New laptop for work. Need suggestions.

[BLINGMW]

I need some help with a 3 year old Macbook...

I can do this kind of stuff, and you probably can to. What I'd recommend though is upgrading her internal HD to something larger for like $75, having half your daily stuff on an external is annoying, and her 3yr old internal drive will catastrophically fail some day anyway. Check dealmac.com for components.
Does she currently have a backup drive? If not, she may not realize she needs one. Again, $75 gets you a 1gig external that she can plug in now and then keep her stuff from disappearing one day. Time Machine actually works pretty well, not a whole lot of features and options, but it's also easy to use and reliable.
The OS upgrade is easy, but backing everything up to that external would be nice first.
There's not much "refresh" to be done that the OS upgrade won't do. She might need some more RAM though, especially if she has something less than a gig.
I'll be happy to help if you have any questions, send me a PM and I'll give you a call

On an unrelated note, and I don't think anyone asked, but for anyone shopping, I have a laptop to NOT recommend. The ThinkPad W510.

Our office went to the W500 and 510 series this year, and the smaller X200 and 201 for the road warriors. The 200 stuff seems just fine, well built, few failures. But these 510s that seem to have decent reviews online, and it's a i7 that should be a nice desktop replacement? They're CRAP. Every single one of us, within a few months of getting one, has had a problem. HD failures, the docks are crap and many have been replaced (mine is pretty touchy too, but for fear of getting a worse one I haven't complained), mine wouldn't get passed the initial black boot screen for a whole day (it chose to do this when I went to california), my co-worker's takes 10+ minutes to start up and no-one knows why, another's speakers blew. The keyboard is poorly anchored (design flaw) and the whole thing is so heavy it feels like it's going to fold in half under its own weight when you pick it up. Maybe since I'm a mac guy my standards are too high, but I'm seriously thinking about requesting my 5yr old Dell back. It didn't miss a beat in 5 years. Only reason I got a new one was because it was getting a little to slow and didn't have enough RAM to deal with all the spyware our IT department installs.

[Steve85]

Thanks a lot. I'll check out her system information and see if she'll need the RAM for the new OS. Good point about the internal drive. I think if we weren't also getting the battery I'd do a new internal and external as recommended. For now I think the external will be the better way to go, allows her to dump stuff and will provide the backup if the HD does crash in the meantime.

I appreciate the offer of help and when I have more info on the system I'll give you call for some direction. (PM sent) :thumbup:

[HAULN-SS]

I had a Dell E6520 latittude or something from work. The thing was an i3 with 4GB of ram and it was awesome. It never skipped a beat. Some asshat thief broke into my car and stole it from tysons a few weeks ago, though. I was pretty impressed with it though while I had it.

[caa337]

Thinkpads are horrible. The latitudes are really good laptops.

[Evan]

Just got a new work laptop.

The only Dells Ive used that havent been flaming piles of shit have been the Precision series. We took some into DoD field training exercises years ago and pounded on them in dirt and dust and they did great.
So even after several flaming turd Dell laptops I figured Id give the Precisions another chance, main reason being the Dell workstation laptops are MUCH cheaper than the HPs.

and Dell sucks yet again. apparently $5k wont even buy you a good laptop from Dell. :finger:
The screen frequently has a bad flicker, every time the laptop goes idle it loses the connection to the external monitor, wont reconnect to it unless I turn the monitor off and plug it into a different port (or sometimes must reboot). my coworker's has the same model and it has bluescreened several times, and has build quality issues with a bulging keyboard and sticky keys.
:bootyshake: to dell.

[WRXtranceformed]

Yeah I've had my screen replaced under warranty already for dead pixels.

[ViPER1313]

Just got a new work laptop.

The only Dells Ive used that havent been flaming piles of shit have been the Precision series. We took some into DoD field training exercises years ago and pounded on them in dirt and dust and they did great.
So even after several flaming turd Dell laptops I figured Id give the Precisions another chance, main reason being the Dell workstation laptops are MUCH cheaper than the HPs.

and Dell sucks yet again. apparently $5k wont even buy you a good laptop from Dell. :finger:
The screen frequently has a bad flicker, every time the laptop goes idle it loses the connection to the external monitor, wont reconnect to it unless I turn the monitor off and plug it into a different port (or sometimes must reboot). my coworker's has the same model and it has bluescreened several times, and has build quality issues with a bulging keyboard and sticky keys.
:bootyshake: to dell.

Have you tried installing the latest drivers from NVIDIA and Intel's sites directly for the video card and motherboard? Running the latest BIOS? Most display problems like those are due to bad drivers.

EDIT2: If you don't know how to update drivers and the BIOS on a PC, you should probably just go buy a Mac. Most PC manufacturers push stuff out to the market that is not 100% without an easy update or 2. I don't really hold this against them because the hardware is 2 years ahead of what Mac uses (because they wait for everything to stabilize and are very stringent so far as hardware and driver configs go). I rarely get hit with this flakiness because I always keep stuff up to date :dunno:

EDIT: My Dell Vostro is still working great, just figured I would throw that one out there.

[HAULN-SS]

Just got a new work laptop.

The only Dells Ive used that havent been flaming piles of shit have been the Precision series. We took some into DoD field training exercises years ago and pounded on them in dirt and dust and they did great.
So even after several flaming turd Dell laptops I figured Id give the Precisions another chance, main reason being the Dell workstation laptops are MUCH cheaper than the HPs.

and Dell sucks yet again. apparently $5k wont even buy you a good laptop from Dell. :finger:
The screen frequently has a bad flicker, every time the laptop goes idle it loses the connection to the external monitor, wont reconnect to it unless I turn the monitor off and plug it into a different port (or sometimes must reboot). my coworker's has the same model and it has bluescreened several times, and has build quality issues with a bulging keyboard and sticky keys.
:bootyshake: to dell.

have you tried calling tech support?

