Looking for a durable laptop

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zandor

Supreme [H]ardness
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Dec 14, 2002
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I'm looking for a new laptop for a friend. She has a work issued Mac, but wants a PC too. It will be used for general office type stuff, web browsing, etc., so no need for fancy graphics. The catch is she's hard on hardware. Her Dell Inspiron (Nehalem/Westmere era i5) has held up pretty well, but it's quite dinged up at this point and her phones usually make it 2 years tops.

Basically I'm looking for a pretty normal "business" laptop that's tougher than average. 14-15.6" screen, i3 or i5, etc. The one sort of premium thing I'm looking for is better than 1366x768 screen resolution. 1600x900 is fine, just want more than 1366x768. It doesn't need to be super light, but no bricks please. I can upgrade the ram to 8GB and add an SSD myself. mSATA/PCI-e SSD + HD would also work. She mostly wants space for music and pictures and such.

I'm kind of thinking ThinkPad T440/T540 or some sort of Dell Latitude. Preferably under $1200 since I can get a T440 set up how I want it and add a 512GB SSD for about that. Any other suggestions for a well built and durable but otherwise pretty normal laptop?
 
Ended up with a ThinkPad Yoga 14. After asking a few more questions it turns out she usually uses her computer on her couch and likes touch screens. The Yoga 14 hits all the right marks. 1080p IPS, i5, 8GB, folds into a tablet for couch use, can (will) upgrade to 256GB SSD + 1TB HD, and even has a discreet GPU in case she wants to run The Sims on it or something.
 
zandor said:
I'm looking for a new laptop for a friend. She has a work issued Mac, but wants a PC too. It will be used for general office type stuff, web browsing, etc., so no need for fancy graphics. The catch is she's hard on hardware. Her Dell Inspiron (Nehalem/Westmere era i5) has held up pretty well, but it's quite dinged up at this point and her phones usually make it 2 years tops.

Basically I'm looking for a pretty normal "business" laptop that's tougher than average. 14-15.6" screen, i3 or i5, etc. The one sort of premium thing I'm looking for is better than 1366x768 screen resolution. 1600x900 is fine, just want more than 1366x768. It doesn't need to be super light, but no bricks please. I can upgrade the ram to 8GB and add an SSD myself. mSATA/PCI-e SSD + HD would also work. She mostly wants space for music and pictures and such.

I'm kind of thinking ThinkPad T440/T540 or some sort of Dell Latitude. Preferably under $1200 since I can get a T440 set up how I want it and add a 512GB SSD for about that. Any other suggestions for a well built and durable but otherwise pretty normal laptop?
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Give thinkpad a try, if Superfish issue is not a problem to you. I personally love my 7-yr old thinkpad x200.
 
I am currently using a company issued Dell Latitude E5430. Solid laptop and has held up well to my abuse over the last 2 years. I specifically love the hinges used - have not required tightening.
 
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