Notebooks through the years (2020 edition)

My 2020 edition of a very long running series of posts on notebooks I’ve owned and used. The previous editions were in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2018. Things move so quickly in the technological world that there’s a high chance that I’ll forget my impressions of each item I’ve used or owned over the years!

The Surface Pro (2017) was sold away as I couldn’t get used to its quirks; specifically, poor port connectivity, the slow as molasses and unfortunately non end-user replaceable SSD. Also, the old Samsung N305 went into recycling.

Entries 26 to 27 are new since the 2018 post. Here’s the reckoning, notes, updates and what-nots for these and other laptops I’m still using:

• #20 Pavilion 15 p257TX: the HP Pavilion now has a new home – at my parents’ place where my mom uses it to play her games of Solitaire haha.
• #21 Aftershock S17: my nightly driver and still the largest and heaviest notebook I’ve had. I’ve installed a 6 year old Samsung Evo 840 250GB SSD as a secondary drive that I recycled from my old desktop, and have done major cleaning of its internals twice now. The 4 year old powerhouse is seriously showing its age now though, as no amount of fan cleaning I can do now will stop thermals from building up, even in relatively low key use. I reckon its CPU and GPU fans are nearing the end of its life span, and the built-in SD card reader has completely failed a year ago too, alongside the rear USB port.  Occasionally, the LCD screen shows horizontal noise lines too – a sure sign that the screen is also reaching the point of failure. And finally, the battery has lost 50% of its capacity. The Aftershock S17 remains the best desktop replacement laptop I’ve ever had, so I’ll be looking for a 17.3″ equivalent replacement probably sometime later this year. Probably something with the i7-9750H, GTX1660i or RTX2060 GPU, 16GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD.
• #23 Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th Gen: fantastic and well-built ultraportable The X1 Carbon is dual purpose: I use it daily as my go-to laptop for teaching, and also it accompanies me on my trips out of the country. I’ve since just replaced the unit with the Dell XPS 13 (9380) on account of the latter’s faster processor for me to do video editing and more complex photo processing tasks, and also offering better battery life. I might sell the X1 Carbon away once the Dell XPS 13 has settled in.
• #25 HP Elite X2 1012 G2: the other notebook I use daily at work, and issued by my workplace. HP’s hybrids aren’t nearly as well-known as Microsoft’s Surface Pros, but are routinely better featured – ports-wise – than the Surface Pros. I loved the HP Elite X2 so much that I ended up picking up a refurbished unit of the…
• #26 HP Pro x2 G2: and for cheap too at about 60% of the usual price of a new unit. Lovely screen, as well-built as the Surface Pros and offering USB-C support that’s sorely missing on Microsoft’s Surface Pros. The battery on the Pro x2 is fairly small at 38Wh though – which provides almost 8 hours of usage when set to the lowest power modes, and roughly about 5 hours under balanced mode. The low-powered i7-7Y75 is fine for normal office productivity tasks, but the Pro x2 G2 chokes at Lightroom, and don’t even get me started on video editing LOL. I’m loathed to sell this one away on account that I enjoy using hybrids more than ultrabooks – just that it’s really hard to find hybrids that are up to the kind of tasks I need it to do, port connectivity options and at reasonable prices.
• #27 Dell XPS 13 9380: the newest horse in the race and my first major acquisition of 2020. My XPS 13 9380 is a refurbished unit of a fairly recent line from Feb 2019, and I got it with a nice hefty discount – about 75% of the price of a new unit. The unit comes with a paltry and speed only so-so 256GB SSD, so one of the first things that I did to it was to replace it with a quicker 1TB SSD. The notebook has fantastic battery life – anywhere between 8 to 11 hours depending on my usage patterns – and is all round lovely to look at.

Next update: in another two years!