[caa337]

Dell does have the best support out of any other company though.

[WRXtranceformed]

I'm pretty good with computers but admittedly not good at updating BIOS or drivers. They make it SUCH a pain in the ass to do on Windows.

[ViPER1313]

I'm pretty good with computers but admittedly not good at updating BIOS or drivers. They make it SUCH a pain in the ass to do on Windows.

For a Dell?

1. Go to Dell's website.
2. Enter your ID tag.
3. Download updates.
4. Double click and then click "next" a bunch of times....

Even the BIOS updates are done through windows on a Dell. All seems pretty easy to me.

[Evan]

yes, the first thing I tried was drivers. both latest nvidia and latest dell certified (they lag by about 1 release) hasnt helped the problem. bios and everything else is up to date. dells support site is in fact pretty spiffy how it remembers all your stuff. Dell gets a lot of traffic to it so its understandable that its got to be good
spent a couple hours on the phone with tech support. even with 'pratinum support' or whatever that was about as fun as jabbing a fork in my eye. will probably call them again this week which will hopefully end up shipping the thing back and getting a new one since it is slow this week.

oh and one more thing, since Dell is trying to cram displayport down everyones throat, the DVI ports on the docking station are only single link. (even on my 2 year old HP docking station they were dual link) which means I have to use displayport for the 30" and thus cannot use it with a KVM :mad:

on a brighter note, i discovered there is a screen under the touchpad. it looks like the display of an alien spacecraft and I have no idea what it does, but it looks cool.

and this monitor (dell u3011) is the best monitor I have ever laid eyes on by FAR. even came color calibrated which made a big difference. my coworker has the last generation model that was not calibrated and his colors have a harsh blue tint.

it did not flicker with my HP, so I know its just this POS Dell thats causing the flicker.

[WRXtranceformed]

I'm pretty good with computers but admittedly not good at updating BIOS or drivers. They make it SUCH a pain in the ass to do on Windows.

For a Dell?

1. Go to Dell's website.
2. Enter your ID tag.
3. Download updates.
4. Double click and then click "next" a bunch of times....

Even the BIOS updates are done through windows on a Dell. All seems pretty easy to me.

I feel like it didn't used to be that easy. Like you had to go searching for each individual driver on the manufacturer's website and install them manually. Auto updates from the computer, even if you told them to search the net, never found any updates even though teh drivers would be years old. I'll try an update tonight from Dell's website and see if it works.

BTW I got another Dell from my new job, Latitude E4310 and it seems pretty awesome so far. No big issues yet.

[Evan]

BIOS updates are easy as cake now.
It used to be you had to use a special program to make a boot disk (as in diskette) with the bios update on it, boot to it, and cross your fingers that you downloaded the right bios image and the power didnt go out while it was flashing and ruin your motherboard.

[WRXtranceformed]

Now I remember why it's such a PITA through Dell's site...I tried to do this before. Yes, it pulls up all of the drivers for all of your installed hardware, but in order to download multiple drivers you have to download Dell Driver Download Manager. That program is an absolute piece of shit and gives me an error message and shuts down every time I open it, saying that I don't have any drivers selected and pointing me back to the website. I do of course have the drivers selected. So I guess I have to download and install each of the 42 separate drivers separately? Lame.

[REED]

Thinkpads are horrible. The latitudes are really good laptops.

not to interrupt all the dell-hate, but I picked up a thinkpad last year for personal use and its been great so far. it's one of the "Edge" models targeted more towards home use than the standard thinkpad. I really don't have any complaints whatsoever for my thinkpad though. it did come with a lot of Lenovo installed software, but it's fairly useful, un-intrusive and certainly hasn't impacted performance at all.


My work puter is a dell E6400 (I believe) and its been rock solid for the last year or two, my biggest complaint is taking it in and out of the dock, well taking it out is fine, but i have to shut it down before i put it back or it will not recognize the monitors and other accessories.

[WRXtranceformed]

So I got Dell Download manager to work by using IE (apparently it only works with IE and Firefox after about 20 minutes on Dell support chat), so I was able to download all 42 of my updated drivers/bios...sadly, I have to unzip and manually install all of them...and left my computer sitting on my bed this morning after the first one wasn't even recognized by the hardware. Not exactly a seamless process.

[ViPER1313]

Just install the following ones, everything else is really not necessary:

BIOS
Motherboard / Mainboard
Video Card
Sound Card
DVDRom Firmware

[caa337]

Thinkpads are horrible. The latitudes are really good laptops.

not to interrupt all the dell-hate, but I picked up a thinkpad last year for personal use and its been great so far. it's one of the "Edge" models targeted more towards home use than the standard thinkpad. I really don't have any complaints whatsoever for my thinkpad though. it did come with a lot of Lenovo installed software, but it's fairly useful, un-intrusive and certainly hasn't impacted performance at all.


My work puter is a dell E6400 (I believe) and its been rock solid for the last year or two, my biggest complaint is taking it in and out of the dock, well taking it out is fine, but i have to shut it down before i put it back or it will not recognize the monitors and other accessories.

Maybe edge ones are better but my highschool had laptops and the grade below me had thinkpads and they always had problems. Good to know they may be getting better

[WRXtranceformed]

Took me like 45 minutes to manually install all of the firmware and BIOS last night. I couldn't pick out which ones were which from the batch I downloaded so I just did them all. What a PITA...I feel like there should be a lot easier way to do that. Good thing I won't have to do it again for a while!