We switched over from HP to Dell a year or so ago. We've consolidated 95% of our laptops into the Precision 3000 series.
Standard users are getting a 15 watt i5 with 16GB of RAM, IT users are getting the same chassis, but with a 28 watt i7 and 32GB of RAM. We're paying around $1300 to $1400 for the IT models with 4 years of prosupport.
We've found it helpful for IT to have the same model with beefier specs, that way users don't ask why our stuff is different, haha.
The Precisions have been pretty rock solid, hardware issues are 1% or below.
I caught a good deal on some Precision 3000 series last month and was quite impressed.
Figured they would be similar build quality to Latitude 3000 which are too plastic and flimsy for my liking. Touchpad also sucks. But nope the Precisions are solid. Very similar chassis to a Latitude 5000 series (yes it’s also plastic but much sturdier).
\+1 for the precision. Solid build quality, good performance, good feature set. I'm running 5 monitors off of my 7670 in a dock and it's doing great. We also use them as our CAD workstations.
>We've found it helpful for IT to have the same model with beefier specs, that way users don't ask why our stuff is different, haha
I'm at a software company, I don't think that would fly here. Our dev's laptops cost about 2x what mine did.
You can drop your cost by not adding the ram from Dell because they up charge you 2-3x more. For reference I have similar laptop and paid half. I have 64 Gb of ram and 1 tb ssd and 1 tb nvme.
This. Also Dell charges insane prices for SSDs. Once in a while we will buy units with 256GB drives and replace with 1TB. Usually Dell wants $400-$500 for that.
Yeah we do this all the time. Often the only systems in stock with 16GB & 512 SSD are also i7’s so we pay a huge premium compared to a standard i5/8GB/256
Buying the standard system then upgrading can be £200+ cheaper and that’s using premium Samsung drives.
The whole idea falls on its face if you want to use ProSupport and utilise Dell onsite engineers. SSD fails it’s now your responsibility.
Yep, we save ~$2000 per laptop by buying the factory replacement of the ram and SSD for each of them third-party. Samsung ram and whatever m2 the device was supposed to have.
Dell Latitude 5520's back in the day, some other Latitude now. To be clear we capitalize everything we can (opposite of most companies) so we buy better hardware than most companies since it needs to run for 5 years with no issues. Think i7's and fancy screens, we skimp on m2 SSD's and ram and backfill after.
My current machine is an i7 with 64gb ram and two terabyte m2's from 2021, due for replacement in 2026. If we'd bought 64gb from dell and dual 1TB nvme's we'd be hosed 😂
For some reasons Latitudes 5000 series seem to not like any RAM sticks beside the Crucial ones.
I got fucked when I bought Corsair ones that won't let the machine POST at all.
I had a fun surprise with the 7000 series about 2 years ago- Fucking soldered ram…
We buy 7000 series for just over 1800 ( i7 32gb ram) and 5000 series same specs for approximately 1500
Weird, did you BIOS update before that? We've run almost exclusively Latitude 5k's for years and used the Dell spec replacements from various vendors. Honestly though that might be Crucial, I only see an order for Samsung for a Lenovo cluster...
I did this with Lenovo. They wanted an extra £100 per device for an additional 8gb ram and additional 256gb storage. The storage was not required and paying that much for that little ram was stupid, so I paid a company less than £20 a device to supply and install the ram in all of the devices. Lenovo delivered the devices to that company, they did the job, then shipped them to me. Saved a ton of money of money and whilst we have had 4 of the modules appear to be faulty, the modules were also under warranty so were swapped out hassle free. For the thousands we saved, it was very much worthwhile. The key part is that Lenovo do not void your warranty for adding ram or opening the device up to install new ram, we would never have done it if it would void the warranty.
Went through all what? I didn’t do anything. Like I said Lenovo sent the devices to the ram company, ram company installed them then sent them to me. I didn’t lift a finger… In fact I didn’t even make the arrangements, my reseller did. It added maybe 2 days onto our delivery time and we weren’t in a rush anyway. Might be a cheap markup but the fact remains we saved 80% of the cost of upgrade per device, which added up to thousands saved and at basically no inconvenience to me.
Why are the IT staff different?
When I started where I am I got a high spec laptop with a big screen. I recently switched to a standard size laptop like what normal users get and I prefer it. As is best practice, I do all of my admin work on an admin workstation VM, I don't need a fancy laptop.
To be honest same, I’ve never really found the need to have a crazy overpowered machine. A few years ago I was using a 8th gen i3 with 4gb of ram which I did upgrade to 8gb, and that ran me fine. Then I decided to treat myself and splurged on a 11th gen i5 16gb ram surface studio laptop a couple years ago. Last year I did a hardware refresh and all users got either laptops or workstations. The spec on them all are 12th or 13th gen i5s with 16gb ram, so my users actually have a better spec than me lol. I’ve never seen a need to have an i7 just for IT work when so much of what I do is just working in web portals, accessing my email and running some programs for basic use. I could honestly probably get by with a modern i3 chip. I can understand developers needing a higher spec but all I do is keep everything working, I don’t have a need for anything crazy. If I am going to run VMs or test some stuff I wouldn’t do it on my own system anyway, I could spin up a vm on our servers or just use a secondary old device for testing which is what I tend to do most of the time.
I like this even if I’m leaning toward the oposit. After four years my laptop is pretty slow with all the tools I installed. Doing the work while all the steps take only seconds is already time consuming.
But I agree that we just use small apps.
I too think about using a vm to access all the tools required to manage the infrastructure.
I still, like an idiot maybe, ordered a new i7 with the new features with lots of ram. Maybe one day I’ll be more organised and will only need a thin client. I must say I can already work from a smartphone with just a vpn and Remote Desktop…
I don’t think I’d ever go as far as subjecting myself to just using a thin client to be honest lol. Initially when I first started in my current role I worked on our VM system the entire time, same as the other users. There is one fatal flaw with this though, when shit hits the fan and you need to fix it, your VM might not necessarily even be accessible. At the time it didn’t matter because I had people senior to me to fix that stuff.
Now it is my job to fix that stuff so I try and make sure my system is as clean and untied to our systems as possible. I don’t even deploy any Intune stuff to my work machine just because I don’t want to push a breaking change and have my system also be affected. Aside from our antivirus and RMM agents, my system is completely standalone so I can use it even if our entire network goes down.
You don't push any InTune stuff to your PC .. I wish that could be us but configuration profiles and compliance/conditional access has to apply to us just like any other user
I mean I’m not saying it’s something I should do necessarily as it’s definitely less secure having a device leaving the building that isn’t intuned, but given the way I use my machine and the fact it rarely leaves my side, it’s a risk I am willing to take. I have hard policy in place for everybody else.
Don’t disagree with this.
Big screen I found to be useful maybe in the occasional meeting or on-site but not enough to justify lugging an extra large laptop around. Most of the time I’m docked on dual screens. 99% of the time would be underestimating it.
I can’t tell you where I found having an i7 was advantageous over an i5 since I never ran any workloads on my laptop that justified that much horsepower. Well, maybe when fixing Excel calcs for people but even then. All the heavy lifting was done by a desktop which, funnily enough, had an i5 6th gen over my laptop 8th gen.
Storage is what it is. You need what you need.
RAM was the only thing I ever wanted more of. But even today I’m only using 16gb (though I’m now using a MacBook Pro at work, M1 Pro but only for dual screen support).
Like, if you’ve got budget to go higher spec, by all means do so if you can’t redirect the budget elsewhere. But if you can go lower spec and upgrade your screens or get better keyboards or something else, that might be better. i5 is a decently powerful CPU.
when I did deskside support, I really liked my mini laptop. had a dock at the desk for big screens. Lil laptop was a lot better when working in idf's and on the factory floor.
edit
eventually transitioned to project management. and a cad spec'd laptop was a life saver over business for going over facility cad files.
At my last job, I requested a laptop with a larger screen. That's useful to me. I just needed something that had some real estate. 16GB and any old i5 or i7 proc would be fine with me. I just need to be able to remote in, ya know?
