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Laptop Recommendation requested

A

apple2gs

Mr. No-Photon
Joined
Aug 21, 2004
Messages
3,961
This fall I will be starting a doctoral program and am looking to purchase a new laptop. I'm looking for something with great battery life and excellent cooling, as I cannot stand laptops where the keyboard gets hot and sitting on your lap can lead to being scalded.
My three most recent laptops have been Dell, and all of them (including the Vostro I use for work) got super hot and uncomfortable.
I would go with ARM on Windows, however my special software is not fully compatible with ARM yet, so that leaves Intel or AMD. Not really picky about either.
I am kind of leaning toward the ThinkBook line from Lenovo, as some of the 16-inch models can be configured with a higher watt-hour battery, and they still have SD card slots where the ThinkPad does not. Any other suggestions?
 
If you're not starting until fall I'd wait a bit unless you need a lot of power. Panther Lake (Core Ultra 300) just came out last month, so few models are available. They're 25W "TDP" chips and have pretty impressive battery life, plus a nice iGPU in the X7 and X9 models. You pretty much need an ARM chip to beat them on battery life. Intel 18A, so they're ahead of anything AMD has right now on fabrication process. If you need high performance there's nothing new expected until end of year or early 2027. So how much punch do you need?

Laptops getting roasty is more about specs and quality than brand. Dells are fine but not all Dells. IIRC Vostro was a cheap model. I've never had the roasty laptop problem, but I don't cheap out. My current laptop is a Lenovo ThinkBook 14S I picked up in 2019. i7-8565U, 16GB, 500GB. "15W" CPU, doesn't get hot.
 
I got an 14” IdeaPad a year and a half ago and it’s solid. Never gets hot running Win11 or Linux. The only time the fan runs is if I’m in the bios for more than 5 seconds. lol. Good battery life too.
 
zandor said:
If you're not starting until fall I'd wait a bit unless you need a lot of power. Panther Lake (Core Ultra 300) just came out last month, so few models are available. They're 25W "TDP" chips and have pretty impressive battery life, plus a nice iGPU in the X7 and X9 models. You pretty much need an ARM chip to beat them on battery life. Intel 18A, so they're ahead of anything AMD has right now on fabrication process. If you need high performance there's nothing new expected until end of year or early 2027. So how much punch do you need?

Laptops getting roasty is more about specs and quality than brand. Dells are fine but not all Dells. IIRC Vostro was a cheap model. I've never had the roasty laptop problem, but I don't cheap out. My current laptop is a Lenovo ThinkBook 14S I picked up in 2019. i7-8565U, 16GB, 500GB. "15W" CPU, doesn't get hot.
Click to expand...


Not really looking for a whole lot of power, but
zandor said:
If you're not starting until fall I'd wait a bit unless you need a lot of power. Panther Lake (Core Ultra 300) just came out last month, so few models are available. They're 25W "TDP" chips and have pretty impressive battery life, plus a nice iGPU in the X7 and X9 models. You pretty much need an ARM chip to beat them on battery life. Intel 18A, so they're ahead of anything AMD has right now on fabrication process. If you need high performance there's nothing new expected until end of year or early 2027. So how much punch do you need?

Laptops getting roasty is more about specs and quality than brand. Dells are fine but not all Dells. IIRC Vostro was a cheap model. I've never had the roasty laptop problem, but I don't cheap out. My current laptop is a Lenovo ThinkBook 14S I picked up in 2019. i7-8565U, 16GB, 500GB. "15W" CPU, doesn't get hot.
Click to expand...


I am not going to need a whole lot of punch, my 1255u on my Inspiron seems to always struggle, maybe that has to do with dells thermal management. For school I will be doing a whole lot of research, so not going to need a whole lot of power in it. The Ultra 300 line look nice enough, I might hold off until the Thinkbook refresh gets released.
 
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