I’m looking at getting a new work laptop - we have a fair amount of flexibility here, pretty much anything Windows.
Right now I’m using a Dell XPS 15 9550 (2016 model). It’s fine. Good weight/size, and has a 960M chip in it so light gaming works OK. But it’s been somewhat finicky and lately it has slowed to a crawl. Even reinstalling Windows didn’t fix it. But I have a Thunderbolt 3 dock at work that works great. Just plug in one cable and it powers two external monitors and all my USB stuff.
So since we don’t have any IT support in my office, HQ IT is basically saying it’s easier to just buy a new laptop. Here’s what I"m looking at. Would love some advice.
I really want to stay as thin and light as possible, but don’t want to forsake the dedicated graphics chip.
Budget is around $2k.
Dell XPS 15 9650 (2017 model). Upgraded to Kaby Lake, 1050 chip (not ti) in it, so basically it’s what I have now, but a little faster. Dell continues to have issues with various parts of the laptop though.
Gigabyte Aero 15. This was just announced, but it’s available now from Newegg. 15" laptop with Kaby Lake and a 1060. But there are some minor issues with the keyboard apparently, and I don’t really know anything about Gigabyte’s reliability. It’s under budget though, and the size seems really good for what you get.
Razer Blade 14". Love the look and feel of this one, but lots of reports of defects online. 1060 chip inside.
Bought the Gigabyte 15 for my son and it’s been dynamite. He really liked the Blade, but I was hesitant to spend that kind of money on a Razer product.
I think the xps15 would be a dynamite gaming machine if it had a 1060 instead of a 1050. Depends on what sort of gaming you want to do.
Yeah, definitely, but like I said we don’t have IT support here and I can’t really send my work laptop out for repairs, so the call was to buy a new one.
BUT! Turns out others have had the same problem as me, so a reddit check showed that all I needed to do is take the back cover off and remove the battery cable for 15 seconds to reset the darned thing. Apparently some event triggers a panic in the BIOS that causes it to throttle the CPU to 800Mhz, but that doesn’t get reported anywhere for some reason. Disconnecting the battery resets everything and I’m back to speedy conditions.
This seems to be the appropriate current laptop thread; I have a laptop resolution / scaling question.
I recently upgraded to a decent Lenovo ultrabook, with a 1080p screen. I dock it to a 24 inch monitor. The problem is that fonts are too small on the laptop when docked and I’m sitting back a bit. So Windows 7 (unfortunately, IT promises to go to 10 in the next few months) has a scaling option that you can bring fonts up to 125%. Right-click - screen resolution - make text and other items larger.
When I do this, then the fonts on my docked monitor are too big and blocky. But the laptop looks more legible.
Put the monitor in external mode rather than duplicate, so that you see different things on each monitor, and you should be able to change the scaling separately for each monitor .
I can’t remember the mouse way to change the mode, just press windows key + P and the menu will pop up.