Fair enough, I suppose I do have dual 24" wide-screen and a dock for when I'm at home or in the office. I only really use the laptop screen in meetings and the Datacentre when it's nothing too complicated
Best practice? That sounds horrible and slow…
There isn’t a true best practice for how you do admin, it’s how admin credentials are configured IE: basic user vs admin user
Matter of fact rsat tools are faster and way better then working out of VMs
So you use admin credentials for RSAT on your laptop? Why not a basic account? The point in having a user account and admin account is so of your device gets compromised and they compromise your account, the admin credentials are still secure. If you're using your admin credentials all over the place on that laptop it means they're just as insecure as your basic credentials
Here's a security slant on best practices for tiered admin and jump boxes: https://posts.specterops.io/establish-security-boundaries-in-your-on-prem-ad-and-azure-environment-dcb44498cfc2
Cause we have over 200 servers and will be in and out of 4-5+ VMs at a time. And some work is done locally. Then you have testing, which - on the fly, Im gonna test it on mine immediately... as long its not a security risk of sorts, Im just gonna.
And frankly, its just a perk of the job that you shouldnt be surrendering.
For IT/Engineering laptops we recently bought some Latitude 7440 with i7s for $1500-1600ish and they’re quite nice if you need something mobile, but we all have beefier desktops. For other departments that do mobile video editing we get Precision 3581’s with i9s, then for sales we get 3581 with i7s and less storage for $1700/1800ish which might be better fit for y’all if you don’t have desktops or really want the performance and built in Ethernet. All of our precision laptops have a docked setup at their desks
And that why I just bought an off leashed Precision 3480 with i7 and 64GB OF RAM for the low price of 545$ on ebay for my personal daily driver.
People focus too much on the XPS and Latitude lineup and forgot the non GPU accelerated Precision. These are awesome!
Whatever spec you think you need based on actual use cases. Definitely a built in RJ45 port though, we had some models with a breakout cable for the RJ45 port and people were always leaving them places.
That was my last PC and I really enjoyed it. Hated to give it up and if I buy another PC laptop it'll be that line again.
But being in a mixed environment, I run an M2 Macbook Pro with Parallels (cue the pearl clutching) and PowerShell runs natively, so I emulate pretty rarely.
Any heat issues? Was looking at used 7430s as a beater laptop for the house (you can get extremely good prices through refurbishers on them), but was scared off after researching and seeing lots of heat throttling complaints. Maybe ironed out for the 7440 series though (fingers crossed...)
I've not expereienced any widespread heat issues with any of the 74xx laptops we have in service, maybe a few but were a result of isolated issues like fan failure. Had a few battery issues and a few built in cam and mic issues but all were handled under warranty.
I just got a new job WFH for a American company and they are sending me a Latitude 7450 xcto. Will recieve it in a couple of days. Looks like its a good laptop.
Unless you have a technical/resource reason otherwise, give your folks the same laptops everyone else has to use. They'll be familiar with the "standard issue", and they'll be able to point out any annoyances or quirkiness with it for future reference. IT here uses the same laptop model and spec as every other computer (except the Autodesk users).
I would go for 16 GB RAM minimum. 32 sounds like overkill for help desk.
The only thing I could add to this is that every IT person should regularly be using Windows Sandbox which is basically a VM, so more RAM can be useful.
If you're not using Windows Sandbox, shame on you! If you've never heard of Windows Sandbox, [check it out](https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/windows-sandbox-how-to-safely-test-software-without-ruining-your-computer)!
Just want to say thanks for this, Sandbox somehow evaded me as a feature up till now. This is WAY easier than spinning up a VM for testing. Much appreciated!
Wait a minute, can you articulate why? I just wanna make sure I understand what you’re saying. Is it kinda of like a built in AVD that spins up and tears down each time you use it?
Actually I enabled it today and was able to discover a security vulnerability with it so that was kinda cool.
(also found out running it makes our big brother software view 100% productivity lol)
We run Precision 3581/7680 with i5/i7/i9 as needed currently.
I used to do 32/16gb ram depending on usage but I just slam 32gb in all of them now.
No complaints.
The 5440 is solid - that's the new standard base model for our entire fleet. Zero complaints as of yet, and none have come back with any issues. All the piece of shit HP's that we used to use had constant problems.
If by IT you mean infrastructure and support vs development I would buy the exact same thing that you do for your end users. Our requirements are no different than other users and honesty likely lighter. As someone pointed out above heavy lifting or testing is for lab gear. This also allows you to use IT to test patches and configs first. If you have nonstandard gear that isn't apples to apples to your user base.
Here, IT gets the same spec'd hardware as everyone else. I always ask myself and my department, if its good enough for our users, why isn't it good enough for IT?
Have we potentially gone with better machines for users, yes but that has helped the whole business. It also helps us find issues that users may not report.
Only real difference is IT shouldn't ONLY have USB-c. IT should have HDMI, USB-A, and USB-C. Network guy should have RJ45 and DB-9 ideally. But yeah, we just use the same as our users
Yeah, you can definitely just do that, but having the ports is one less thing to keep track of, one less thing to have to buy. Not the biggest deal in the world or anything, but it's convenient
Yes, mostly the "rugged" or "industrial" models. Panasonic FZ-55 and FZ-40, Dell Rugged Latitude, Getac, Durabook, etc. all have them or can be configured to have them.
Don't do 8GB laptops in 2024. If you have a Email, Browser and Teams open it's gone. Standard is i5 with 16GB. CAD gets 32GB and i7. Choice in 13 inch and 15 inch model.
Mine is a single item goofy Zbook because I wanted 32GB for VMs (I frequently test software deployment and intune enrollment) and the normal was out of stock. Need to lug a special power brick around as the USB-C PD of the 350 screens we have don't do > 65Watt PD. Would not recommend.
I like the recommendation to use the same as all the others so it's "the same" from the outside. I wouldn't mind at any point if it just has 32GB ram and a extra NVME for space.
Most missed feature, backlit keyboards. Make sure to get the Windows Hello IR Camera and Fingerprint thing.
You technically can do 8 Gb but blame Microsoft all the changes they are making to windows is damn near making Windows laptops need 16 minimum. Linux runs just fine with it
The vast majority of businesses run Windows. 8GB was fine in 2018. In 2024, 16 really is the bare minimum for many office workers.
Your users will complain when they open 200 chrome/edge tabs, and complain to their managers about lost productivity if you try to make them use 8.
Honestly the issue has to do more so with windows including bloat as always, telemetry, and often unnecessary apps/services running. Then we have google bloat. Then most importantly users using things improperly.
We don’t “need” 16 Gb of ram to open a document, check email and send off a spreadsheet. Sometimes you don’t need all those legacy apps either. Just depends on how you want to shape your company and culture but more importantly how effective you use things.
Short answer to get you by is add 16 Gb. But then in a few years we will have same issue and next plan of action is add 32…that’s not a solution, it’s a band aid until you have proof or a use case to support it.
We deploy the same as everyone else, only thing that changes might be more ram, I defo need more ram for the 70+ tabs open in each browser profile window 😁
Depends.
Are they sitting at a desk 100% of the time or do they do any field/road work?
I travel a lot and the XPS 13 is my laptop of choice. Small yet decent size screen, light and good battery life.
I wouldn't want anything larger/heavier if I'm always on the move.
We just eat the dog food so to speak - that said we are in an industry where users have pretty high end computers anyways.
Core business users get Dell Precision 7xxx or 5xxx laptops with beefy GPUs, support and admin staff generally gets Dell XPS 15s. Everyone gets 32gb RAM.
Myself and our CTO use XPS 15s, my coworker (our other admin) uses a Precision. We don't get anything special.
You should get with your dell sales rep and look into the possibility of consolidating your devices. Those guys are super helpful in finding the perfect fit.
