Laptops are stupid and shitty. Why would anyone buy one?

[Hippy_Hollow]

@Giraffe

OK, VCO3. Given your history of starting Pit threads and then never returning (latest example), we’re going to have a special rule for you. No more dropping Pit threads like steaming turds and then never returning. If you don’t want to discuss a subject, don’t start the thread. If you start a thread and never come back (or make only fake, token responses to get past this new rule on a technicality), you’re going to start racking up warnings.

Note to all: this rule applies only to VCO3 and his adherence to it will be judged by the mods (rather than some arbitrary minimum quota of posts per thread).

You know, the mods get a lot of shit on this board… but this response is awesome!

I have a PowerMac G4 desktop that I never use, but a work MacBook Pro 15" and home MacBook Pro 17". Both are docked and used with external monitors and keyboards. So I have the best of both worlds. The MBP 15" that my uni provided for me has a BookEndz Dock… people in my department come by all the time and drool.

My employer offered me the option of a lapper or a desktop. It was a no-brainer when I saw that they made a dock for the MBP.

[Pushkin]

@Shagnasty

My director found a solution with a docking station. I just walk into work, set the laptop in the docking station, and I have a full keyboard, mouse, and large LCD monitor fired up with 15 seconds. The bonus is that I also have the laptop screen that functions as a secondary monitor. It is great

They do seem pretty handy, for home use all I found I needed though was a USB mouse to make it painless to use.

I had an older PC and got some money that absolutely had to be used on a newer PC, so I picked up a laptop. For no other reason than that I seem to be moving into smaller places with more crap and needed the space.

[zweisamkeit]

@Mangetout

The reason for poor battery performance on laptops is often because they’re charged too much. If you use a laptop in the office as well as out and about, it’s better to run it on batteries for a while (say, in the morning), then charge it fully before you take it away. If you’re planning to use the thing as a desktop PC for an extended time, physically take the battery out.

This isn’t so much the case with the newer Lithium Ion batteries, but still, laptop batteries are designed to be used - that is, charged and then discharged (a bit at least).

Just wanted to say “the newer”? Yes, I know that NiCad batteries were the only choice for awhile, but when I got my current laptop (4 years ago), I couldn’t find a single NiCad-powered laptop*, unless I wanted to go to a huge trade center and find a vendor selling a laptop from 1997 barely able to run Win95’s screensaver.

I really really doubt that the total number of NiCad laptops in use are more than a very small percentage of total laptops.

I love my laptop; I was a CompSci student doing a lot of programming and my laptop handled that just fine. Now I mainly use it for general surfing, typing etc. (my job is currently a ‘leave your work here when you walk out the building’, where I have a desktop and dual monitor set up) and it suits me just fine. I have a 4 year old Systemax and it only runs warm, not hot.

• Not that I wanted one.

[Crotalus]

I wonder if the OP ever stops to consider that he might be clueless about the wants and needs of the majority of people. Laptops apparently are doing something useful for millions of people.

My company provides me with a Dell Latitude. I use it in the office in a docking station with a full-size keyboard, a mouse and a nice flat screen monitor. I work from home a couple of days a week and use the on-board keyboard and screen with a USB mouse. In the office, I can take my computer to conference rooms and show presentations from my hard drive. When I travel, I can work in airports or on planes in full self-important douchebag mode. Battery life has never been an issue, since I generally don’t work more than an hour or so in those situations. Heat has never been an issue. In the bad old days, when I used a desk-top computer for work, I could work at home using my home desk-top. I had to keep my personal software in sync with work software, and when I traveled to my company’s other locations I had to use whatever desk-top computer they had lying around.

My wife has one of the huge ones that the OP mentioned, a Dell Inspiron, I think. It enables her to work on her real estate business anywhere in our home as well as in the real estate office.

These two laptops do everything we need computers to do, and they do it well and portably. I think we’ll keep them.

[Sarahfeena]

@Sleeps With Butterflies

You may consider simply wearing pants while you’re online sometimes.

When he finally finds some hot MILF porn, he wants to be ready!

[Jurph]

@9thFloor

I’ve got a full size foldout keyboard that collapses into a wallet-sized package for when I want to type a great deal.

Laptops suck.

Whoa, buddy. Define “full size”. I have a 101-key keyboard here in front of me–none of this “hold down FN to get a half-assed Num Pad” crap–and it’s got to be 18 inches wide and at least six deep. If it’s smaller than that, it ain’t full size.

