Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Laptop advice

My daughter's laptop is dying so I'm looking at what to get her as a replacement.

We seem to have come down to the Lenovo Thinkpad S431 as it gets good reviews and is the right form factor. At $659 for the 128gb ssd model, it seems like a good deal.

The two downsides are that it has a weak display and the cost to upgrade to 8gb ram at an eye popping $130.

The important things are size durability and weight. I have not found another laptop this light that fits the bill.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I have an older Thinkpad that's been rock solid for a few years, so I'd recommend them without hesitation. You could do the RAM upgrade yourself. It's a really simple operation. Crucial has 8gb chips for $75.

Fred, you might consider this .

John. With the newer Haswell chip that is a very nice laptop and should get very good battery life. I proposed a similar Acer to my daughter, but she opted for lighter and smaller. As a student, she carries it around everywhere.

Joe, I must be getting a little soft in the head from all this shift work. Didn't even think about looking at doing the replacement myself.

I have found one other alternative, the HP Envey NV4-1117: better CPU and display, but lower battery life and apparently a somewhat funky touchpad (minor to major issue depending on the reviewer).

Just received 2 laptops I ordered from Dell. Very impressed with them.
17 inch screen/non touch
Core i5 4200u
750gb HD
6gb ram
4 usb ports/very handy

Total cost including free shipping 1259.00

So far I find the screen to be very clear with great color, the keyboard is one of the best I have ever used and having so many usb ports is great. Wasn't worried about SSD since it will be on or in standby most of the time so a little quicker boot time is not important. What was cool was when setting up I used the same windows login as my home computer and it set up the new one virtually identical.

About 8 yrs ago we bought a couple cheap computers from Dell since that was all I could talk the boss into, and they are still working great after all these years. We have a lot of power outages here and neither are on a surge protector and both have been hit a lot of times without failing. Still running on the original OS loaded from day one. But technology moves on and it was time for an upgrade plus the ability to use the computer in the shop to save time going back to the office.

HP Envy it is. It turns out the display was a big downside to the Thinkbook because of its poor off angle viewing. My daughter and her roomie watch movies etc. on the laptop.

It also has most of what I wanted to upgrade on the Thinkpad plus an i5 cpu for $100 less. It only has an SSD cache, but that is still a big step up from just an HDD.

The chain having the clearance sale had a demo I could get my hands on and the feel of the keyboard and touchpad are just fine. I'm sure my daughter will be very happy with it.