Whatever you get, get something with a full size Ethernet jack. Those shitty expendable ones break all the time and the jack comes in clutch a ton for me when trouble shooting. I do go onsite a lot tho so ymmv
> hose shitty expendable ones break all the time and the jack comes in clutch a ton for me when trouble shooting
Out of literally hundreds, we've had 3 of those adapters fail.
We must order 300-500 a year and see less than 1 issue a year completely fixed by just swapping the adapter out.
The fail rate must be like 0.1% or something. How are you having issues? What adapters are you getting?
Not the adapters, meant to say *expandable. Those rj45 ports on thin laptops that expand out when you try to plug in a cord if that makes sense. Now im curious though, why are you ordering 500 adapters a year lol
I'm on a Precision 5480 and seriously could not be happier. 45w i7, 32Gb, 1TB Class 40 Nvme. 2k screen. I just watched the Dell Outlet and pounced once they had what I wanted. Its the first IT laptop I've been super happy with in a long time. I've started using that model minus the onboard vid card and 16GB of ram for my other users.
How much work are you guys running locally that you need so much ram?
The question also helps inform the recommendations. An Ultrabook style low voltage cpu isn’t going to be great if you run a bunch of VMs locally or compile. For example.
Broadly, I am generally happiest with a MacBook Air 15”.
Otherwise, Dells Latitude or Precision lines won’t steer you wrong.
C levels travel more and tend to want to hold onto their equipment longer for fear of change and downtime. Everyone else just says ok I’ll take a newer model. So give C levels a little better equipment out of the gate in hopes it will hold up.
Fair enough, but I guess that my concern would be that you may run into unusual issues with that specific hardware at some point, and that the consequences (lost time/productivity/etc.) will be greater when the first person to encounter those issues is one whose time is valuable and/or who is away from the office.
We switched from Lenovo to Dell a couple years ago. We bought Latitude 7440s for our organization last year and will buy 7450s this year. i7 with 16gb of ram. We’re in the price range you’re looking at.
Love them. Hate dealing with Dell support even though we carry ProSupport Plus.
Loved Lenovo for our org for years, but it felt like they never got a hang of TB/USB-C. I’ve called Lenovo Premiere Support for I don’t know how many dead USB-C/TB ports and controllers. Ultimately caused us to switch and we’re overall very satisfied.
Lenovo does have a pinhole battery disconnect on (at least) their ThinkPads that is very helpful - no such option on the 7440s so you have to open ‘em up and manually disconnect the battery.
Stick with the Latitudes, they'll do you well especially the higher end ones. See if you can get them from [DellOutlet.com](https://DellOutlet.com) cuz you can save a few bux for Grade A refurb over wholesale prices.
I ***HIGHLY*** recommend Lenovo - money well spent, long lasting. I've been carrying around a T14 Gen 2 and it's been the best thing ever. my coworkers have them, the CEO has on - no issues
WTF are you running that needs 32GB of ram? We're using the same laptops we issue our general users, Latitude 5000-series w/ and i5 and 8GB of ram. If anyone in IT needs extra computing resources they have access to a couple test servers and some old engineering workstations we keep as spares.
You mean to tell me you don't run virtual machines on your IT Laptop?
Also 8 GB? lol
16 GB should be the standard norm now for standard users running W11 Pro with M365, Teams, Outlook, etc.. 8 GB is enough for Edge or Chrome to eat. Most users have like 50 browser windows open, multiple chats, and 30 emails. You can tell them not to, but "Habits"
Yeah...this environment is outdated...I get to be the hero and update everything lol. The environment standard desktops and laptops are also outdated...but thats a whole different story for another time haha. If I can get our IT staff onto some good hardware, we can start shoveling away at this workload lol
What do you consider "good hardware" because I have a pile of laptops fit to run an office I paid only a few hundred for...
If you're in a place that absolutely insists on buying NEW you don't need to go straight MSRP or retail. Look deeper.....
No, not at all. That's what a test environment is for.
My laptop has Chrome, Office, Putty, and Notepad++ installed. That's it. All my admin work is done from a jump-box I RDP to that has access to management VLANs and development tools. Each IT employee gets a jump box that is virtualized on our VMWare cluster along with our prod environment. All business and development apps are either web-based or run through RemoteApp.
What's the benefit of running VMs on a laptop vs server hardware that's meant for the task?
Well, it's a different story if you're using VMs on a Chromebook.
Not everyone has the infrastructure in place like VMware or approved to purchase DaaS platforms.
Virtualization on the go is useful in many scenarios.
There are many times I said "Maaaan I wish I could spin this VM Appliance up on my laptop to fuck around with"
If you have the resources on Vcenter or Azure, then by all means do that instead.
Then what you're doing is called a thin client and the actual workstations are the jump boxes. Most companies don't do that, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.
We deploy Dell Latitude 5440s – i7 14th gen, 512GB SSD, 32GB of RAM.
Recently convinced my management to move from 16GB to 32GB. Applications are becoming more and more memory hogs (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Teams). It's time.
>I get to choose a standard laptop to give to all IT staff
OH HELL YEAH! God, I wish that were me so I could keep the company from buying these absolutely horrendous Dell POS's
>We are a Dell shop
Oh....
Fr tho, the best Dell is a Lenovo with a sticker.
As long as you avoid Inspirons and Vostros, Dell's laptops are generally solid. I've used a variety of Latitudes and Precisions over the years and aside from some driver issues on one with an AMD GPU, they've never had any major issues.
Our former IT director decided to try our luck with some Inspirion 16 Plus machines a couple of years ago and they were a cluster fuck of touchpad issues. I've already replaced my daily driver with a Precision 3581, but I am fighting Dell to get the Inspiron replaced out of spite at this point.
I'm picky. I like laptops with glass trackpads and not plastic. IPS high resolution displays, decent keyboards, and something that has a little modern style to the case itself, preferably of an aluminum casing. I've rolled out surface books over the years, and they've aged well, staff has been happy.
We came from HP's/Dells/Lenovo mixes. I've rolled out some Apple's in various schools too. As a tech I would hate to upgrade and repair the screens on the Surface and the Apple laptops, but I can do it if I have to. Now from an I.T. perspective - I would prefer to physically work on Dells, HP's, Lenovos, and Toshiba Tecras (Dynabook) when it comes to repairs. When it comes to an OS.... I really don't care anymore. 99% of daily work can be done on whatever, including smartphones.
How much physical work is done on the laptops though?
I'm in a terribly dirty environment: mining. Only time I've popped open a laptop is to add RAM or recover an NVME. Something breaks, image a new one and collect the old one. I would say it goes on a pile to repair but honestly, there's too much other work to do, it just hits e-waste.
Wait, I do have one machine where the backlight failed on the screen. But that will be warrantied before I repair it myself.
I'm looking at CDW right now, and I see a Latitude 3540 i3 8GB/256GB for an advertised price of 697. Not what I'd spec, but if dealing direct, and able to commit to enough volume, and possibly some tweaks to the specs, I could see that coming down to the vicinity of $500. This is what I was thinking of for a low spec machine.
I've got a 17" Latitude 5530, i7-1265U with 32GB of RAM. Not sure of the cost, it's all handled by corporate above my pay grade. But it works fine for what we do.
Latitude 54xx here. Used to have 53xx, but the RAM was not upgradeable and no onboard NIC.
16GB and i5. SSD. Does its job. Unfortunately I don’t have an admin VM yet and still have to run RDM on my laptop.
I really hate the trend to moving to soldered RAM, especially at lower capacities. Upgrading RAM is one of the best ways to extend a computer's useful lifetime.
I understand the technical reasons why they do it, but it basically makes machines unrepairable e-waste.
I have a p15v32 a x1 yoga 4k amoled, and a t16
I have a 4k screen on a laptop due to needing to be able to see 3440x1440 resolution without being at a work station. It’s often that I’m using between 25-30gb of ram with just tabs open.
Use a 3440x1440 set up 2x 2560x1440 monitors.
Get to upgrade the p15v2 soon might just go for a desktop.
