Home notebook - Thinkpad E540, L540 or Dell Latitude 3540 or maybe something else?

[krzysiekx]

Hi,

I'm looking for a home notebook for Office work, movies, browsing Internet, occasional gaming. It has to be very comfortable in use (multitasking, many browser tabs, movies, copying data and whatnot) and I'd like to have it for some longer time, I don't feel like replacing it in a year or two from the purchase. My previous notebook was Asus N71vg - nice display, but it was glowscreen, got dirty fast, had fingerprints on plastic cover, fell few times and now is in terrible condition, had a few incidents with power charger and mainboard, even the HDD is damaged. I'd like to avoid that in the future, plus I guess matte dispays are better, there's no light reflecting from it and whatnot. Am I right?

I understand these are only notebooks, not powerhouses I could build creating PC, but I need a notebook, and that's it. It has to be as fast, as comfortable as possible, and I want it for a longer period of time. SSD would be rad, but it is not installed in the notebooks within my price range, so I guess HDD is going to be fine, as long as notebook's specs are decent.

I made a little research and found devices like:

Thinkpad e540
- pros; totally my price range, quite good specs;
- cons; issues with power reported all over the Lenovo forums

Thinkpad L540
- pros: with the i5 processor called as top1 business notebook in dec 2014, very favourable opinions
- cons: out of my price range, it's a bit more expensive, although I found a shop that offers it with i3 processor in around E540 / Latitude 3540 price range, I'd aim for that version

Latitude 3540
- pros: considered better than E540 (although they look at the i5 processor and I aim at cheaper, i3 model), great guarantee
- cons: no hdmi input, I'm not sure I'm going to use that anyways

I also found few ProBooks with decent price and specs, but I wouldn't enjoy using HP, I heard they made pretty bad notebooks in the past and I have their printer, it's quite slow and pricey to use

I also found notebooks like Dell Inspiron 3542/5547 with i5, dedicated gfx and more ram; Lenovo Z50 and Acer E5 with i5 and more ram - they are nicer because the price is almost the same, the specs are better, but they have 'glare' screens and I am afraid that with kind of usage my family does (it has to be home family notebook btw) it's going to break as N71vg did, so I aimed for business series or something like that. Am I doing the right thing? Or maybe I should fix my view and aim from something like these four?

 

[jaguarskx]

I use the Dell Latitude 3540. It is one of the higher end models with a Core I5-4200u, 1080p screen and Radeon HD 8850m GPU. Overall it is a solid laotop. Bought a refurbished one on eBay for about $500 back in January. The only thing lacking is the keyboard is not backlit.

HDMI ports are output only. The only laptops that I know of with HDMI inputs are Alienware laptops.

 

[krzysiekx]

Yeah, I of course meant imput ones.

I have rearranged my price range and I can get a new Latitude with i5/8GB ram/integrated graphics and without OS, or the same setup, but with i3 processor and W7. The version with dedicated graphics is totally out of my price range.

The L540 is too expensive and I excluded E540 for it's power issues described vividly on Lenovo forums.

I found a HP ProBook G1 to suit my needs to, it's price range is very similar to Del's - I could get new one with i5/8gb ram/w8, it's a bit cheaper than Dell actually. Do you have any opinions on this notebook?

 

[jaguarskx]

Which HP ProBook G1? The HP ProBook 430-G1? Here's a review of that laptop:

http/www.notebookcheck.net/Review-HP-ProBook-430-G1-Notebook.104999.0.html