Recommendation Views Thread

So first off I have no idea where this thread goes. The What Notebook Should I Buy section seems closest to correct but also seems like a bad place to put it. Mods feel free to move it if there's a good spot.

The point of this thread is to have a civil discussion on perspectives in regards to recommending laptops that others are intending to purchase.

I'm going to share my views and hopefully we can have a productive friendly discussion on this to get a better understanding of each other.

Brands

I, personally, do not like brand loyalty. I feel that when one looks back on the history of laptops there are many many cases where a brand that was once king of world falls off into utter mediocrity. I also find that within a brand quality can vary wildly. Where there are cases of laptop companies putting out a great machine at 800 dollars, but a terrible one at 2700 dollars. I feel that overall it's best to go on a case by case basis. Don't look at any given brand and assume the machine is good, get specific, look for that model and that models competitors. So if I own a Mazer Pearbook Pro and it's excellent, that doesn't mean the Mazer Pearbook Etherial Conjuring is also excellent.

As to resellers:

So the increased tensions in the WNSIB section are mainly being caused from this. And I think the problem is coming down to two different things.

The first is that I'm separating why advice is being given from what the advice is. If someone is recommending company x all the time in seemingly every situation I'll take some issue with that because that opinion looks biased. That doesn't necessarily mean I think the quality of the advice is bad. Which, is the second thing. I.e. Just because what is being recommended is often like an 8.5-9.5/10 in quality doesn't mean I don't think other options shouldn't be considered. I shoot for the 10/10 to the best of my abilities which to me means providing the most options possible for the buyer to make an informed decision.

Let me come up with a hypothetical example. Let's say we have two companies, Company X and Company Y. And then let's say we have two laptop brands Mlevo and CSI. Now Company X is a company that has tons of awesome customization options, they do repastes, have a great selection of ssd and ram, have nice stress testing, and have a cool sales guy. But they're also a bit more expensive than their rival company Company Y. Company Y also has pretty good customer service, but doesn't use the same tier of thermal paste or stress test as well and offers less options overall. Plus no cool sales guy.

The Customer

To me this is where both the customer and the laptop brands come into play. The customer is looking at the Mlevo P50 and the CSI CT600. Both are pretty sweet laptops. However, the Mlevo P50 is known for being great out of the box. Temps are good and there aren't any outstanding issues with it. The CSI CT600 is another great machine. It, however, has some issues that need work. It's thermal paste is kind of crappy, the panels sometimes have bad backlight bleed, and there are more reports of issues by users.

In this situation I think that if the customer likes the CSI CT600 he should definitely go for Company X. There's a ton of upside to using their higher end services that will make him a happy customer in the long run. If he likes the Mlevo P50 more, however, I don't really think that carries as much weight. The Mlevo P50 tends to work just fine the way it is, the additional thermal paste, nicer panels, or stress testing are fairly unlikely to matter all that much for him. Plus if something does end up going wrong Company Y still has pretty good customer service.

One other possible variable is the customer. If the customer is an extremely adept user they may also not need to use Company X. I'll use myself as an example here where if I order a laptop I don't need to pay extra money for display calibration, repastes or drives or ram. I know how to source, install, or apply all those things myself without any trouble.

Assumptions and Me

Lastly are assumptions. We are all guilty of making assumptions at times. But when I go into a thread to give advice I assume as much as possible on less clearly shown otherwise that the customer is naive. What this means is that the customer may be using a link to Company X or Company Y. Regardless I will tell them to look around and make sure they are aware of their options. Check out Company Z as well. Price check. Option check. Review check. Make sure you have decided that the services of Company X are worth it to you. If they are, fantastic! If they aren't that's great too, you just saved some money!

I've been receiving flak for telling potential buyers to look at other options and other companies. What I want to ask is that if you're a fan of Company X and always recommend it, would you recommend it if the buyer starts off their post with links to Company Y? Or would you leave them alone. Regardless of your answer that's fine! It's your opinion and you're allowed to post it however you want.

However, it's my opinion that I think people should know their other options. So that also means if someone is posting links only to Company Y I would post them links to Company X to make sure they're aware of them as well. The problem is sometimes Company X gets mentioned so often that I don't get the chance to mention them from that angle very often. But regardless I still won't assume the poster has already done their full research on the pros and cons of both because honestly there can be a lot to go through.

Final Thoughts

But in conclusion this means that I do not have a problem with Company X because it is expensive. In fact I may think Company X is pretty awesome and a great fit for many buyers. But just because I feel that way doesn't mean the buyer has to. I try and keep my personal views out of my recommendations as much as possible. So that despite what the Company X fans may think I really like 85% agree with them, but I don't end up getting to vocalize it very much. They end up getting to do most of the praising.

A final harder section of this is hands on experience and consistency. I'm fortunate enough to have access to a whole lot of laptops. This allows me to get hands on with many of the gaming machines out in the wild and figure out how they stack up against each other. Things like build quality, keyboards, display quality etc... Are all pretty direct comparisons I can make. I'm hesitant to make claims about the build or keyboards of something I've never used. It's why at the moment my general advice on the new 8th gen laptops is caution. Not only have I not used them, for the most part almost no one has.

I also get to read the opinions of and speak with a whole lot of laptop users. I'm a moderator of a couple laptop communities on reddit and run a discord server about laptop purchasing advice. These communities are also drastically different view wise from here. This further helps me get a picture of how laptops are stacking up against each other based on how happy all these people seem to be with their machines. I try and keep all of that in mind when giving advice on models.