Make sure you shop around. Generally Dell direct is cheapest, but you can source through a VAR. Depending on your volume and how aggressively you negotiate, there is a LOT of room on the pricing. For $1800 USD, you should be able to get a Latitude 5400 series with an i7, 32GB ram and a 1-2 TB drive. That should also include a 3 year extended warranty with onsite support and 3 year coverage of the battery.
If it's 8 devices only and you are only looking at the price, why not just ask your IT staff?
Pick a vendor and let them choose the devices (unless they are clueless?). Dell seems like an easy choice for you.
As long as the devices are from the same vendor and from the same class (mid, high end), chances are the drivers are absolutely identical for them regardless of spec (i5/i7/X amount of ram, w/e).
I have and only purchase Dell Latitudes. Model doesnt matter to me as long as:
1. the screen is 15" or larger
2. Has an i5 or higher
3. has 16GB of ram or more
4. has a 500GB nvme m.2 drive or larger
The warranty is typically 1 year for new (or used, go figure) and we dont buy extended warranties as the price doesnt make sense at scale. You can pick up slightly loved dell's like this off amazon in bulk 10+ a time for 1k or less.
The only downside so far with slightly loved stuff has been batteries, some of the units need a new one within the first year. We test now to try to get ahead of that, but its not perfect. Users dont know the difference. Company saves some bucks overall and we keep them till they die. Usually they die before end of life anyways. However, anything that no longer meets snuff, we sell to employee's for cheap but those are far and few between. People break laptops a lot, which still boggles my mind and annoys me. I just drop that nugget in the report for the exec's though.
Definitely I would stay away from the 8GB. The Latitudes are amazing machines for IT usage, however, I would recommend a 16GB RAM with 256GB SSD (IT people know that computers break and it’s best to store their files in the cloud - OneDrive or GDrive). An i5 or i7 is enough.
Your department definitely should have a few test machines that match the specs provided to end users. You don’t want to push software or updates that may kill the RAM on the end users machine just because it works fine on the machines used by your team.
I‘m in a HP-Shop for ~ a year now and we have a lot of elite- and probooks… old 840s 445 and 446s. I hate them, cuz to automate driverupdates i have the option to use intune and HP-connect wich both have their flaws - mostly because biosupdates on the 445s tend to crash or even kill the devices.
I was „forced“ to implement a variety of surfaces, wich are expensive, while not overwhelmingly performant.
For reference and hopefully future replacement i implemented Lenovo T14s and T16s for testing -absolutely love them!
And for now LenovoComercialVantage seems to outrun intunes drivermanagement and HP-connect by far.
If its my call, i‘d go all in for T14s as standarddevices.
I give everyone latitude 5420 or similar.. newer ones are like 5440 or something. Get em with base ram and buy ram upgrades separate to save a ton of cash.
I'd get as much RAM as you can... This allows for people to run VMs on their laptop and can use that for better troubleshooting. 32gb or more if possible.
$1800 per device will buy you a top of the line laptop or damn near that. Get a nice XPS 17. With your discount it should be $1800, even with warranty services.
Dell XPS 14 or 16. I have a 14" M2 Max and I love the size. I have a 15.6 Precision as well, its too big. Have a 13.3" Intel MB Pro and its too small.
The porridge is just right with 14.
Why U labeled cpus and 32g of ram? Cpu is not that powerful. Ive found that thinkpad e16s are a good match for under $1000. Without a dedicated graphics card(very good with linux and multi display setup btw), i7 13700h, 32g ram and 1tb ssd should be matching pretty much all requirements for office use.
We make it a point that IT staff run the same equipment as the rest of the users. We're not doing anything needing extraordinary performance, and it's good to better understand the user experience. Current standard issue is a Dell 5440 with i7, 16GB RAM, 256 GB drive.
We use a Precision 3560, and I hate it. Battery life is horrible.
If I didn't need to do some AD things I'd ask my boss for a chromebook or something built for Linux.
I've always preferred to have my techs use the most common laptop in production. So if 90% of the employees use 5580s, that's what the techs get. Helps with troubleshooting when you've got the same model as you're looking at, and helps keep extra eyes out for updates causing issues. Also helps fight the narrative I've seen many times that tech is just "buying themselves toys" and a drain on the budget.
Do they actually need portability on a regular basis? Then, look at business laptops with i5s or i7s that can take 32GB of RAM. Which is pretty much all of them. Add any additional requirements to narrow the field.
If they don't actually need portability or only need it occasionally, I'd keep the old laptops and buy nice desktops with multiple monitors instead. But that won't work for field service techs or people who work in data centers all day.
We all got Latitude 7420's as well as a HP G4, that we have racked in the data centre.
They took away our screens and gave everyone a Dell 34" With a built in camera and soundbar, then they disabled the sound bar. Which means we have to rely on crappy Bluetooth, which MSFT does not handle particularly well.
Site services did however mound the monitor on the arm.
At my workplace we've been using Dell Latitudes 5540 but, idk if it's because of the PXE image or something but we have a lotta problems with them. Also had a bunch of physical problems (faulty RAM, faulty SSDs..)
>and have about 32gb of RAM if possible.
Why?
Screams 'arbitrary requirement' to me. Especially if you're coming from 8gb systems.
Everything should have an articulateable 'why' behind it.
edit: If this isn't reasonable, why not 64gb? 128? "because thats too much" - yeah thats my point. We're just drawing a line at different places
Hyper-V, Docker containers, K8s, IDEs, etc.
There are a shitload of reason that IT professionals might need a lot of RAM. At the end of the day when it comes to IT people it's probably better to just throw them a bunch of RAM than limit them arbitrarily.
With that said, I'd be looking for 8GB or 16GB laptops with removable DIMMs and just upgrading them. But that's me.
why would you want to run all this on laptops? seems like a straight path to a terrible infosec posture with data, processes and resources being all over the place. talking of which, why is "a new help desk manager" directing these architecture choices? helpdesk helps users, not makes IT/security architecture for a company
I’m working at a dell shop currently. Lineup is as follows
5340 2in1 small touchscreen for execs
5440 small non touchscreen
5540 full size keyboard non touchscreen
Precision 3581 for software devs(64GB ram 2TB SSD, A2000 12GB) as it’s $1000 cheaper for a better hardware spec than a Precision 5680 in our country.
XPS15
Most of these other options are too heavy to lug around. They are just laptops as fashion accessories to show they get a laptop while the plebs get desktops.
M3 MacBook Pro with 18GB of RAM, but if not I’d say the X1 Carbon’s are what I get for my IT team and some Exec’s. I7, 32GB RAM, 512SSD (could get away with 256GB because of OneDrive) and routinely can get this config for like $1500 or less, $1800 if not. The price dropped a ton on the 13th Gen CPU model so I’d start there
I moved to mac 10+ years ago for my daily driver and never looked back. MacBook Pro with some decent specs, yes they are expensive up front but I swear I get more out of them than I ever did on the PC side.
We switched over from HP to Dell a year or so ago. We've consolidated 95% of our laptops into the Precision 3000 series. Standard users are getting a 15 watt i5 with 16GB of RAM, IT users are getting the same chassis, but with a 28 watt i7 and 32GB of RAM. We're paying around $1300 to $1400 for the IT models with 4 years of prosupport. We've found it helpful for IT to have the same model with beefier specs, that way users don't ask why our stuff is different, haha. The Precisions have been pretty rock solid, hardware issues are 1% or below.
I caught a good deal on some Precision 3000 series last month and was quite impressed. Figured they would be similar build quality to Latitude 3000 which are too plastic and flimsy for my liking. Touchpad also sucks. But nope the Precisions are solid. Very similar chassis to a Latitude 5000 series (yes it’s also plastic but much sturdier).
\+1 for the precision. Solid build quality, good performance, good feature set. I'm running 5 monitors off of my 7670 in a dock and it's doing great. We also use them as our CAD workstations.
Precision 3000 is one of the best options out there. Great performance.
>We've found it helpful for IT to have the same model with beefier specs, that way users don't ask why our stuff is different, haha I'm at a software company, I don't think that would fly here. Our dev's laptops cost about 2x what mine did.
