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New XPS 15 Laptop

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Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#301

Post by slantyyz »

canuckintime wrote: post #290
slantyyz wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Razer's product line, but I also like the safety of an extended warranty backed by a very large company like Dell, Lenovo or HP. I had one of those dodgy early 2011 15" MBPs, and if I didn't have AppleCare, I would have been stuck with a costly motherboard replacement when my GPU croaked the first time. Granted, my MBP did eventually die after my AppleCare lapsed, but knowing you can get decent support in a ma…

Hey have you considered a third party warranty like BestBuy? Or buying insurance? I've never done that and I'm curious about the pros and cons

I have bought a third party warranty once but it was never put to the test.

The only laptop I ever had that needed warranty service was my Macbook Pro. Good thing I got it, the logic board replacement cost more than the AppleCare did. Not that it helped though, my model of MBP had a design defect related to the GPU overheating and my laptop died after the AppleCare lapsed. Apple "recalled" it and fixed it, but not until after I bought a new laptop.

I've never had any issues with my non Mac laptops... None that required a major repair under warranty, at least.

The thing with third party warranties is the "put to the test" part. You never know how it's going to turn out until you need it. The thing with AppleCare and warranties from Dell/HP/Lenovo is that they are lower risk in my opinion.

That's not to say that third party warranties are bad, I just don't have much interest in trying them.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#302

Post by slantyyz »

zem wrote: post #296
slantyyz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been planning for my next laptop purchase next year, and for some reason, I can't pull the Alienware 13R3 off the top of my short list. It's big (for a 13"), heavy, ugly and adorned with hideous gamer bling (WHY, WHY, WHY??), but it also has all the ports and features (discrete trackpad buttons!) I want in my work machine. Right now, it's basically between the new XPS 15 and the 13R3 (or R4 if it's out by the ti…

have you given the lenovo x1 carbon a look? the x1 yoga is currently at the top of my short list, mostly due to lenovo's amazing keyboards, followed by the dell xps13 developer edition for the significantly longer battery life.

I generally don't consider anything that has an ultrabook processor for a work related laptop, which is also why the XPS 13 isn't on my radar.

I generally look for a quad core i7/HQ and a discrete GPU. I guess I could probably live without the discrete GPU, but if I'm going to buy a good laptop, I may as well spend a little extra to get it.

Battery life isn't a big consideration for me - I'm plugged in most of the time and I consider any battery life >3h to be gravy.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#303

Post by slantyyz »

jquast wrote: post #270
slantyyz wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not just on laptops/desktops. I use a gamer keyboard (because of the 22 macro keys it has) and a gamer mouse (I like the ergonomics and tracking) for work. And of course, they have the obligatory fugly LED lighting and garish stylings.

If macros and ergonomics is your thing, and you don't mind a high cost, I recommend the kinesis advantage. No bling, all function and hardware-programmable, which is very nice to remap keys independent of the OS.

I use a SteelSeries Apex keyboard. It's pretty fantastic, but it has dome keys instead of mechanical switches.

I grew up on mechanical keyboards but after testing a bunch in a computer store, I realized I no longer care what kind of keys I use. It could be that I just got used to the Apple chiclet keyboards, but who knows.

My keyboard has four switchable profiles and 22 programmable keys, which means I can have 88 combinations. I mostly use the keys for launching apps and Sublime Text shortcuts though.

Not bad for around $100.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#304

Post by hashhar »

slantyyz wrote: post #275
hashhar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the Razer Blade or the Razer Blade Pro. Except for the green logo on the top nothing makes it look like a gaming machine. And the Pro even has mechanical switches.

Those are nice machines, but for any laptop I buy for work reasons, I like to invest in a 3 year extended warranty. With brands like Apple, Dell, HP and Lenovo, I know I'll get at least OK support. Because Razer is more of a niche brand without a mature support infrastructure like the aforementioned companies, I do have some concerns.

I do agree with the support. I have a cheap Dell Inspiron with 1 year complete warranty which I extended to 3 years (very cheap package) and their service is so great that they came the next day I called them to ask about a keyboard replacement and fixed it on the spot in my home.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#305

Post by hashhar »

Roritharr wrote: post #288
hashhar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try the Razer Blade or the Razer Blade Pro. Except for the green logo on the top nothing makes it look like a gaming machine. And the Pro even has mechanical switches.

Last time i looked neither the 13 nor the 14 offered 32gb ram.

Check again. A refresh was launched recently and it even has Matte screen, upto 2TB of mSATA RAID0, 32GB of RAM, desktop GPU, i7-6x series (2.6Gto 3.5G Turbo).

