Laptops

Im looking for a good solid laptop for the road gigs.

Personal in nature but able to run lighting software if crap hits the fan on a gig and both backups fail.

Max I want to spend is like 300-400$

New Used Refurb doesn’t matter to me. Will mainly use it on the road as I have a desktop at home.

Suggestions and or recommendations as I haven’t bought a laptop since like 2008.

Amiers said:

Im looking for a good solid laptop for the road gigs.

Personal in nature but able to run lighting software if crap hits the fan on a gig and both backups fail.

Max I want to spend is like 300-400$

New Used Refurb doesn’t matter to me. Will mainly use it on the road as I have a desktop at home.

Suggestions and or recommendations as I haven’t bought a laptop since like 2008.

Click to expand...

I think you're going to be hard pressed to find something that checks all the boxes in that price range. Used and refurbs are a crapshoot in my opinion. you could get a steal, or you could have a brick in 2 weeks.

My advice is, look more in the $500-600 range, with overall good reviews (on multiple sites, because sometimes those are faked) and some kind of decent warranty. Stick to brands you have heard of. I'm not going to recommend one, because opinions are like.... noses.

To run lighting software, you'd need an usb to dmx interface, so that's extra $$ unless you already have one. I'd also suggest test it out and work all the bugs out before hitting the road. Sometimes there a good deal of troubleshooting to make those things work, at least in my luck/experience.

I just looked at some surface laptops with a friend who wanted one and I was reasonably impressed. I think the lowest end of those which was still not bad was 500 or 600 so its a little out of your range but the surface go might work, though its cheaper and smaller. I didn't even want one and decided I may pick one of those up as a cheap tablet and the other surface keyboards felt pretty nice as an actual laptop.

I presume you are looking for PC based platform:

I love my Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad. They are bullet proof. I still have a T410(I think), it's going on 7 years and still works as a low grade reliable PC for MultiPlay/ Powerpoint/Web Browsing.

That said Lenovo ThinkPads are kinda of the Mac's of the PC world, so there is a price premium.
As Josh88 mentioned MS Surface could be a good route to go.

at 300-400, your not getting much of any kinda of reliability/performance/ or user experience for dollar spent. I mean our College passes out 300$ laptops to departments and their' junk, and would't ever want to own one.

Yeah I was looking at the Lenovo. The using it for show part is last ditch effort if all the backups ever failed. It’s more for personal use on the road.

I'm a big fan of refurb ThinkPads (I'm typing this on a T61 with Win 10). Arrow Direct is one of the "good guy" refurbishers and there are a couple others.

But lately the better deals have been from dellrefurbished dot com. They are the resale arm of Dell Financial and these are lease returns. There is almost always a coupon special of some kind and this "gifting holiday season" I got 2 laptops and a micro desktop for about $650 for gifts or backup machines. All were i5 quad core, 4th or 5th generation. I don't run lighting software so I can't say if they would be suitable for that use but they're fine for the JBL/Harman line array coverage software, and Audio Architect/Performance Manager and general MS Office use.

I watch Techbargains dot com for the killer Dell Refurb coupons - the MLK weekend they had a 40% off non-clearance models with free shipping - and I wouldn't have known it without Techbargains. The other good thing - while you can buy refurbished Dell consumer models from another Dell site, they come will all the usual consumer bloatware; the business models sold by dellrefurbished dot com don't have all that crap.