Chris P Lewis

I've used several Dells, but the newest one has terrible battery life and you can hardly see it in anything brighter than a tunnel. I'm willing to spend a bit, but I am trying to stay away from Macbook for the slipperiness of them and the fact that you have to run Bootcamp to run Motec and AIM data. I looked at the Panasonic Tough Books but they are small and it's hard to see a busy data screen on them.

I'd also like one with a SSD drive for boot.

Thanks, Chris

Matt Romanowski

Lenovo Carbon looks good, but I haven't used one. The Dell XPS has also been popular. Those are what I'm looking at now.

ProCoach

Matt Romanowski

Is it pretty light. My current Dell work station is a tank (with awesome performance). I like a 15" screen, so I'm thinking the XPS15.

Scooby921

Dell makes a semi-rugged laptop. It's what I use at work for vehicle testing and calibration. Model is Latitude E5414. Mine is spec'd with the higher capacity battery, i5 processor, 250GB SSD, and 32GB RAM. With the i5 processor it's pretty light on battery consumption. Sitting idle all day just browsing email with Outlook I get 8-10 hours of battery life. When in-vehicle and testing/logging/calibrating I get 3-4 hours of battery life. Because it's a semi-rugged and intended for outdoor activity the screen gets nuclear bright. I usually run it at half brightness when I'm in the office and don't need to go full bright when in-vehicle. We opted for the Dell over Toughbooks and the like because Dell offers a full 1920x1080 HD resolution screen instead of being limited to 1366x768 like most others.

Lemming

I really like my Surface Book 2 (8th gen core i7, 16GB, 1T SSD, 13.5" screen). Light weight, touch screen, long battery life, and can be used as a tablet.

boxboxbox

i use an older toughbook bought 2nd hand for 400 bucks, plopped a 850evo 500gb in there for another 200.

8 gigs of ram, core i5.

more than enough to do most trackside stuff thus far, including chassissim

Nizer

Two items missing on my Lenovo that I wish it had in hindsight: mirco SD or SD card slot for downloading video/data and HDMI for connecting and viewing video/data on large monitor.

ProCoach

Yep, this is what killed me on the Surface Pro (no full size SD card slot, dongle for the HDMI, but the latter is true for most laptops).

The full size SD card slot and HDMI port on the Retina MBP has been a life saver and really, really nice. The XPS 13 does have a good full size SD card slot.

Matt Romanowski

I think I've had both of those on my last few computers. SD slot is not an option on a track computer for me - it's got to be there. HDMI I could be talked into a dongle, but I'm used to not needing one now.

Chris P Lewis

Peter:
So I assume that you got the FHD (1920 x 1080) Infinity Edge Anti-Glare Non-Touch IPS 100% sRGB 400-Nits display or is the one you are referring to (TFT) different? I am trying to understand the difference in outdoor viewing of the

• 15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) InfinityEdge Anti-Glare Non-touch IPS 100% sRGB 400-Nits display
  versus
• 15.6" 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160) InfinityEdge Anti-Reflective Touch IPS100% AdobeRGB 400-Nits display
  
  + $400.00
  

I had a touch screen Dell (cheap one) and the touch screen stop working (fine with me) but the screen has a lot of glare and you can't see it outside. I am turning it into a Frisbee.

ProCoach

Yes, Chris. That's what I got. (1920 x 1080 non glare).

Lemming

Agree, biggest issue with the surface pro is lack of SD card slot, but a dongle can be used. The surface book 2 does have the full size SD slot, but needs the HDMI dongle. PixelSense display is awesome (3000x2000 for the 13.5' screen and 3240x2160 for the 15").

ProCoach

audipwr1

Where did you source that?