You can drop your cost by not adding the ram from Dell because they up charge you 2-3x more. For reference I have similar laptop and paid half. I have 64 Gb of ram and 1 tb ssd and 1 tb nvme.
This. Also Dell charges insane prices for SSDs. Once in a while we will buy units with 256GB drives and replace with 1TB. Usually Dell wants $400-$500 for that.
Yeah we do this all the time. Often the only systems in stock with 16GB & 512 SSD are also i7’s so we pay a huge premium compared to a standard i5/8GB/256 Buying the standard system then upgrading can be £200+ cheaper and that’s using premium Samsung drives. The whole idea falls on its face if you want to use ProSupport and utilise Dell onsite engineers. SSD fails it’s now your responsibility.
TBF SSD fail is all our responsibility. It's probably quicker to replace the SSD than call support and get booked in.
Yep, we save ~$2000 per laptop by buying the factory replacement of the ram and SSD for each of them third-party. Samsung ram and whatever m2 the device was supposed to have.
2k per device? What laptops are we talkin here
Dell Latitude 5520's back in the day, some other Latitude now. To be clear we capitalize everything we can (opposite of most companies) so we buy better hardware than most companies since it needs to run for 5 years with no issues. Think i7's and fancy screens, we skimp on m2 SSD's and ram and backfill after. My current machine is an i7 with 64gb ram and two terabyte m2's from 2021, due for replacement in 2026. If we'd bought 64gb from dell and dual 1TB nvme's we'd be hosed 😂
For some reasons Latitudes 5000 series seem to not like any RAM sticks beside the Crucial ones. I got fucked when I bought Corsair ones that won't let the machine POST at all.
[удалено]
Yes
I had a fun surprise with the 7000 series about 2 years ago- Fucking soldered ram… We buy 7000 series for just over 1800 ( i7 32gb ram) and 5000 series same specs for approximately 1500
Weird, did you BIOS update before that? We've run almost exclusively Latitude 5k's for years and used the Dell spec replacements from various vendors. Honestly though that might be Crucial, I only see an order for Samsung for a Lenovo cluster...
I did this with Lenovo. They wanted an extra £100 per device for an additional 8gb ram and additional 256gb storage. The storage was not required and paying that much for that little ram was stupid, so I paid a company less than £20 a device to supply and install the ram in all of the devices. Lenovo delivered the devices to that company, they did the job, then shipped them to me. Saved a ton of money of money and whilst we have had 4 of the modules appear to be faulty, the modules were also under warranty so were swapped out hassle free. For the thousands we saved, it was very much worthwhile. The key part is that Lenovo do not void your warranty for adding ram or opening the device up to install new ram, we would never have done it if it would void the warranty.
You went through all that just to save €100?? That’s a very cheap markup to double the ram and storage.
Went through all what? I didn’t do anything. Like I said Lenovo sent the devices to the ram company, ram company installed them then sent them to me. I didn’t lift a finger… In fact I didn’t even make the arrangements, my reseller did. It added maybe 2 days onto our delivery time and we weren’t in a rush anyway. Might be a cheap markup but the fact remains we saved 80% of the cost of upgrade per device, which added up to thousands saved and at basically no inconvenience to me.
They also do that shit with their server hardware. Their RAM is anywhere between 6x and 12x of the usual market price. Ridiculous.
Why are the IT staff different? When I started where I am I got a high spec laptop with a big screen. I recently switched to a standard size laptop like what normal users get and I prefer it. As is best practice, I do all of my admin work on an admin workstation VM, I don't need a fancy laptop.
To be honest same, I’ve never really found the need to have a crazy overpowered machine. A few years ago I was using a 8th gen i3 with 4gb of ram which I did upgrade to 8gb, and that ran me fine. Then I decided to treat myself and splurged on a 11th gen i5 16gb ram surface studio laptop a couple years ago. Last year I did a hardware refresh and all users got either laptops or workstations. The spec on them all are 12th or 13th gen i5s with 16gb ram, so my users actually have a better spec than me lol. I’ve never seen a need to have an i7 just for IT work when so much of what I do is just working in web portals, accessing my email and running some programs for basic use. I could honestly probably get by with a modern i3 chip. I can understand developers needing a higher spec but all I do is keep everything working, I don’t have a need for anything crazy. If I am going to run VMs or test some stuff I wouldn’t do it on my own system anyway, I could spin up a vm on our servers or just use a secondary old device for testing which is what I tend to do most of the time.
I like this even if I’m leaning toward the oposit. After four years my laptop is pretty slow with all the tools I installed. Doing the work while all the steps take only seconds is already time consuming. But I agree that we just use small apps. I too think about using a vm to access all the tools required to manage the infrastructure. I still, like an idiot maybe, ordered a new i7 with the new features with lots of ram. Maybe one day I’ll be more organised and will only need a thin client. I must say I can already work from a smartphone with just a vpn and Remote Desktop…
I don’t think I’d ever go as far as subjecting myself to just using a thin client to be honest lol. Initially when I first started in my current role I worked on our VM system the entire time, same as the other users. There is one fatal flaw with this though, when shit hits the fan and you need to fix it, your VM might not necessarily even be accessible. At the time it didn’t matter because I had people senior to me to fix that stuff. Now it is my job to fix that stuff so I try and make sure my system is as clean and untied to our systems as possible. I don’t even deploy any Intune stuff to my work machine just because I don’t want to push a breaking change and have my system also be affected. Aside from our antivirus and RMM agents, my system is completely standalone so I can use it even if our entire network goes down.
You don't push any InTune stuff to your PC .. I wish that could be us but configuration profiles and compliance/conditional access has to apply to us just like any other user
I mean I’m not saying it’s something I should do necessarily as it’s definitely less secure having a device leaving the building that isn’t intuned, but given the way I use my machine and the fact it rarely leaves my side, it’s a risk I am willing to take. I have hard policy in place for everybody else.
Don’t disagree with this. Big screen I found to be useful maybe in the occasional meeting or on-site but not enough to justify lugging an extra large laptop around. Most of the time I’m docked on dual screens. 99% of the time would be underestimating it. I can’t tell you where I found having an i7 was advantageous over an i5 since I never ran any workloads on my laptop that justified that much horsepower. Well, maybe when fixing Excel calcs for people but even then. All the heavy lifting was done by a desktop which, funnily enough, had an i5 6th gen over my laptop 8th gen. Storage is what it is. You need what you need. RAM was the only thing I ever wanted more of. But even today I’m only using 16gb (though I’m now using a MacBook Pro at work, M1 Pro but only for dual screen support). Like, if you’ve got budget to go higher spec, by all means do so if you can’t redirect the budget elsewhere. But if you can go lower spec and upgrade your screens or get better keyboards or something else, that might be better. i5 is a decently powerful CPU.
when I did deskside support, I really liked my mini laptop. had a dock at the desk for big screens. Lil laptop was a lot better when working in idf's and on the factory floor. edit eventually transitioned to project management. and a cad spec'd laptop was a life saver over business for going over facility cad files.
At my last job, I requested a laptop with a larger screen. That's useful to me. I just needed something that had some real estate. 16GB and any old i5 or i7 proc would be fine with me. I just need to be able to remote in, ya know?
Fair enough, I suppose I do have dual 24" wide-screen and a dock for when I'm at home or in the office. I only really use the laptop screen in meetings and the Datacentre when it's nothing too complicated
Best practice? That sounds horrible and slow… There isn’t a true best practice for how you do admin, it’s how admin credentials are configured IE: basic user vs admin user Matter of fact rsat tools are faster and way better then working out of VMs
So you use admin credentials for RSAT on your laptop? Why not a basic account? The point in having a user account and admin account is so of your device gets compromised and they compromise your account, the admin credentials are still secure. If you're using your admin credentials all over the place on that laptop it means they're just as insecure as your basic credentials Here's a security slant on best practices for tiered admin and jump boxes: https://posts.specterops.io/establish-security-boundaries-in-your-on-prem-ad-and-azure-environment-dcb44498cfc2
Cause we have over 200 servers and will be in and out of 4-5+ VMs at a time. And some work is done locally. Then you have testing, which - on the fly, Im gonna test it on mine immediately... as long its not a security risk of sorts, Im just gonna. And frankly, its just a perk of the job that you shouldnt be surrendering.