I am a fan of laptops for long airplane flights - I can write my trip reports and place them in my outbox for automatic sending next time I’m connected. Once I finish my work I can play NetHack or Dwarf Fortress, watch a DVD if I don’t like the in-flight movie (and who ever does?). But the keyboard is teeny tiny, and I love getting it back to the office where I can dock it to take advantage of a second screen and a real full-size keyboard.

As for VCO3’s assertion that they’re loud or hot, I find that my Dell Latitude D430 is a great computer. It’s quiet, only gets noticeably hot after two or three hours, and runs for four or five hours on a charge (less if I’m using the WiFi antenna). It costs about $1,500 which is nearly twice what a bare-bones machine would cost me. A $1,500 gaming rig would be a nicer machine for my home, and a $1,500 quad-core (or eight core) machine dedicated to heavy RAM and CPU loads would be useful for running simulations at work. I could use any of them as my desktop machine at work… but I couldn’t take any of them on the plane with me.

Look at it this way, VCO3: a laptop is a piece of specialty computing hardware. People are stupid (surely you’ve figured that out by now!) and routinely use the wrong tool for the job. Obviously, a man who tries to use a broadsword as a screwdriver is a fool, but that does not make the broadsword a bad weapon. It makes it a bad screwdriver.

[kidchameleon]

This thread is as lame as the poster who started it. I have a Dell Latitude D620 with extended battery. It lasts 4 or 5 hours on a charge and rarely ever gets hot. With a cellular card I can get a lot of work done, keep up with things or catch a movie while shuttling around the country. When I’m at one of our other facilities, I don’t need to take a computer from someone who’s using it, I can use my lap top.

[Justin_Bailey]

Wow. I agree with VCO3 and DudleyGarrett. It’s too early in the morning for that kind of head trip.

Anyway, yes I think laptops are pretty dumb. Small, cramped keyboards. Those lame trackpads. No scroll wheel. Much too short battery life. Crotch burning bottoms. No thank you.

And while I realize that every jackass at the coffee shop is like this, but most people that I’ve seen with laptops aren’t actually using them. They have them on and the screen is displaying something colorful and important looking, but the laptop owner is staring into space while drinking his coffee. It’s a very quick and easy way to spot the hipster ass holes.

That said, the way my wife can carry her laptop anywhere in the house and get a wireless signal for the Internet is neat. But then, she has tiny girl hands that can actually type comfortably on the keyboard.

[Zulema]

Dell Vostro 1000, warm but not hot. Dell seems to have the hot thing under control. My old Dell got so hot the paint on the bottom would melt and stick to my leg.

[Man_With_a_Cat]

Toshiba Tecra. It gets warm, but not uncomfortably so.

I work at my desk, at any one of 19 schools, at off site meetings, at home…wherever I am and need to work, it’s there with me. The extended life battery is good for over 4 hours, but I keep a spare charger in my bag anyway.

I’m almost not comfortable on a normal sized keyboard anymore, so none of the miniaturization issues bug me at all.

Desktops suck. Try and work on one on the train!

[Caffeine.addict]

I like my laptop for home use when I want to surf the internet or do a few things at home like research. However, I prefer my desktop if I have to do a good amount of typing. The good thing about the laptop is that I can sit on the couch or the dining room and not be near an ethernet port. It works best if used as a supplement to the desktop not as a substitute.

My desktop at work died last year and I was stuck using the office laptop for three days while our computer guy got around to replacing the hard drive and reinstalling all of the software that I use. Let me tell you, that did suck. I finally connected my monitor and keyboard to the thing and used it that way.

For what I do, I just don’t need that much computing power. If I can run MS Office, Acrobat, and a few more specialized programs that don’t use to much power, I’m fine.

[Jayn_Newell]

@Justin_Bailey

Anyway, yes I think laptops are pretty dumb. Small, cramped keyboards. Those lame trackpads. No scroll wheel. Much too short battery life. Crotch burning bottoms. No thank you.

Buy mouse.
Set up laptop.
Plug in mouse.
Do work.
Unplug mouse.
Put laptop and mouse away.

I’m not going to say that laptops are inherently bad, but I’m sure a lot of people have them when they would be as well or better served with a desktop.

[THespos]

Odds on whether our favorite seagull poster will return to the thread?

I’ve had this HP Pavilion dv8000 for a couple years. Before that, it was a series of Toshiba notebooks that are all still going today. (I gave one to my mom, one to my wife.) I commute two hours each way, with most of that time spent on a Long Island Rail Road train, so it doesn’t make sense for me to have a desktop. When I get to the office, I plug it in and keep going.

