As an IT Professional what laptop do you use?

[flyinghaggis]

 

At home? I don't have a laptop. I have a desktop with a 43" ultrawide screen instead.

 

 

Cool. I have a 34" ultrawide Samsung and find it pretty handy for multitasking. That's why I'm keen to make sure if I buy a laptop it can connect to it without issue.

[mikeprice]

My home laptop is a 10 year old Core 2 Duo - getting a bit slow nowadays - but only becaseu people keep putting dumb amssive images and gifs on web sites

 

While I was working I generally found that stuff I needed to do at home was mostly web stuff researching what to do the next day and it has always been fine for all that

 

occaisional Excel or access stuff has crept in at time but it has managed that (OK slowly at times) with a bit of extra memory I was throwing out at work anyway (old laptop with 1GB and only 1 memory slot - upgraded with a new SODIMM and put the 1G in my home laptop instead of throwing it out!)

 

Will be upgrading it soon though - the problems are starting to mount up!

 

if you seriously need a great PC at gome just becasue of work stuff - I would start looking at work-life balance and whether or not you actually get paid for doing stuff at home

I generally limited home stuff to intersting projects like robots or Python

anything normal could wait

[rogerdnixon]

HP X360 14 i3 Chromebook or when I want to be lighter weight HP G6A Chromebook.

 

Fast, long battery life and just work.

[Jcx500]

I alternate between my dell vostro and my MacBook Pro 2018 model , do prefer the vostro

[Mr.Ben]

I'm quite mobile (between 33 schools), so DK need one. I have a Lenovo L370, i7, 16GB, 256GB.

 

It is by far the best laptop I've ever had

[dhicks]

Do you not find running ChromeOS limits what you can run and do especially if you're supporting, developing and training for a Windows based network?

 

All the admin stuff for our network is done on a Windows Server instance accessed via web-based interface - I use a Mac at school anyway, and this setup works very well for us. For home use, I'm tempted to get Shadow's cheapest gaming setup - at £12 a month it's more affordable than buying a new laptop every 3 to 5 years.

[mavhc]

The Windows part of the network gets smaller every day. Most of my recent work has been automating admin for websites without oauth that idiots keep paying for, using selenium, have to get access to linux on chromebook for that to work. Rest can be done via ssh or web interface usually.

[flyinghaggis]

if you seriously need a great PC at gome just becasue of work stuff - I would start looking at work-life balance and whether or not you actually get paid for doing stuff at home

I generally limited home stuff to intersting projects like robots or Python anything normal could wait

 

That's actually a large part of the reason I'd prefer to switch to a laptop rather than a desktop. I feel I spend long enough sitting at a computer desk at work so would prefer to avoid doing the same at home.

 

Having a portable device I can quickly grab when I need to means it's easier to use it on the couch/etc rather them needing to actively go upstairs and sit down in front of my desktop.

 

Hence why I was curious what portable laptops other IT folk were using!

[MartinT]

Surface Pro i7 with dock.

[mikeprice]

Although I do have a desktop upstairs nowadays - I used to have a cheap keyboard, mouse plus and secondhand monitor - in my study upstairs, so that if I needed to work on something properly I could plug it all into my laptop and I would have a 'proper' system so I could concentrate if I needed to

 

If you are asking why I had to buy my own stuff - when I started in Education no-one got a work laptop (even teachers) so if you wanted to do computery work at home you had to have your own stuff - it was just expected for teachers to do that or work in school - and, at the time. I used to do a lot of photo editing at home so I saw no reason that work should supply a computer for stuff like that

[HTCPCP]

Home I have an old Toshiba Sat Pro with a 1st gen i5, but its now getting to the point its failing on me. Most of my work from home is done on my general workstation - a Phenom II X6, 16GB RAM, and about 20tb of storage, with gaming being handled on my Ryzen machine which I really need to install some of my other software on it

[witch]

PC at work

Lenovo at home

Both nice deals from ICT Direct

[Opendium_Steve]

A ThinkPad running Fedora Linux... Also worth bearing in mind that you can often save quite a bit of cash by buying a low-memory + spinning rust version and adding memory and SSD yourself (obviously check the spec to make sure it'll take whatever you plan on installing

[flyinghaggis]

A ThinkPad running Fedora Linux... Also worth bearing in mind that you can often save quite a bit of cash by buying a low-memory + spinning rust version and adding memory and SSD yourself (obviously check the spec to make sure it'll take whatever you plan on installing

 

Unfortunately most manufacturers seem to have noticed this and started soldering RAM and SSD's in place to prevent it

 

Take for example the Surface Laptop 3 I wanted to buy. The RAM is soldered on. The SSD is technically replaceable but is a non-standard sized unit plus it means removing the feet to get at the screws and bending several heat shields to get at it which will certainly void the warranty. Not something I want to do on a brand new laptop.

Edited February 13, 2020 by flyinghaggis

[mavhc]

Wouldn't say most, just those ultra thin macs and surfi. MS will tell you it's for security, now you can't cold boot attack it. The prices for laptops with ssds seem much more sane now too.

[MartinT]

Yes, I buy Lenovo E490 with SSD now so no need to upgrade with SSDs any more.