It’s about time to retire my Lenovo L512. Some questions:
Is it practical/sensible to try to stay with Win 7 Pro? (It seems to meet my needs well.) Any strong arguments for or against Win 10?
My (limited) experience with touch screens hasn’t impressed me. Is it a bad idea to stick with a non-touch screen? (These seem to consume less power - yes?)
What’s the best way to transfer apps from old to new PC?
Model & feature recommendations? What I think I need:
Reasonable speed (no gaming)
Large-ish SSD
Need not be extremely small, thin, lightweight or low cost
Windows 7 is officially dead. You cannot buy a new machine anymore with Win 7 pre-installed, although Win 7 Pro is still available from tigerdirect.com. Damn. Win 10 sucks.
I have new Lenovo P50 and P70 non-touch screen machines. Work fine. My screens stay clean.
I’m a IT Luddite. I have all my install files from every app. After I got my new machines, I spent weeks (yes, weeks!) deleting all the bloatware from my new machines before manually installing all of my apps, and manually transferring my files using an external hard drive.
If you’re happy with Lenovo, stick with it. Or go Dell or HP.
Go to a Microsoft Store and check out their offerings. The MS store offers 30 day no questions asked refunds, the machines have the Windows Signature Image (optimized for performance and zero crapware), and a selection of good machines at different price bands.
you don’t really give any hints to help with the purchase. It would really help to know more than you don’t need to game. Howsabout, you want a laptop, will use it in multiple locations occaisionally, primarily do email and web browsing, probably store everything on the hard drive (have a big stash of photo’s or videos?), and that’s about it? Do you need a long battery life? Do you travel a lot? What size screen do you like?
Me, I love touch screens. Really makes it easy to scroll through the Dope. I also use the pen to annotate, well, just about everything. I’ve got a mid range surface Pro 4 with keyboard. I don’t think I have ever taken the keyboard off, and this is the best road warrior laptop I’ve ever owned.
Full disclaimer: I used to work at MSFT. I also got some brand name devices assorted at the MSFT store. I have bought about 5 PC’s from the MS Store and had great service on them. My original Surface Pro 4 overheated, the fan ran constantly and the battery life was sub 2 hours. I took it into the Store, the guy put his hand on it to feel the heat, heard the fan zooming away, and said “Gimme 2 minutes and I’ll swap this out for you.”
I do travel a lot.
Decent battery life is important (but most models I’ve looked at seem to offer 6+ hours, which is fine).
I do some development in VisualStudio and AndroidStudio, so need the horsepower to handle that (which again seems easy enough to get).
No big stash of photos or videos.
Current screen is 14" - I could stand to go a bit smaller for additional portability - but not much.
I don’t know if it’s a strong argument, but I really like Windows 10. It is, in my opinion, the best Windows since XP, in the sense that it’s well thought-out and designed and a fairly big leap since the previous versions.
I’m primarily a Mac user, and Windows 10 feels like it was made with a lot of the design sensibility that makes the Mac great without losing the essential things that make Windows Windows.
Also, it has a (beta) Ubuntu/bash userspace! Linux! (sort of!) (You probably don’t care about this, but for people who do, it’s an amazing development. No much fucking about with cygwin).
Agreed. You’ll save money and (a little) weight, and have more battery life.
On the other hand, if your budget allows, the Microsoft Surface Books look great and are really well-reviewed and are touch-screen.
