Tue, 09 Jun 2015
Laptop Upgrade, take 2
After thinking about upgrading my laptop in 2013, it is time for another try. My old ASUS F3E has flaky power connector, and sometimes fails to charge, which is quite annoying. So far my requirements are:
- Fully supported by Linux without proprietary blobs (definitely not nVidia graphics or Broadcom wireless).
- No Microsoft tax (read: no pre-installed Windows).
- At least 8 GB of RAM, upgradable to at least 16 GB, more is better.
- As big battery as possible (upgrading my old ASUS F3E to a 9-cell battery helped a lot).
- 14" to 15.6" display. Maybe even 13.3", but not 17".
- Keyboard without the numeric keypad, with full-sized inverse-T arrow keys, and with backlight.
- Display resolution higher than my old ASUS F3E has (1280x800), especially in the vertical direction. Definitely not that "HD-ready" thing.
- Matte display. Glossy displays suck.
- Touchpad with at least two physical buttons, so that the middle button can be emulated.
- Not very heavy, if possible.
- Magnesium chassis (or, generally speaking, no brittle plastics).
- Internal SSD storage, or no storage at all (I already have a 240 GB SSD drive from my old laptop.
- No DVD drive. It only eats power, and it is dead weight anyway.
- CPU with as high single-core performance as possible. For a laptop, two cores are more than enough.
- If possible, something less ugly than classical black Thinkpads.
Of course, all the above criteria are met with exactly zero laptops currently available in the Czech Republic. So far I am considering the following less-than-optimal models:
- HP Probook 450 G2 (K9K20EA) (cons: HDD, DVD drive, only 4-cell battery, Realtek ethernet, probably no backlit keyboard).
- HP ZBook Z15 G2 (K0G61ES) (cons: HDD, weight 2.8 kg, numerical keypad, no information about wifi)
- HP EliteBook 850 G2 (J8R65EA) (cons: 3-cell battery, Windows)
- Lenovo Thinkpad T550 (20CK000XMC) (cons: 3-cell battery, price, Windows)
- Lenovo Thinkpad L450 (20DS0003MC) (cons: Windows, probably no backlit keyboard)
So, my dear lazyweb, what would you recommend? Any other models? Any known problems with the abovementioned laptops? Thanks!