What computers are easy to use..

[hemiram]

I've had some real **** laptops, two of them were just awful. The first one, a Dell Inspiron 15.6" had endless USB weirdness where one of the two USB 2.X plugs would randomly fail and then work again, and it ran so insanely hot that I had to run a laptop cooler and my left hand would get all dried out from the hot air that came out of it. I finally gave up and ordered a new one, which was great until just after the warranty was up and the motherboard failed. The worst of them all was an HP I bought back about 2012 on Black Friday, it was a middle to high end machine, that I thought would work out well. It was a lemon and was eventually replaced, as HP customer service got tired of my telling them what happened this time. The replacement was a minor upgrade and was flawless until I dropped it when I was taking it off my desk and tried to catch it, and I destroyed the display. I sold it to a friend's son who found a dead one on Ebay and put the display into my PC and had a "toss around" laptop for school.

I decided to just buy a new one, from Xotic PC. It's a Sager/Clevo 15.6" OLED screened with a 1TB SSD, 16 gigs of RAM, and a RTX 2070Super video card. Movies and pics look amazing on it. All my best laptops have been Clevo made. Not heard of here by the name, but many laptops are made by them. Most of the big Inspirons back in the late '00's were Clevos with Dell on them. My second laptop was a 17" monster Clevo that a friend now owns. Still works quite well at 14 years old.

 

[hemiram]

I just ordered a Dell laptop. It's going back. One of the things on my 'must have' list is a backlit keyboard. I got it and the keys are silver and the letters are grey. When you turn on the backlight to 'bright'. You can only see the letters if you turn the computer to your face. And they are DIM. My sis says she had one and sent it back.

I'm replacing an ancient HP. There are some things I don't like about it, but it works.

What computers are you guys using that you actually LIKE to use?

I have zero issues with Windows 7 and 10, anything with 8 is to be avoided, but those are only used ones now, so that's no big deal. I personally don't want a laptop as a main PC, I don't like the keyboards and I HATE the trackpad, so I use a mouse anyways. I build my own desktop PCs and they are always upper midrange machines. The last one was an AMD Ryzen machine with water cooling. It has W10 home on it, as my last two laptops have had. Other than a couple of older games having issues with it, I have no complaints about W10. An Apple machine will never be in my house. I had to use/support them at work and that was enough to make me never want to deal with them again. Overpriced and usually underpowered, you're paying for a name.

My last 3 laptops have had backlit keyboards that can be any color you want, with various "breathing" and other effects. The ASUS, MSI, and others all have nicely lit keyboards available. I have a cheapish green lit keyboard on my desktop PC and I never could see it very well, and a few months back, I ordered one that could be any color I wanted. I couldn't see it well either. Oh well, they were both cheap keyboards. I put the new one back in the box. Then I had cataract surgery. Whoa! The "weak" green keyboard was not weak at all! It was my eyes. I had to look up how to back the intensity down after my first eye was done last month. I got the new one out and up on high, there are three settings, it's way too bright, the #2 is perfect, but I put it back in the box again, the green one is fine now that I can see decently again. I had no idea how bad I was seeing until my first eye was done. Same goes for my monitors at work and home, I had them cranked up to almost painful brightness before my eyes got fixed. The contrast increase is huge, and colors really pop now.

 

[rwsmith]

Thanks for everything......

I appreciate all the good advice. Even the 'not so good' advice.

I'm looking at the Lenovo Ideabook if I can find one in town to check out before I buy.

And yeah, the Inspiron had two backlight settings I put it on 'high' and could only see the keys if I turned the keyboard toward my face like a book. Even then they were dim. When I put the thing back in my lap, the keys disappeared.

 

[TheHobbyist]

Another vote for Apple products.

It may take a little getting used to if you are more familiar with the Windows platform. (which borrowed heavily from, you guessed it, Apple ).

My personal experience is that Apple is a far better product. If you have sticker shock on new models, you can buy one or two generation NOS for a price comparable to other brands (haven't checked all the benefits/pitfalls though or an 'apples to apple comparison.............. )

 

[sipowicz]

Another vote for Apple products.

It may take a little getting used to if you are more familiar with the Windows platform. (which borrowed heavily from, you guessed it, Apple )

They used to say Windows 2000 is Mac 1980.

 

[S42N8]

Another Apple recommendation. But as others have said, outboard keyboards, mice and monitors pretty much give you all the options you want; perhaps too many. My office has that combination down to a science... if I wouldn’t get in trouble, there’s a crappy monitor that’s itching to get replaced.

 

[oldbrownhat]

If you're into only word processing...

Problem is, it's even getting hard to get reliable general-purpose pencils these days. The only ones I've found to be consistently good are the Staedtler Norica.

As to computers, like a few here I'm a Mac guy. Typing this on a 2009 iMac (that I just upgraded with an SSD last summer) and also have a 2015 MB Air. Yes, they are pricey, albeit well made. My MB Air has a backlit keyboard.

But I also have a c.2012 Lenovo T410 running Windows 10 and it's a good machine, if a bit slow and heavy, with the good, old fashioned IBM Selectric keys. It doesn't have a backlight, but a small LED in the lid that can illuminate the keys. Works OK, although it's not as nice as having them backlit. Lenovo are generally considered to be one of the best, esp. the ThinkPad series, although they are the top-end business machines. My gf has Dell supplied by her university and they're excellent, too.

As to the backlit keys, I guess that's something you have to actually see for yourself.

I don't think there's much to recommend one OS over the other these days, unless there are specific programs one likes. On the Mac I use Graphic Converter for photo editing and retouching; there really isn't anything equivalent on the Windows side. But for general browsing, e-mail and word processing, which is what most of us do, most applications are available on both platforms. Libre Office is a good, free substitute for MS Office for most people. If you need professional drawing, photo retouching/adjustment, there are excellent alternatives to Adobe from Affinity (Serif Inc.) for about $60.