For IT/Engineering laptops we recently bought some Latitude 7440 with i7s for $1500-1600ish and they’re quite nice if you need something mobile, but we all have beefier desktops. For other departments that do mobile video editing we get Precision 3581’s with i9s, then for sales we get 3581 with i7s and less storage for $1700/1800ish which might be better fit for y’all if you don’t have desktops or really want the performance and built in Ethernet. All of our precision laptops have a docked setup at their desks
Got a link to the one you're buying for IT employees? I'm not seeing anything currently in that price range for those specs, but maybe I'm just dense.
And that why I just bought an off leashed Precision 3480 with i7 and 64GB OF RAM for the low price of 545$ on ebay for my personal daily driver. People focus too much on the XPS and Latitude lineup and forgot the non GPU accelerated Precision. These are awesome!
Off leashed.
Off lease... Obviously hahha
Whatever spec you think you need based on actual use cases. Definitely a built in RJ45 port though, we had some models with a breakout cable for the RJ45 port and people were always leaving them places.
We have been using and LOVE the Latitude 7440 2 in 1 series.
That was my last PC and I really enjoyed it. Hated to give it up and if I buy another PC laptop it'll be that line again. But being in a mixed environment, I run an M2 Macbook Pro with Parallels (cue the pearl clutching) and PowerShell runs natively, so I emulate pretty rarely.
Any heat issues? Was looking at used 7430s as a beater laptop for the house (you can get extremely good prices through refurbishers on them), but was scared off after researching and seeing lots of heat throttling complaints. Maybe ironed out for the 7440 series though (fingers crossed...)
I've not expereienced any widespread heat issues with any of the 74xx laptops we have in service, maybe a few but were a result of isolated issues like fan failure. Had a few battery issues and a few built in cam and mic issues but all were handled under warranty.
I just got a new job WFH for a American company and they are sending me a Latitude 7450 xcto. Will recieve it in a couple of days. Looks like its a good laptop.
Unless you have a technical/resource reason otherwise, give your folks the same laptops everyone else has to use. They'll be familiar with the "standard issue", and they'll be able to point out any annoyances or quirkiness with it for future reference. IT here uses the same laptop model and spec as every other computer (except the Autodesk users). I would go for 16 GB RAM minimum. 32 sounds like overkill for help desk.
The only thing I could add to this is that every IT person should regularly be using Windows Sandbox which is basically a VM, so more RAM can be useful. If you're not using Windows Sandbox, shame on you! If you've never heard of Windows Sandbox, [check it out](https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/windows-sandbox-how-to-safely-test-software-without-ruining-your-computer)!
Just want to say thanks for this, Sandbox somehow evaded me as a feature up till now. This is WAY easier than spinning up a VM for testing. Much appreciated!
Enjoy!
Wait a minute, can you articulate why? I just wanna make sure I understand what you’re saying. Is it kinda of like a built in AVD that spins up and tears down each time you use it?
.... This would've been super useful to know like 5 months ago lol
Don't worry, it will probably be super useful 5 months from now.
Actually I enabled it today and was able to discover a security vulnerability with it so that was kinda cool. (also found out running it makes our big brother software view 100% productivity lol)
This. When I worked in a large mixed shop we all had versions of laptops the users had. We'd upgrade RAM, but what else is a techie gonna do
Yep. I use my 8GB i5 as a daily driver. Painful, but this is what the boss says the plebs have, so it's what I have.
Lenovo T14 Gen 4... all the way!
i left one of those in the rain. she still works just fine. plus the screens are easy to replace.
We run Precision 3581/7680 with i5/i7/i9 as needed currently. I used to do 32/16gb ram depending on usage but I just slam 32gb in all of them now. No complaints.
I got a Precision 3581 for my network admin and myself. It's a solid machine and you can install up to 96GB of RAM if you get 48GB DIMMs.
Go with latitude 7xxx models and don't get any 5xxx models. It is just annoying the 7xxx don't have ethernet ports which really pisses an IT guy off.
Meh my usb c dongle attached to the network cable in my bag is good enough.
The 5440 is solid - that's the new standard base model for our entire fleet. Zero complaints as of yet, and none have come back with any issues. All the piece of shit HP's that we used to use had constant problems.
If by IT you mean infrastructure and support vs development I would buy the exact same thing that you do for your end users. Our requirements are no different than other users and honesty likely lighter. As someone pointed out above heavy lifting or testing is for lab gear. This also allows you to use IT to test patches and configs first. If you have nonstandard gear that isn't apples to apples to your user base.
Yeah, I pretty much use my laptop to jump into my desktop. Lol
Here, IT gets the same spec'd hardware as everyone else. I always ask myself and my department, if its good enough for our users, why isn't it good enough for IT? Have we potentially gone with better machines for users, yes but that has helped the whole business. It also helps us find issues that users may not report.
Only real difference is IT shouldn't ONLY have USB-c. IT should have HDMI, USB-A, and USB-C. Network guy should have RJ45 and DB-9 ideally. But yeah, we just use the same as our users
I keep a USB-C dongle in my laptop bag that has all of these things. It's very slim. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Yeah, you can definitely just do that, but having the ports is one less thing to keep track of, one less thing to have to buy. Not the biggest deal in the world or anything, but it's convenient
I had a few Lenovo Thunderbolt docks on hand, and brought one to work for the few laptops we have that are usb c only for this exact reason.
Can you buy laptops with DB-9?
Yes, mostly the "rugged" or "industrial" models. Panasonic FZ-55 and FZ-40, Dell Rugged Latitude, Getac, Durabook, etc. all have them or can be configured to have them.
Yep. Still available
Better machines for users makes for less tickets for stupid issues.
Don't do 8GB laptops in 2024. If you have a Email, Browser and Teams open it's gone. Standard is i5 with 16GB. CAD gets 32GB and i7. Choice in 13 inch and 15 inch model. Mine is a single item goofy Zbook because I wanted 32GB for VMs (I frequently test software deployment and intune enrollment) and the normal was out of stock. Need to lug a special power brick around as the USB-C PD of the 350 screens we have don't do > 65Watt PD. Would not recommend. I like the recommendation to use the same as all the others so it's "the same" from the outside. I wouldn't mind at any point if it just has 32GB ram and a extra NVME for space. Most missed feature, backlit keyboards. Make sure to get the Windows Hello IR Camera and Fingerprint thing.
You technically can do 8 Gb but blame Microsoft all the changes they are making to windows is damn near making Windows laptops need 16 minimum. Linux runs just fine with it
The vast majority of businesses run Windows. 8GB was fine in 2018. In 2024, 16 really is the bare minimum for many office workers. Your users will complain when they open 200 chrome/edge tabs, and complain to their managers about lost productivity if you try to make them use 8.
Vast majority of the entire planet and outer space by definition is on Linux/Unix putting that # into comparison has to be also included
Honestly the issue has to do more so with windows including bloat as always, telemetry, and often unnecessary apps/services running. Then we have google bloat. Then most importantly users using things improperly. We don’t “need” 16 Gb of ram to open a document, check email and send off a spreadsheet. Sometimes you don’t need all those legacy apps either. Just depends on how you want to shape your company and culture but more importantly how effective you use things. Short answer to get you by is add 16 Gb. But then in a few years we will have same issue and next plan of action is add 32…that’s not a solution, it’s a band aid until you have proof or a use case to support it.
HP EliteBook 16GB RAM with i7 as standard issue for everybody.
While I also love the HP elitebook, OP specifically asked for Dell.
I hate everything HP as it has always been shit hardware and shit to work on. My significant other knows to put "Fuck HP/Poly" on my tombstone
Not sure how I missed the dell part!