Most people working here have notebooks. We’ve been ordering a bunch of the Lenovos lately, since we can get pretty good deals on them via GotApex. And they hold up pretty well. Some people plug them in to docking stations when they get to the office, while some people just use the keyboard and display on the notebook.

I doubt we’ll be buying too many desktops anymore. It’s so much more convenient and efficient to let people leave earlier and take some work with them on their commute. It’s also convenient when someone decides they want to work from home or they get a cold and don’t want to come in to the office.

We’re not exactly doing supercomputing here (we’re an ad agency), so really we need only Microsoft Office and a web browser to do what we do. Sprinkle in a few other low-powered apps like eFax, AIM, an FTP client for remote file access. That’s about it. Yeah, sometimes people throw iTunes or Photoshop on their machines. But it’s not like we’re running anything crazy, so we can usually get away with machines that don’t represent the latest and greatest in terms of processor speed or RAM.

I’m going to do my thing on this HP until it blows up, at which time I’ll probably scoot down to my Apple reseller (right here on my block) and scoop up a Macbook Pro. Yeah, it will likely be a lot more than I need, but maybe I’ll grow into it.

I’m also acutely aware of looking like a pretentious dick from time to time as I type away in Starbucks. When Starbucks first got WiFi, my partner and I signed up for accounts, because we do a good deal of running around, and it’s cool to be able to duck into a coffee shop if you have 30 minutes to kill before a client meeting and you want to see what’s going on back at the office or get some work done. Just remember that not everybody typing on a notebook in Starbucks is an attention whore or loser. I usually don’t even drink their shitty coffee, but I’ll happily take them up on their offer to let me choose from a few thousand WiFi lounges where I can get work done when I’m on the road.

[Justin_Bailey]

@Jayn_Newell

Buy mouse.
Set up laptop.
Plug in mouse.
Do work.
Unplug mouse.
Put laptop and mouse away.

I’m not going to say that laptops are inherently bad, but I’m sure a lot of people have them when they would be as well or better served with a desktop.

You forgot “keep laptop plugged in at all times because the battery runs down too quickly” and “buy keyboard” and “buy desk for laptop because I can’t use a mouse on the side of my leg while also balancing a real keyboard on my lap”

I think I’ll stick with my desktop thank you very much.

Oh, and I’m sure the surge in laptop spending is due to a rash of college kids who have decided that’s what they want as a graduation gift. And I will grant that in a dorm setting, a laptop is much better than a desktop.

[Jayn_Newell]

@Justin_Bailey

You forgot “keep laptop plugged in at all times because the battery runs down too quickly” and “buy keyboard” and “buy desk for laptop because I can’t use a mouse on the side of my leg while also balancing a real keyboard on my lap”

Yes, if you must, and if you didn’t insist on a ‘real’ keyboard you wouldn’t have that problem

I’m still glad I swapped machines with my father though (he bought me a new desktop, I gave my old laptop to replace his even older one).

[Justin_Bailey]

@Jayn_Newell

Yes, if you must, and if you didn’t insist on a ‘real’ keyboard you wouldn’t have that problem

My giant manly hands prevent me from using a tiny laptop keyboard easily.

It’s the same reason I need a third-party controller for my PS2. Sony may tout their system as the “mature gamer’s choice” but that controller is built for a child.

[Flander]

Good news, everyone!!

[Crotalus]

@Justin_Bailey

My giant manly hands prevent me from using a tiny laptop keyboard easily.

It’s the same reason I need a third-party controller for my PS2. Sony may tout their system as the “mature gamer’s choice” but that controller is built for a child.

I’m confused about the keyboard thing. The letters and numbers area of my laptop keyboard is exactly the same size as that area of my full size keyboard. The F keys at the top are slightly smaller, but everything bounded by ` ~, Backspace, Ctrl and Ctrl is the same size and spacing on both boards.

[Contrary]

I must completely suck then, I own three laptops.

To be fair, I gave my oldest laptop to my husband so I am down to just two.

Last month, I got a gaming laptop which replaced my gaming desktop. I made the move to a gaming laptop because we are leaving the midwest (and the large house we have) and moving to Boston where we know we will be lucky to have 1/3 the space we have here. While it’s a big beast for a laptop, it still takes up a lot less room than the desktop.

I also have an HP Pavilion dv2000 which is a year old. Since I’m self-employed this laptop is perfect for me–it runs all the programs I need and is still lightweight enough I don’t break my back hauling it around.

I personally find regular keyboards annoying, and I much prefer the laptop keyboard both for size and the way the keys feel when I type.

[Astroboy14]

This is how I picture VCO3 on his commute…