DontBuyDell.com

It all started by the CPU dying on the first motherboard a few months after first use. After 2-3 hours of back and forward with the support agent and diagnostics (machine was dead dead, blinking orange led indicator), they sent a tech relatively soon (within a week) and replaced the mobo.

A few months go by, a year - throughout this period of time after the first repair, the CPU has been sitting at 99 and thermal throttling like hot shit. Fans screaming all the time, finally I got fed up and launched another ticket. Let me tell you, I wasted a combined whole work day over two days going through diagnostics to no end. Getting messages from support at 2, 3 in the morning with massive delay between WhatsApp messages. Finally I got impatient with them so they sent a tech out (again, within a week).

Tech says temp sensor on the cpu is faulty, changes the board over again. The bloke literally remembers me from last time. TO give credit where credit is due, the tech was a top lad. He tells me that they are a 3rd party hired by Dell - they get penalised if the repair is unsuccessful - while often relying on misleading diagnosis from the first line support teams (chat).

Immediately after the repair I started noticing another issue - when you wake the machine from sleep or launch it after shutdown, without having the DC charged plugged in - CPU is throttled at 1 GHz and the machine takes minutes to even boot. No setting fixes that, I have tried resetting, running live Linux, the same. Once you plug the charger in it springs back to life.

After a few months, today, I get a BIOS warning that the machine can no longer verify the power of the charging adapter - the machine was so slow yesterday that the mouse was lagging on the screen after waking it from sleep.

I really do not like Dell. I will never buy Dell for myself or recommend it to anyone else. Oh and around 40 percent of us at work (we all use Dell laptops for remote work in the better part of the last 3 years) have experienced some sort of hardware failure / issues.

Their server and laptop hardware is often garbage, so if you need to buy it, structure in SLA penalties so that people get fired when the company screws up. That will incentivize the salespeople to make sure you get the better models. That will cost you money though.

If you are small or don’t have the budget, shop for the better gear or treat them as disposable. The upside of the sprawling product line is that they have product in every possible segment, from HDMI stock thin clients to high end workstations.

There have always been terrible laptops in the market. I generally recommend the following process:

1. Go to a physical store and try out the keyboards / mousepads of the laptops you're interested in. Don't worry about specs yet.

2. Look up the service manual of that model, ensure that you can replace important parts (M.2 Drive and Battery take top priority for me) with relative ease. You can probably do this on your phone after deciding you like a particular keyboard/mouse.

3. Ask the store for the specs (CPU / GPU / RAM / SSD) you want, especially if the SSD is soldered on (though ideally, buy a replaceable M.2 slot). If not available at the store, _MAYBE_ buy online, but in my experience the Retail return model just works far better than RMA to manufacturer. So prefer retail / buying off the shelf.

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Normally, I start to see things worth buying at the $700 point, but with compromises of some kind (poor screen, bad mousepad, etc. etc.). Moving up to the $1000 price point, things are generally better with only one thing that's really terrible that I probably can live with (maybe soldered on SSD, a lower quality screen, or something along those lines).

Moving up to $2000 price point, I get good everything, but price sucks.

I'm pretty confident that I can find a good $700 to $1000 laptop, especially if you give me the freedom to choose a user-replaceable M.2 drive, and give me an hour or so to replace it with a $130 1TB generic drive. It won't have the best specs by modern standards, but it'd beat the pants off of any old Thinkpad from 5+ years ago. Bonus points: I probably was going to do this anyway to wipe out all that terrible crap-ware / bloatware on the laptop. So doing this _AND_ upgrading to 1TB or 2TB is just cake.

But just using the most modern chips (even of a lower-value one, like an Intel i3 or AMD Ryzen) will grossly improve battery life and have all sorts of other advantages. You really don't need to jump for the $2000+ models.

Perhaps more of us can chime in with anecdotes about good experiences we had with certain lines/models of laptops that we can recommend?

My recent experiences have been with Lenovo Legion gaming laptops.

One is a bit over 3 years old, the other is coming up on 2 years. My wife and I use them (almost) daily. They get picked up, moved around, run mostly plugged in but with CPU/GPU getting a solid work out as we play games. Other than needing a good wipedown (and mildly decreased battery life), both are indistinguishable from brand new in how they work after 2-3 years.

I did build 23° riser stands for each out of pine, so we often use them on the stands, with a board under the stand, sitting on our laps. This isn't due to heat, but because it raises the screen closer to eye level, decreasing neck strain, and works reasonably well with our arm/wrist angle, reducing wrist strain. Of course, it does open them up quite a bit underneath, so it no doubt does help with cooling as well.