Notebooks Have you ditched your desktop for a laptop?

The only time I wish I had a laptop is for the couple of times a year we go on vacation. At home I use my desktop exclusively, and my tablet a little. Recently I've been using the tablet (as I am now) to do a little lite browsing while playing WoT since if I launch a browser on the desktop it kills my frame rate until I reboot.

I find the laptop to be limiting compared to my giant desktop with full size keyboard. Sure I can use the laptop, but everything is just harder. The tablet is barely effective for browsing and a real PITA for anything that requires typing, such as this reply.

 

No.
Ditched the laptop for a tablet and kept (and upgraded) the desktop.

 

If you are a PC gamer I think it actually make less sense now to ditch the desktop than it has for a while.

Games now are generally less and less CPU/Memory limited.
I think system that was reasonable when you bought it can be competitive longer than it used to be just updating the GPU rather than the whole system.

This makes laptops with non-upgradable GPUs less competitive and comparatively less future-proof (or rather future-resistant) than they were a while back when substantially upgrading the gaming performance of a desktop would more often mean a new motherboard/CPU.

 

For university work yes, I live on my laptop, the desktops that they provide are useless for me (too restricted for my course) and with all the development I do as part of my course transferring SQL servers from laptop to desktop would be a pain in the rear.

Once uni has finished I don't think i will use this laptop again, if work wants me to have a laptop they will need to provide me with one. I am a gamer at heart and a desktop is where gaming is best for me currently.

 

I hardly ever use my laptop at home. For web browsing I like to remain semi-sociable and use a tablet in the lounge. For gaming I like to be antisocial and retreat to the PC in the office.

 

I'm kinda between houses so the laptop has became my main computer. Could easily be replaced with a tablet tho for the majority of uses and since in no longer travelling with work as much i wont need the laptop to fill in 2hour gaming lunches. Once the study is finished in my new house Ill likely go back to desktop there. Itll be interesting to see how the laptop use changes too. There is a good chance the desktop could end up as a media pc downstairs and the laptop remaining the main PC. Streaming games on Steam could make that possible

 

Nope. I've got both. A little laptop that is my netbook for comfort browsing and two desktops. One for gaming (a complete animal, no laptop on earth could even sniff it) and my WIP workstation.

 

I did it in 2004. Came back to desktops in 2008. Laptops are nice and cool, but not for everyday work.

 

No I've got 3 PC's and a netbook and a tablet if anything the tablet has made the netbook unused but there's things that only the PC will do everything else the tablet does fine

 

I own a macbook laptop, Nexus 7, iMac and gaming PC which I built in January. Out of all of them, I hardly use the Nexus that much, and the past couple of months I haven't used my PC that much either - only due to having some freelance design work come my way so haven't had time to play games, but I don't regret buying any of them, they all serve a purpose.

 

Well - tablet for sitting on the sofa, e-mails on the train, watching movies when away etc (and backing up the camera), laptop for work (and a MBP as the heart of my mobile studio) and then a big PC rig for games and everything else. I am yet to find a single device that will cover all bases for me, but I think a laptop has its place!

 

One thing that a lot of people don't seem to think about when downgrading outright (and seriously, unless you live in a broom cupboard, why would you ever get rid of a working desktop computer?) is how easily laptops can go wrong and how impossible they are to fix. I've upgraded my PC through 4 GPU failures. Graphics cards often have 2- or 3-year warranties, meaning that in one of these cases I got a free replacement and upgrade. (And of course, during the RMA process, I still had a working computer to use.)

By contrast, laptops often only have a 1-year warranty and if/when the GPU fails - which is a pretty high risk if it's well used - the machine's a doorstop. Ditto for the power circuitry (£50 repair on a desktop, endgame for a laptop).

Laptop hinges also break very easily now, as do the screens and the flimsy, inadequate plastics that surround them. They're also unergonomic and drastically slower/less powerful than a desktop at the same price point.

Basically a laptop's only worth downgrading to if you need the portability and extra space. In every other sense, they're a bad consumer choice - they have a higher total cost of ownership, they're slower, smaller, less healthy, less upgradable, easier to break, harder to repair, more expensive to repair, more likely to fail, have worse connectivity and can perform fewer tasks.

The obvious exceptions to some of these concerns are Alienware and Apple, if you can afford them. I can't, personally.

 

A desktop PC is a man's PC, son.

 

LOL @ Nexxo. I have two desktops and a laptop (which I'm using now), and although the laptop is convenient for "sofa surfing" and such like, I grow tired of it very quickly because I hate the keyboard, the track pad, the crap performance etc.

By Nexxo's standards I must be a real man, which is comforting.

 

Hell no!

I use a desktop in the lounge (ok so it's a one bed flat so it can't go elsewhere), but I never would replace it with a laptop. The screen is 100 times better, the keyboard is better, the performance is better, the upgradability is better... etc. It gets used every day, mostly by me but sometimes by the GF.

I have a small laptop for when I need to be portable (doesnt really get much use) and a Nexus 5 smartphone for carrying around at all times.

If anything the laptop is the least useful of the lot.

 

All electronics sold in EU have 2 year minimum warranty, regardless of what manufacturer (or retailer) says.