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We live in an age of stunning laptops, but is the desktop still king of productivity?
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We live in an age of stunning laptops, but is the desktop still king of productivity?
We have laptops in my place of work, but they are on docking stations connected to monitors, keyboards and mice; they never get taken off them. I guess they have done this simply to save office space but yes, we are neither here nor there when answering this question as we use laptops as if they were desktops haha.
I work in a lab testing gas analysers. A couple of years ago IT decided to move away from desktop PCs, now all new rigs are laptops. Most users get a bog standard bottom of the range thinkpad, but they do seem to be OK. In my lab we have mounts that take the laptop on one side and a separate screen on the other, but both screens are at the same height, used with Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Its works surprisingly well and gets back some space, although a mini pc would also work. 90% of our works laptops are used for email, data logging, running VNC clients and interpreting data using excel, they shifted to office 365 a couple of years ago and everything is run from that. I have also installed an all in one pc with touchscreen to run some gas blending kit, it looks nice and we use it display work schedules and other exciting excel stuff!! Most of the laptops could probably be replaced with tablets if we wanted to, have demoed a couple for reading SOPS, the windows ones can do most of the data logging stuff that the laptops do.
"We live in an age of stunning laptops"
Yes... but you're either dreaming or tripping if you think my work would splash out on anything that even vaguely resembled 'modern' technology. And even if we got something that ran at 50GHz and had 500 petabyte drives, IT would still bog it down with so much security junk and conflicting software that you're better off using a calculator watch... We're lucky we ever got Windows 7 and even luckier that it's still working!!
Besides, if you have a laptop, you're still required to dock it and use an external monitor mouse and keyboard, for reasons of DSE and correct seating position. Might as well have a desktop.
At home, it's a desktop. Desktops let me choose and use whatever screen size and type, keyboard, mouse, monitor arm, sound system and whatever else I want.
Laptops are either restricted to whatever they come with, or can connect to so much of the above that you might as well get a desktop and leave everything connected. Plus I can do a lot more in terms of upgrades and personal mods/builds/customisation. Laptops are generic-looking same-sames and the best looking ones are still made by GRiDCase.
Desktop running VMWare Workstation so I can run a second desktop which is my "work PC".
Desktop. In my not so humble opinion, laptops just have too many compromises. Horrible keyboard - will never be an ergo keyboard. Trackpads are horrible compared to a mouse. Underpowered hardware. Small monitor. ... You can't build your own.
I hope and pray that I never have to have a mobile job.
Work puter is a home brew rack mounted water cooled thing. Dual screens (plus output to a projector). I do have laptops but they are used to go to gigs etc. rather than carrying separates
Not used a laptop for a couple of years now.
Couple of 27" 1440p IPS monitor, 1080Ti FTW3, G502 mouse, Corsair keyboard with Chery MX silent switches, couple of HDDs and a couple of SSDs and 32GB of RAM. Not to mention addons such as the Rift, USB camera, USB TV tuner, several USB coms devices, USB UPS and headphones.
Laptops just can't compete.
PC at home
PC and Mac at work
Desktop at home, swish laptop on a dock at work, undock and take it to meeting rooms/off-site as required
As I photographer/videographer to I use a desktop with dual UHD IPS monitors. I laptop to the same spec just wouldn't be feasible.
I do also own a laptop for working on site as such, it runs on an AMD A10-9600p with 8gb ram which is epic for how much it cost. Its not up to the same spec as my desktop but more than good enough for the more basic tasks I need to do on the move.
I do all of my computing work on my desktops; I haven't powered up my laptop in over two years.
4K desktop is a huge help. @32"
Laptop is only for onsite jobs. And the phone is the 3rd line to fall back to
Desktop, my laptop is an OLD celeron one which needs to be plugged in all the time anyway as the battery won't take charge. It can just about play a video, or surf the net, but with it's poor screen resolution, there's no point.
Agreed - our IT do it as their business continuity/ disaster recovery planning & because staff move around a lot!Quote:
Originally Posted by EvilCycle
I'd love a deskop PC at work, as I do some reporting in excel which needs a bit of crunching, and a slightly beefier CPU would help. IT only get HP elitebooks now, but I dont want to upgrade as they'll take admin rights off me...
...and this is the other reason I need a laptop - lugging a desktop into a customer site would be weird.Quote:
Originally Posted by virtuo
Desktop. Hoping some day to have a decent laptop for on-the-go that's okay for productivity and gaming, but only realy contenders for that are expensive and bleeping loud. (I *hate* fan noise. All my desktop PC fans are ultra quiet.)