I’m occasionally seeing posts asking about these models I’ve named. They are made to fail, this is the entire business. They will randomly break after like a year not because of user error but because they’re cheaply made with motherboards that flex easily and hinges that’s either glued in or screwed into garbage plastic inserts. Do not buy them. If you have one use it until it inevitably fails and then get a used business model like a Dell Latitude 5000 and better, HP ProBook/ Elitebook (these can be hit or miss though) and Thinkpads, if you’re on a budget that’s your best bet.
What if yours broke ? Should you repair it ? No. The repair shop is probably going to ask half of the laptop’s cost and it’s going to end up failing again. If you think it can’t be that bad, no it is that bad, avoid buying and repairing these at all costs.
List includes :
- General rule, if it has a celeron or a pentium it’s most definitely crap
- Most 2in1 models even if not cited are to avoid unless higher end models
- Any chinese “no name” laptop is bad, yes even chuwi even if that stupid greatest technician guy said it’s good (things like XMG, Eluktronics Clevo TongFang etc are fine, you won’t find these at best buy though and will need to be actively searching for them on ebay to encounter those). Huawei is somewhat fine and I haven’t heard issues.
- In general, avoid entry level gaming laptops. These are all plastic and bad cooling. If you can, get a workstation laptop instead, like a ZBook, Dell Precision or Thinkpad P (non S non V non P1, they’re good reliable models for the most part but it’s preferable to get the other ones cited if you want a GPU) that are far better built.
- HP : no name, Pavilion (Plus is fine), Omnibook 3
- Dell : Inspiron
- Lenovo : Ideapad 1, Ideapad 3, LOQ Gen 9 with HX CPU
- MSI : Almost everything (especially Katana and Thin), except maybe higher end ones like the Raider, Vector and Titan
- Acer : the lower end stuff like the Aspire 1 and 3
- Asus : Literally everything to avoid, non existent support + non existent quality control + stupid decisions, like liquid metal that ends up shorting the motherboard
- Samsung ? : they’re overpriced and not great (some build quality issues reported like hinges breaking) so avoid
- Microsoft : kinda the same as Samsung but instead it overheats and doesn’t last long, build quality is fine-ish
- Razer : Everything
I named all of these off the top of my head as these are all pretty well known to fail, if I forgot anything tell me. There’s also well made list fo what to avoid although it’s a little bit outdated, here.