 

[docjonson]

Easy to use computer

The HP Chromebook is easy to use, has a touchscreen and is lightweight. The screen is 14" and you can't connect a larger screen and doesn't have a disk drive . I have a desktop with more memory, disk drive etc. but the HP is a low cost pleasure for me!

 

[docjonson]

Getting older isn't always what it's cracked up to be!!

 

[Rustyt1953]

The HP Chromebook is easy to use, has a touchscreen and is lightweight. The screen is 14" and you can't connect a larger screen and doesn't have a disk drive . I have a desktop with more memory, disk drive etc. but the HP is a low cost pleasure for me!

Ruthie has the same laptop that she used for nursing school two years ago and it still serves us well. She, the grandkids and I all use Linux/Android tablets as our daily portals to the ether. The boys use iPad's at school and are quite adept at all three platforms.

If they made a three sided coin I would flip it.

 

[nicky4968]

I’ll see your DOS and Commodore and raise you a Texas Instruments DS 990 with a dual disk drive and 8” floppies.

 

[oldbrownhat]

I’ll see your DOS and Commodore and raise you a Texas Instruments DS 990 with a dual disk drive and 8” floppies.

8"? Pffffft! Go big or go home!

10mB, c.1960

 

[outta_ammo]

First, full transparency, although now retired, I'm an ACMT, Apple Certified Mac Tech, and a few other Apple acronyms...
Between my wife and myself, there are 10 Apple devices in our home, and the real value of Apple is the ecosystem, the fact that all of our devices work seamlessly, identically, and each one knows what the other ones are doing, so transitioning between devices is, well, seamless.

Dismounting soapbox.

If I had to use winders? lenovo!

 

[7shooter]

I'll raise your DOS and 8086 with a Commodore PET running BASIC with cassette player storage...or a HP-85 with their BASIC and proprietary tape drive system.

My first computer was the main frame at the university I was attending. I was taking a computer language class and we were assigned statistical tests to write programs in Fortran. We had to write the program and then go to the building that had the main frame and type the steps on Hollerith cards. There would typically be around 80 cards per test and if you made one mistake it would fail and send you a message in machine language . Fortunately there were computer geeks with pocket protectors who could decipher machine language.
In order to get to use the computer you would have to go at 2am.

It was more fun than it sounds.

 

[rwsmith]

Windows has finally gotten workable.....

They used to say Windows 2000 is Mac 1980.

They have a long history of crippling their OS in various ways to make people want to upgrade to the next release. The present release never really 'cut it' and neither did the promised 'next release'. MS are sorry jackasses but many years ago it was the only viable platform for my CAD program, I suffered through the whole mess and I don't want to start over.

Complaints about Windows 10: Some of the default settings will drive you nuts and you have to do a web search to find out what and where to change them.

Why can't MS at least put all of the system settings IN ONE PLACE rather than have to search for 'special' settings.

 

[rwsmith]

Cheesy is too good of a word....

r w,

Did you try this technique?

"To Turn On Backlit Keyboard in Dell laptops like Studio/Vostro/XPS/Latitude, “Hold the Fn key and press the Right Arrow key”. You can see all symbols illuminating on the keys. With the same hotkey, you can toggle between the three lighting states (in the given order). The lighting modes are full keyboard, half keyboard and off."

This does not mention the Inspiron product line. My wife has a new Dell Inspiron laptop and it's the "F10" key that controls the brightness. However, is is a bit cheesy. The only options are "Off", "50% intensity" and "100% intensity".

Bill

I turned the brightness to 'full' and the letters are invisible unless I turn the keyboard to my face like a book.

'Unusable' is a better description.

Oh BTW. I used a desktop for many years, but now I sit my butt down in my easy chair and put the laptop on my lap right in front of me on a wedge shaped pillow thing to hold it in position better. So my laptop really is a laptop.

If I do 'serious work' like CAD or sound/video editing I use a desktop, except I only have an old wreck of one nowadays because I don't do that kind of work much anymore.

Browsing, email, typing, looking up stuff, forums, watch videos is about all I do now.

 

[rwsmith]

I remember those days.....

My first computer was the main frame at the university I was attending. I was taking a computer language class and we were assigned statistical tests to write programs in Fortran. We had to write the program and then go to the building that had the main frame and type the steps on Hollerith cards. There would typically be around 80 cards per test and if you made one mistake it would fail and send you a message in machine language . Fortunately there were computer geeks with pocket protectors who could decipher machine language.
In order to get to use the computer you would have to go at 2am.

It was more fun than it sounds.

....and it made me stay away from computers until they got a workable personable system. When hard drive became available on PCs was when I jumped. I started at work with a two disk floppy set up and said I'd hold out a little longer.

 

[snubbyfan]

Samsung Notebook laptop with a solid state hard drive. Works for me....

 

[jeffrefrig]

I'm on my 3rd IMAC. The 1st one I gave to my daughter so I could get the (then) new 27" with the 1TB of whatever the thing is that kept all my music CDs on and barely put a dent in it. The OS on it won't upgrade anymore but it still works. I got a new IMAC a few months ago when I got my new phone, but this new computer, I can't put pics of anything on my posts, like on this Forum.They're pricy, but I've never had any virus problems. This thing does more capabilities than I know how to do with it. I just can't post pictures like I did with the other one. Other than that, I stick with Apple everything.

 

[Bugkiller99]

Just use one of your 1000 flashlights to backlight it.

Hey! I resemble that!!