HP 450 vs Stonebook Pro vs Dell Latitude 3540 - staff

[Andycat]

Hi all,

 

We're replacing 55 staff laptops and it's whittled down to the 3 options, all with 5 yr warranty. Prices are different but what are peoples recent experiences with the Dell 3540 or Stonebook Pro?

 

We already have the HP Probook 450 on site, and have had a few issues with the cases, even though they're for staff use.

 

Thanks in Advance,

 

Andy

[CHiLL]

We have the HP ProBook 450 G8 and G9 models, as well as some ProBook 440 G10 models (14" version). We're finding that they're fairly good for us, though the only downside is the keyboard quality and replacement cost/procedure. We've had these <1 year and already had a key come off the keyboard on two laptops and we can't fit them back on. A replacement keyboard is the whole top keyboard panel, which costs ~£100 to replace and is literally an entire laptop teardown to replace it. Despite that, we also have HP USB C docks and deciding to keep ourselves a mostly HP house.

 

We do have 15 Dell Latitude 3520 (not the same I know) laptops as student devices in one department. A school I worked at previously had replaced all their staff laptops with 3520's a couple of years ago and first impressions were pretty decent, though I haven't had enough exposure with them to suggest anything else. I think that school may have also bought some Stonebooks and liked them, but I can't remember, though I don't have any experience with the Stone's myself.

[KarlGoddard]

Been using Stonebooks here for many, many years. Never had any faults / hardware failures / warranty calls with them.

 

Can't fault their build quality. They just work

[Norphy]

It's been a long (long!) time since I've touched anything Stone, but every Stone branded laptop I've ever seen has been a Clevo unit with a Stone logo silk screen printed onto it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Clevo laptops are very generic things and I found getting things like BIOS updates and driver updates more awkward than I did for the likes of Dell.

 

Dell laptops (Latitudes, anyway) also plug into software like Dell Command which makes integrating them into systems like MECM a doddle, make updating drivers and firmwares a lot easier and, with Dell at least, they seem to be supported for a longer time with new BIOSes and suchlike.