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About LinkBacksi3 all the way.
People who tell you an i5 makes any difference using office in the real world have no idea what they are talking about
An SSD will make far more difference.
i3 all the way.
People who tell you an i5 makes any difference using office in the real world have no idea what they are talking about
An SSD will make far more difference.
laserblazer (12th March 2013)
As @Norphy says, with laptop CPUs the only difference is in Turbo - i.e. the i5's will boost their clockspeed when thermal headroom allows. In a laptop that's not worth as much as in a desktop, as the thermals are rubbish.
Sometimes you'll get an i5 laptop for only £20-£30 more than an i3, in which case it may be worth it. If it's £80-£90 though, i3 and SSD would be subjectively quicker for end users, or i3 and other-bits-you-desperately-need. I know from experience that teachers love a bright and shiny projector almost more than anything else
laserblazer (12th March 2013)
i3 for laptops imo.
even an i3 on a desktop is a decent experience and more than capable (im sat writing this on an i3 system at work)
HDD performance is the bottle neck especially as alot of cheaper laptops still come fitted with 5400rpm drives which are usually woeful
laserblazer (12th March 2013)
i3 with SSD and the best N band on them, Last lot of laptop can't get them above 75Mbs (don't know if I missed a setting on them) But some older laptops with N band good for 150! also some new laptops now only giving you 100Mbs on Lan now...
What kind of aweful laptop is only specing a 100mbit Ethernet card, is this 1997?Originally Posted by w-clarke101
Not that it matters, none of ours are ever plugged in! Plus we only have 100mb to the user so it wouldn't make any difference
With N make sure it can handle the A and G radio ranges, ie 5GHz and 2.4GHz. Some radios only support one of the ranges.
Even N 300Mbit has a hard time keeping up with 100Mbit Ethernet as the Ethernet has comparatively no overhead and is dedicated. Wireless comparatively spends most of its time avoiding other stations and resending corrupted frames. Gigabit beats the pants off both even if it never gets to the theoretical max with your system it still blows the doors off the other two. 802.11ac may finally close the gap with the several decades old 100Mbit/s in real use but that will require a rebuy of most hardware.Not that it matters, none of ours are ever plugged in! Plus we only have 100mb to the user so it wouldn't make any difference
With N make sure it can handle the A and G radio ranges, ie 5GHz and 2.4GHz. Some radios only support one of the ranges.
i3 can be alright if you have the right motherboard (again - Intel is rubbish). SSDs will make a huge difference as will a decent amount of RAM (at least 4GB) with a more modern OS (Vista or higher). i5 will have a longer lifespan thanks to the turbo boost and the four real cores is you get those ones.
Last edited by SYNACK; 12th March 2013 at 01:11 PM.
True with desktop i5s, not with laptop i5s - they're dual core with hyper-threading, as with the i3s, and the Turbo Boost is the additional feature. As if the Core iX naming scheme wasn't already stupid enough!
i3 will be fine. About to purchase a number of laptops to be run for the next 5 years. Much better things to buy with the money saved over the i5. Thing to watch out for is the generation of i3. The cheaper laptops tend be Sandy bridge with HD3000 graphics when you really want Ivy Bridge with HD4000 graphics. There is also more to the longevity of a school laptop than just raw power. That i5/i7 wont be much use when the cheap plastic chassis has snapped when the laptop has been chucked, sorry placed somewhere sans case.
laserblazer (12th March 2013)
The one we are looking at is HD3000 but in view of the usage, I'm not sure that's too big an issue. As for flimsy cases, apart from a couple of broken lid catches, we've not had that much damage to the Toshiba laptops. As for faults, out of the 50 odd we have bought, we,ve had two dead screens (one under warranty) a dead drive, again under warranty and an external vga port died (laptop moved to a non IWB invironment).
We've run Toshiba's since 2009 (600 ish) and the latest Sat Pro R850's and Tecra R850's we've had don't seem as well built as the older A300 series we are replacing at the moment. So this time we've gone to Dell with the Latitiude E6530 which is a lot better built.
For the classroom I would have thought i3s would cope, but personally I wouldn't have Toshibas again. Ours (Satellite pros) only just managed three years. I was nursing them along with spare bits and taking several apart to create one working machine. By contrast I've got some Dell D510s (retired - might use them for digital displays or similar) which can only have been mid-field performance when they were bought about 10 years ago. They ain't fast, but they still work.
Given that Toshiba don't want you repairing their laptops when they break, I would choose laptops from a different manufacturer such as Dell or Lenovo.
Trouble is, they need to run Windows 7 Pro and looking at the prices, it will cost at least 50% more to get a Dell or Lenovo, so there goes our budget and no replacement projectors. To be honest and this may seem a somewhat selfish attitude, the Toshiba laptops come with free 3-year warranty. I'll be long gone by the time it expires.
My intention is to do a report with pros and cons for Tosh and Dell and let someone else make the decision.
Don't go off the web pricing for Dell, speak to an account manager and they can do some amazing deals
EG Lattitude E6530 15.6" screen on the Schools section with the Full HD screen and 8Gb memory is about £1200 where as though our account manager we got them for £650 with 4 year warranty buying 100 units
Last edited by old_n07; 13th March 2013 at 11:22 AM.
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