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#306

Post by e2kp »

Const-me wrote: post #292
e2kp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience too, when buying a high-end laptop, I expect it to just work. If my time was worth dealing with shitty QA, I'd buy a low end laptop.

That high-end / low-end thing is mostly a marketing BS invented to maximize manufacturer’s profits. Works OK in the sense their profit is fine, but if you’re a consumer, you better rely on the specs only and ignore the marketing.

Specs dont matter much anymore. Any dual core laptop can do what most people need.

What matters is the build quality, QA, battery life, screen, heat dissipation. All things you cant infer solely based on specs.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#307

Post by HCIdivision17 »

WildUtah wrote: post #298
HCIdivision17 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because my Surface Pro 4 can run 3 1920x1200 monitors just fine (I'm partial to a -|- setup (dontjudgeme)). The dock really makes it, no question. My monitors stands stay bolted to the desk and everything's cabled together, but I'm personally not tethered. Best of both worlds, to me at least. (Except for when I need to do something irresponsibly inefficient like run three VMs and full screen video at once... which wi…

The 5k iMac is gorgeous, weighs only double your brick laptop, runs faster than any stock laptop, and is a delight to use every day. It has a lot more than 3x 1920x1200 pixels but it will take two external displays if you want them. I like mine -| with a 1920 on the side, but you could do |-| or even -|- (wtf is wrong with you?). Desktops are a shrinking market, but innovation continues. I'm glad I looked into them.

See, I can't use the OSX interface. It makes me feel like a complete imbecile and I consistently do the wrong or useless thing. It's why I can't say good or bad things about Macs - haven't successfully used one since 2003 (thank goodness iOS apps can be compiled via Jenkins or the like!). People I respect seem to love their machines, but I turn into a cussing idiot when in front of one. Like can't-click-on-things stupid. If it didn't have a command line I'd never get anything done. Sure I could learn, but it comes up so rarely for me that I just settle for living in mild fear of having to help the secretary connect to the printer or something.

Plus 4K screens make me squinty (the SP4 has a lovely screen, but Win10 often gets confused on scaling and does horrific things to Java subwindows... and it's small). I'm pretty much a 30 year old curmudgeon now.

Oh and I used to use |-| with two 1080s on the sides of an IBM 2560x1600 monitor. Gosh you could spreadsheet the hell out of things on that 30" screen. Kinda miss it.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#308

Post by socksy »

IanCal wrote: post #265
rcatajar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a precision 5510 (pro version of the XPS15) Skylake gen and it doesn't have the annoying coil whine of my previous XPS13 (Haswell gen)

Very useful to know, thanks. I'm somewhat torn about whether to keep or replace mine, apart from the whine it's a lovely little machine.

From what I've read the coil whine is related to having the keyboard backlight on. Is that important enough to trade-off for the noise? I always turn off backlights when using a computer on battery anyway (it's not like I'll be looking at the keyboard much...).

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#309

Post by WildUtah »

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #307
WildUtah wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 5k iMac is gorgeous, weighs only double your brick laptop, runs faster than any stock laptop, and is a delight to use every day. It has a lot more than 3x 1920x1200 pixels but it will take two external displays if you want them. I like mine -| with a 1920 on the side, but you could do |-| or even -|- (wtf is wrong with you?). Desktops are a shrinking market, but innovation continues. I'm glad I looked into them.

See, I can't use the OSX interface. It makes me feel like a complete imbecile and I consistently do the wrong or useless thing. It's why I can't say good or bad things about Macs - haven't successfully used one since 2003 (thank goodness iOS apps can be compiled via Jenkins or the like!). People I respect seem to love their machines, but I turn into a cussing idiot when in front of one. Like can't-click-on-things stu…

I strongly prefer Gnome or XUbuntu myself and I still hate losing focus-follow-mouse, but Mac is at least less brain damage than Windows. I do everything I can on the command line and with Unix or X programs, of course, so I don't even know what the mouse-based interface is supposed to be like.

And Mac does high resolution very well.

Re: New XPS 15 Laptop

#310

Post by chx »

andlarry wrote: post #222
chx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sniff, that's a Maxwell chip not Pascal. But it came out early 2016 so perhaps early 2017 we will see a G4 with Kaby Lake and Pascal quad core. Would be nice.

> Sniff, that's a Maxwell chip not Pascal. Is there a substantial difference? This is a development laptop so I only cared about it being able to push enough pixels. Perhaps there's a difference for gamers?

Largely depends on whether you want 3D performance or not (that's not only for gamers). The performance/watt ratio is significantly higher on Pascal.
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