - dunno about build quality, but that’s a different story.
Yeah, my X201 has an SSD in it and it’s totally quiet. Great machine, excellent battery life, very good build quality and you can pick one up for a big discount if you wait for a sale (they do them frequently).
I’ll jump in and concur with Alan and David on the relative quietness of the x-series. Maybe not totally silent but you won’t notice unless the room is absolutely quiet and you’re concentrating on the noise. I don’t have an SSD in mine so I don’t know how much more quiet that would make it.
Good SSDs are very reliable. The reason they aren’t more widely put into laptops out of the factory is cost. When you’re trying to make a sub-$500 laptop to compete in today’s netbook-heavy market, there just isn’t room (in the budget) to fit an SSD in.
Rumor has it that Intel will be releasing a significant upgrade to the SDD market 1st or 2nd Q next year, expected to have “double capacity for cost”; ie, a 512gb for around 600$. It might be worth holding off until then.
I’m nearly hitting the trigger on buying a X201 but have one last question I can’t seem to find an answer to. Do you know if the laptops display still seen when using the VGA port to connect an external monitor?
I want to be able to display on both this laptop and on the external monitor at the same time, and preferably have two independent displays where I can have different apps showing on each. Is this possible? :)
I have a T410, and I can either duplicate an external monitor (same image on laptop as external monitor) or extend my desktop (different applications on laptop/external). T410 and X201 are same generation and should have the same capabilities.
I like my T410, but if I were to do it again I would have bought another X-series. Love those computers.