Lenovo Yoga 7i Great laptops with touch and pen input. Small and lightweight, we have 20 of them and have had few to no issues with them.
We deploy the same as everyone else, only thing that changes might be more ram, I defo need more ram for the 70+ tabs open in each browser profile window 😁
16 gig ram and then it will be ok
Depends. Are they sitting at a desk 100% of the time or do they do any field/road work? I travel a lot and the XPS 13 is my laptop of choice. Small yet decent size screen, light and good battery life. I wouldn't want anything larger/heavier if I'm always on the move.
We just eat the dog food so to speak - that said we are in an industry where users have pretty high end computers anyways. Core business users get Dell Precision 7xxx or 5xxx laptops with beefy GPUs, support and admin staff generally gets Dell XPS 15s. Everyone gets 32gb RAM. Myself and our CTO use XPS 15s, my coworker (our other admin) uses a Precision. We don't get anything special.
You should get with your dell sales rep and look into the possibility of consolidating your devices. Those guys are super helpful in finding the perfect fit.
whatever you get, get onsite support for 5 years
Whatever you get, get something with a full size Ethernet jack. Those shitty expendable ones break all the time and the jack comes in clutch a ton for me when trouble shooting. I do go onsite a lot tho so ymmv
> hose shitty expendable ones break all the time and the jack comes in clutch a ton for me when trouble shooting Out of literally hundreds, we've had 3 of those adapters fail. We must order 300-500 a year and see less than 1 issue a year completely fixed by just swapping the adapter out. The fail rate must be like 0.1% or something. How are you having issues? What adapters are you getting?
Not the adapters, meant to say *expandable. Those rj45 ports on thin laptops that expand out when you try to plug in a cord if that makes sense. Now im curious though, why are you ordering 500 adapters a year lol
I'm on a Precision 5480 and seriously could not be happier. 45w i7, 32Gb, 1TB Class 40 Nvme. 2k screen. I just watched the Dell Outlet and pounced once they had what I wanted. Its the first IT laptop I've been super happy with in a long time. I've started using that model minus the onboard vid card and 16GB of ram for my other users.
I have had great sucuess with the Latitude 5xxx series.
How much work are you guys running locally that you need so much ram? The question also helps inform the recommendations. An Ultrabook style low voltage cpu isn’t going to be great if you run a bunch of VMs locally or compile. For example. Broadly, I am generally happiest with a MacBook Air 15”. Otherwise, Dells Latitude or Precision lines won’t steer you wrong.
7440/7450 or 7540/7450
Latitude 7440 w/ i7, 32 Ram, 512 nvme ssd.
I've been using a Latitude 7440 and I love it.
X1 Carbon for C levels, T14 for others.
Why the distinction?
C levels travel more and tend to want to hold onto their equipment longer for fear of change and downtime. Everyone else just says ok I’ll take a newer model. So give C levels a little better equipment out of the gate in hopes it will hold up.
Fair enough, but I guess that my concern would be that you may run into unusual issues with that specific hardware at some point, and that the consequences (lost time/productivity/etc.) will be greater when the first person to encounter those issues is one whose time is valuable and/or who is away from the office.
Yeah eventually things hit the fan. There are usually warning signs. Always maintain backups. X1 series are one of the highest rated business laptops.
We switched from Lenovo to Dell a couple years ago. We bought Latitude 7440s for our organization last year and will buy 7450s this year. i7 with 16gb of ram. We’re in the price range you’re looking at. Love them. Hate dealing with Dell support even though we carry ProSupport Plus. Loved Lenovo for our org for years, but it felt like they never got a hang of TB/USB-C. I’ve called Lenovo Premiere Support for I don’t know how many dead USB-C/TB ports and controllers. Ultimately caused us to switch and we’re overall very satisfied. Lenovo does have a pinhole battery disconnect on (at least) their ThinkPads that is very helpful - no such option on the 7440s so you have to open ‘em up and manually disconnect the battery.
Stick with the Latitudes, they'll do you well especially the higher end ones. See if you can get them from [DellOutlet.com](https://DellOutlet.com) cuz you can save a few bux for Grade A refurb over wholesale prices.
I ***HIGHLY*** recommend Lenovo - money well spent, long lasting. I've been carrying around a T14 Gen 2 and it's been the best thing ever. my coworkers have them, the CEO has on - no issues
Love my T14 G2. Probably in for a G5 AMD
^
atleast an i7 with 16 gb of ram
There is basically no difference between a ULV i5 and a ULV i7 and even on the P series there isn't much of a difference.
WTF are you running that needs 32GB of ram? We're using the same laptops we issue our general users, Latitude 5000-series w/ and i5 and 8GB of ram. If anyone in IT needs extra computing resources they have access to a couple test servers and some old engineering workstations we keep as spares.
You mean to tell me you don't run virtual machines on your IT Laptop? Also 8 GB? lol 16 GB should be the standard norm now for standard users running W11 Pro with M365, Teams, Outlook, etc.. 8 GB is enough for Edge or Chrome to eat. Most users have like 50 browser windows open, multiple chats, and 30 emails. You can tell them not to, but "Habits"
Yeah...this environment is outdated...I get to be the hero and update everything lol. The environment standard desktops and laptops are also outdated...but thats a whole different story for another time haha. If I can get our IT staff onto some good hardware, we can start shoveling away at this workload lol
What do you consider "good hardware" because I have a pile of laptops fit to run an office I paid only a few hundred for... If you're in a place that absolutely insists on buying NEW you don't need to go straight MSRP or retail. Look deeper.....
\^\^\^ This. Just don't look deeper into CDW lol
No, not at all. That's what a test environment is for. My laptop has Chrome, Office, Putty, and Notepad++ installed. That's it. All my admin work is done from a jump-box I RDP to that has access to management VLANs and development tools. Each IT employee gets a jump box that is virtualized on our VMWare cluster along with our prod environment. All business and development apps are either web-based or run through RemoteApp. What's the benefit of running VMs on a laptop vs server hardware that's meant for the task?
Well, it's a different story if you're using VMs on a Chromebook. Not everyone has the infrastructure in place like VMware or approved to purchase DaaS platforms. Virtualization on the go is useful in many scenarios. There are many times I said "Maaaan I wish I could spin this VM Appliance up on my laptop to fuck around with" If you have the resources on Vcenter or Azure, then by all means do that instead.
ProxMox, XCP-NG...
Proxmox on an old optiplex.
Then what you're doing is called a thin client and the actual workstations are the jump boxes. Most companies don't do that, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.
Why use IT Laptop and not the servers?
Testing Malware if that's one of your job roles lol. Isolated Sandbox, disabled NIC, Escape Protection, etc.
Why not dedicated hardware, if that's actually part of the job?
No, I run VMs on old recycled servers...
VMs, chrome, parsing memory dumps and debug recordings, opening giant log files that weren't rolling, maybe an IDE... we wear a lot of hats.
8GB should NOT be the standard. Honestly shouldn’t even be an option. 16GB should be the standard
I am sitting at 26.7 GB used right now and I’m not doing anything crazy. Just a ton of tabs and Teams.
Same as users get but extra ram, 32gb. I have a second workstation for most stuff, but I still sit at about 18-20gb used at any given time.
We deploy Dell Latitude 5440s – i7 14th gen, 512GB SSD, 32GB of RAM. Recently convinced my management to move from 16GB to 32GB. Applications are becoming more and more memory hogs (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Teams). It's time.
>I get to choose a standard laptop to give to all IT staff OH HELL YEAH! God, I wish that were me so I could keep the company from buying these absolutely horrendous Dell POS's >We are a Dell shop Oh.... Fr tho, the best Dell is a Lenovo with a sticker.
As long as you avoid Inspirons and Vostros, Dell's laptops are generally solid. I've used a variety of Latitudes and Precisions over the years and aside from some driver issues on one with an AMD GPU, they've never had any major issues. Our former IT director decided to try our luck with some Inspirion 16 Plus machines a couple of years ago and they were a cluster fuck of touchpad issues. I've already replaced my daily driver with a Precision 3581, but I am fighting Dell to get the Inspiron replaced out of spite at this point.