Anyway those are just my thoughts on how I go about giving advice and responding to threads in the WNSIB section of the forum. Feel free to list your own opinions below!

Just remember to be respectful of others with a topic like this as it's easy to get carried away.

 

You took the words right out of my mouth!

This is a very important point. Many people who come to NBR tend to be very tech savvy and would have no problem taking apart and repasting their laptop, so it makes little sense for them to spend in excess of $100 more just for better thermal paste and pads when you could be spending that money on a better CPU/GPU or a larger/faster ssd. It's also worth pointing out that the ease of disassembling a laptop varies from model to model. My P950HP6 for example is a nightmare to take apart. I have remove two screws holding the keyboard to the laptop, pry up the keyboard, remove 5 more screws, before removing the rest of the screws from the bottom of the laptop and opening it up.

 

The Precision lineup, my favorite lineup has many more steps involved. The only time I dont like taking apart a laptop is when there are plastic clips that are built into the frame.

Ultimately, you WILL have to maintain your machine.

Though one thing I could never do is screen calibration and sBIOS / vBIOS mods.

 

Depends what you're doing, IMO. I'm generally a fan of how easy Dell makes it to get to things (desktops often have many tool-less connectors, once you get inside the case, and on my Precision removing the base panel takes 10 seconds (remove battery and two screws), giving you access to both fans, half the RAM, wifi, SSDs, etc. I do agree that getting to the other 2 RAM slots is a PITA, but the things I need access to most often are really easy to get to.

 

Many people equate difficulty with amount of screws they have to remove. I never said it was hard for me personally.

 

@Galm can you give me the link to that channel on discord ?

 

Yeah here: https://discord.gg/ZYcNCU @Firefox@yami

 

Speaking from experience, as someone that joined the forums to ask a question in WNSIB about a year ago. Maybe I'm a good example of a "naive" user (i.e., I've owned several laptops before, work as a Software Developer, am familiar with most brands and OEMs, but know squat about resellers, OS tweaking, OC and bleeding edge hardware).

The situation described by Galm is not new. At the time I was looking for a work / gaming machine and received great advice from @Galm and another forum member. With their help I quickly narrowed down my options to a Clevo machine.

Galm them started pointing me towards resellers near where I live as well as resellers that would be a great fit for my specific user case (e.g., PREMA partners, resellers specialised on Linux compatible builds, etc). He also gave me advice about potential savings (e.g., swapping a top of the line NVMe SSD for a cheaper SATA one, etc).

The other forum member was all about his favourite reseller. He also implied that Galm was assuming that everyone was counting pennies, etc. The gist of what he said was: Reseller X trumps all; you want the best every time.

I have do admit that my mind was already set on some of the luxury items, as well as some of the extra services. I've also managed to get a good deal from the reseller. So, before going ahead, I want to make perfectly clear that I'm not badmouthing the mentioned forum member nor the reseller.

However, &*"# happens! I had several issues with my laptop: Bad temps, regular BSODs (Video Scheduler Internal Errors) when the laptop wakes up, issues with Windows Updates and the fact that, afaik, PREMA never released a BIOS for the machine that I've bought (or, if he did, the reseller never got back to me despite my many, many emails and tickets to customer suppport).

To make matters worse my "backup" laptop is in use by my wife and I don't have a fallback. My new laptop was my daily driver and I couldn't really afford to ship it to the reseller's country and wait for the fix.

The mentioned forum member then spent a lot of time volunteering his time tweaking and trying to fix my laptop. And by a lot I really mean a lot (like 10 to 20 hours total). After a while he gave up in frustration, said that he was too busy to handle my problems, then blocked me altogether.

I now understand that I was pestering him. Even while I've initially donated some money for his time and offered to donate even more (by my own initiative) it seems that he didn't want to deal with my time-consumint problems . I never understood that he was annoyed at me and was eventually left to fend for myself with a broken, half tweeked OS, that would wake up to a BSOD at least twice a day.

After pulling several all nighters I've managed to find a way to live with the laptop. I've basically disabled hibernation, disabled the options that turn off power to the NVMe and GPU and learned to live with the computer in discrete GPU mode 100% of the time. Now I'm buyng a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with international guarantee to be my next daily driver and will use my Clevo exclusively as a gaming box / media server. I guess that we can choose to call this a happy ending (at least that's how I'm telling the story to myself).

Anyway, my point here is not that the forum member (nor the reseller) have failed me. I just think that a lot of frustration could be avoided if, back in the day, I had listened to @Galm and spent some time considering the pros and cons of local resellers.

I totally agree with him that we should avoid the "my favourite reseller trumps all" attitude in the WNSIB subforum. We should also assume that the OP is naive regarding resellers. It's ok to say that a reseller "has the best cutomer support IMO" or "exclusive services like panel selection, custom BIOS and CPU delidding", but there is no reason to get offended by phrases like "You may also want to consider local reseller X, Y, Z" or "You may save a few quid by downgrading this specific piece of hardware that shouldn't be a bottleneck for your build / use case". Everyone has their own biases and preferences, the more information the merrier.

 

@Galm Would you mind reposting the discord link? I tried to follow but it expired.

 

We're not using non-expiring links for the server except on the subreddit to help us with tracking. So visit here and the link is on the sidebar where it says Discord server.

 

Perfect. Thanks!