I'm sitting here using a year-old $1300 HP Envy 14. It's the MBP of PCs -- all aluminum/magnesium alloy case, backlit island style keyboard, edge to edge glass around a 1600x900 display, i5, switchable graphics adapters, the works.
The fan cycles on and off every 3 seconds the entire time it runs. It hard freezes if I play certain games for a few hours. Sometimes it emits a high pitched noise. There's some discoloration starting where my palms rest. I doubt it'll make it another year without needing service to at least apply new thermal paste or pads or something. This is HP's finest build quality and it's still not up to Apple standards.
As for the software side, one of my jobs is to resell advertising services, and I manually review each order to make sure the sites to advertise meet some quality guidelines - 20 to 30 a day. At least one of them each day will be a site distributing malware of some sort. Even with a firewall, Windows Update set to auto, Microsoft Security Essential Real-Time Protection enabled, and using the auto-updating Google Chrome... I sometimes get infected by one of these sites anyway. Last week it was one of those pieces of malware that pretends to be an antivirus program telling you to register to clear an infection -- while autokilling all processes except explorer.exe and iexplore.exe on the system. Took me half an hour in the registry editor in safe mode to get rid of it.
I built a high end machine a few years ago. Quad core. 6gb RAM, fastest gpu available at the time. All quality parts, in excess of $1500. Installed Win 7.
I barely ever used it. I have a late 2009 MacBook that I use daily. About 6 months ago, I decided to turn my desktop into a Hackintosh. Put OS X on it.
Ever since, I use the desktop at least as much as my laptop now. I've determined it's the OS that's more important than hardware. Even with high end hardware, I can't work with Windows. Put Mac OS on the very same hardware and it becomes a powerhouse.
> There's some discoloration starting where my palms rest.
> This is HP's finest build quality and it's still
> not up to Apple standards.
Apple dealt with that issue a while back. They constantly tried to downplay it until they came out with newer models that didn't have the issue. The Apple fanboys of the day were constantly berating the people that complained about it stating that they "must be dirty, sweaty and days without a shower." I remember constant calls for people to, "just wash your hands."
This exact problem happened to me. Do you know what Apple did? They took my computer, replaced the case and did a full diagnostics on everything to make sure it was in perfect working order. I had the computer back at the end of the day.
HP has never gotten their laptop thermal solutions right, sorry cant help you with that.
For the other problem - create a virtual machine with windows installed. Then use a clone of this virtual machine to do your actual surfing. Once that gets infected just make anohter clone of the virtual machine and resume surfing. I am assuming that there is something windows specific in what you are doing, if not just surf in linux and kiss most malware goodbye.
...especially when "Use a Mac" is an equally effective solution, with pretty much equivalent user-friendliness (arguably more, given that so much hacker-friendly software is *nix friendly [and in fact developed on a Mac] and won't run on Windows at all).
> I'm sitting here using a year-old $1300 HP Envy 14. It's the MBP of PCs
Sorry. Had to stop reading after that because it'll be obvious what's coming. The problem here is that you are the prey of "High-End" PC companies with emphasis on the air quotes. You fell for /the works/ and the bells and whistles.
This is the problem with PCs. Anyone who can make a decent build for $700 will tell you the same: Pre-built PCs are the built like matchstick homes. As long as you put enough glossy paint on the exterior, you can sell it to any sap.
Now I don't go out there and advocating that /everyone/ build their own PCs (though they should at least consider it). I do advocate, however, that one should do enough research to be comfortable with their purchase and to NOT be comfortable with "I just bought a $2000 PC with all these shiny parts. It /has/ to be good."
> The problem here is that you are the prey of "High-End" PC companies with emphasis on the air quotes. You fell for /the works/ and the bells and whistles.
I didn't fall for something, I chose the only option available. I went to Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, Walmart, Target and Sears. Not a single one of those stores carried a single laptop under 17" with a higher density display than 1366x768. On a laptop this size, at 1366x768 you can see the damned grid etched onto the glass the pixels are so big. It's a huge leap backwards compared to what was offered before everyone went widescreen. Any of those computers would've been worse to work on than the one I was trying to replace.
HP offered a 1600x900 14" screen for a brief period and since that's important to me (my laptop is my primary development machine), I paid what it cost to get it. The only other option for a comparable screen in that size is a 15" MBP. A 15" MBP with 8GB RAM, a 128GB SSD and the display upgrade (the options needed to be comparable) costs $2299 or $1000 more than I paid.
> I don't go out there and advocating that /everyone/ build their own PCs (though they should at least consider it)
Next time, get the thinkpad T-series. Yes, it's plastic rather than pretty metal, but the build quality is spectacular, even compared to my (Stolen.) MBP 13 inch. It runs both Linux and Windows like a champ. Oh, and it's easy to put in your own memory and hard drive, which decreases the relative cost. (I have an HDD and an SDD in there right now in place of the CD-ROM.
But people do build their own laptops, relatively speaking. They get Clevo bare bones and put what they want in it. I happen to think the clevo bodies are clunky, but to each their own.
yeah, my last laptop was a dell inspiron 14" with a 1400x900 resolution. my current one is a dell inspiron 15" that does 1366x768 :( i could simply not get a 900 vertical resolution without paying an exorbitant price. (for my next laptop i probably will pay the price and get a decent vertical resolution)
I am a big PC fan (love the openness) but even I will concede that buying a laptop has not been easy for quite some time now. fwiw - the asus u series is pretty good, good battery life and very light, the lenovo t series is built like a tank, and the hp elitebooks are very nice.
For a desktop I would recommend PC's anyday, but for notebooks I must grudgingly concede that buying a mac laptop is the logical thing to do from a hardware standpoint.
The fan cycles on and off every 3 seconds the entire time it runs. It hard freezes if I play certain games for a few hours. Sometimes it emits a high pitched noise. There's some discoloration starting where my palms rest. I doubt it'll make it another year without needing service to at least apply new thermal paste or pads or something. This is HP's finest build quality and it's still not up to Apple standards.
As for the software side, one of my jobs is to resell advertising services, and I manually review each order to make sure the sites to advertise meet some quality guidelines - 20 to 30 a day. At least one of them each day will be a site distributing malware of some sort. Even with a firewall, Windows Update set to auto, Microsoft Security Essential Real-Time Protection enabled, and using the auto-updating Google Chrome... I sometimes get infected by one of these sites anyway. Last week it was one of those pieces of malware that pretends to be an antivirus program telling you to register to clear an infection -- while autokilling all processes except explorer.exe and iexplore.exe on the system. Took me half an hour in the registry editor in safe mode to get rid of it.