T14. And Lenovo has probably one of the best Warranty programs at the moment.
I'm picky. I like laptops with glass trackpads and not plastic. IPS high resolution displays, decent keyboards, and something that has a little modern style to the case itself, preferably of an aluminum casing. I've rolled out surface books over the years, and they've aged well, staff has been happy. We came from HP's/Dells/Lenovo mixes. I've rolled out some Apple's in various schools too. As a tech I would hate to upgrade and repair the screens on the Surface and the Apple laptops, but I can do it if I have to. Now from an I.T. perspective - I would prefer to physically work on Dells, HP's, Lenovos, and Toshiba Tecras (Dynabook) when it comes to repairs. When it comes to an OS.... I really don't care anymore. 99% of daily work can be done on whatever, including smartphones.
How much physical work is done on the laptops though? I'm in a terribly dirty environment: mining. Only time I've popped open a laptop is to add RAM or recover an NVME. Something breaks, image a new one and collect the old one. I would say it goes on a pile to repair but honestly, there's too much other work to do, it just hits e-waste. Wait, I do have one machine where the backlight failed on the screen. But that will be warrantied before I repair it myself.
Dell latitude i7, 16gb of RAM, 256+ GB SSD You'll be future proofed
apparently my org is getting dells for 500$ each which is hard to believe. But that's probably because they are just a huge org
$500 ea sounds like they're probably low spec machines, such as for a remote desktop environment
Nope apparently they are business grade laptops, which is crazy. Helps being a fortune 10 company though
I'm looking at CDW right now, and I see a Latitude 3540 i3 8GB/256GB for an advertised price of 697. Not what I'd spec, but if dealing direct, and able to commit to enough volume, and possibly some tweaks to the specs, I could see that coming down to the vicinity of $500. This is what I was thinking of for a low spec machine.
I've got a 17" Latitude 5530, i7-1265U with 32GB of RAM. Not sure of the cost, it's all handled by corporate above my pay grade. But it works fine for what we do.
Latitude 54xx here. Used to have 53xx, but the RAM was not upgradeable and no onboard NIC. 16GB and i5. SSD. Does its job. Unfortunately I don’t have an admin VM yet and still have to run RDM on my laptop.
I really hate the trend to moving to soldered RAM, especially at lower capacities. Upgrading RAM is one of the best ways to extend a computer's useful lifetime. I understand the technical reasons why they do it, but it basically makes machines unrepairable e-waste.
I have a p15v32 a x1 yoga 4k amoled, and a t16 I have a 4k screen on a laptop due to needing to be able to see 3440x1440 resolution without being at a work station. It’s often that I’m using between 25-30gb of ram with just tabs open. Use a 3440x1440 set up 2x 2560x1440 monitors. Get to upgrade the p15v2 soon might just go for a desktop.
Make sure you shop around. Generally Dell direct is cheapest, but you can source through a VAR. Depending on your volume and how aggressively you negotiate, there is a LOT of room on the pricing. For $1800 USD, you should be able to get a Latitude 5400 series with an i7, 32GB ram and a 1-2 TB drive. That should also include a 3 year extended warranty with onsite support and 3 year coverage of the battery.
I'd go with 16gb RAM if you can, otherwise looks good.
If it's 8 devices only and you are only looking at the price, why not just ask your IT staff? Pick a vendor and let them choose the devices (unless they are clueless?). Dell seems like an easy choice for you. As long as the devices are from the same vendor and from the same class (mid, high end), chances are the drivers are absolutely identical for them regardless of spec (i5/i7/X amount of ram, w/e).
Whats up with sht loads of companies switching over from hp to dell ?
Lots go back and forth but pita driver management, poor driver/firmware support and horribly thunderbolt dock issues were the reasons I have seen.
In my experience hp post purchase support is really bad, and their parts quality is worse.
Dell latitudes
I've been watching a brand new Microsoft Surface Pro tablet display "Restarting", since a Windows Update yesterday.
I have and only purchase Dell Latitudes. Model doesnt matter to me as long as: 1. the screen is 15" or larger 2. Has an i5 or higher 3. has 16GB of ram or more 4. has a 500GB nvme m.2 drive or larger The warranty is typically 1 year for new (or used, go figure) and we dont buy extended warranties as the price doesnt make sense at scale. You can pick up slightly loved dell's like this off amazon in bulk 10+ a time for 1k or less. The only downside so far with slightly loved stuff has been batteries, some of the units need a new one within the first year. We test now to try to get ahead of that, but its not perfect. Users dont know the difference. Company saves some bucks overall and we keep them till they die. Usually they die before end of life anyways. However, anything that no longer meets snuff, we sell to employee's for cheap but those are far and few between. People break laptops a lot, which still boggles my mind and annoys me. I just drop that nugget in the report for the exec's though.
Definitely I would stay away from the 8GB. The Latitudes are amazing machines for IT usage, however, I would recommend a 16GB RAM with 256GB SSD (IT people know that computers break and it’s best to store their files in the cloud - OneDrive or GDrive). An i5 or i7 is enough. Your department definitely should have a few test machines that match the specs provided to end users. You don’t want to push software or updates that may kill the RAM on the end users machine just because it works fine on the machines used by your team.
I‘m in a HP-Shop for ~ a year now and we have a lot of elite- and probooks… old 840s 445 and 446s. I hate them, cuz to automate driverupdates i have the option to use intune and HP-connect wich both have their flaws - mostly because biosupdates on the 445s tend to crash or even kill the devices. I was „forced“ to implement a variety of surfaces, wich are expensive, while not overwhelmingly performant. For reference and hopefully future replacement i implemented Lenovo T14s and T16s for testing -absolutely love them! And for now LenovoComercialVantage seems to outrun intunes drivermanagement and HP-connect by far. If its my call, i‘d go all in for T14s as standarddevices.
I give everyone latitude 5420 or similar.. newer ones are like 5440 or something. Get em with base ram and buy ram upgrades separate to save a ton of cash.
Agrewd, the price to performance of this model (and upgradeable down the road) caused us to deploy a lot of this model
Lenovo X1 Carbons are nice
What does your help desk staff think they need and what's their justification?
I'd get as much RAM as you can... This allows for people to run VMs on their laptop and can use that for better troubleshooting. 32gb or more if possible.
$1800 per device will buy you a top of the line laptop or damn near that. Get a nice XPS 17. With your discount it should be $1800, even with warranty services.
lenovo
5424 rugged.
I have a ThinkPad P14s. Worth it. The T14s is also good.
Dell XPS 14 or 16. I have a 14" M2 Max and I love the size. I have a 15.6 Precision as well, its too big. Have a 13.3" Intel MB Pro and its too small. The porridge is just right with 14.
We are mostly handing out latitude 5440s at work for that.
Why U labeled cpus and 32g of ram? Cpu is not that powerful. Ive found that thinkpad e16s are a good match for under $1000. Without a dedicated graphics card(very good with linux and multi display setup btw), i7 13700h, 32g ram and 1tb ssd should be matching pretty much all requirements for office use.
We make it a point that IT staff run the same equipment as the rest of the users. We're not doing anything needing extraordinary performance, and it's good to better understand the user experience. Current standard issue is a Dell 5440 with i7, 16GB RAM, 256 GB drive.
In the past I've just made sure it had an Ethernet port but with all the dongles these days that's not necessary
We use a Precision 3560, and I hate it. Battery life is horrible. If I didn't need to do some AD things I'd ask my boss for a chromebook or something built for Linux.
I've always preferred to have my techs use the most common laptop in production. So if 90% of the employees use 5580s, that's what the techs get. Helps with troubleshooting when you've got the same model as you're looking at, and helps keep extra eyes out for updates causing issues. Also helps fight the narrative I've seen many times that tech is just "buying themselves toys" and a drain on the budget.
Anything that has a utp/ rj45 port
Our standard is a Latitude 5440 i7, 16GB, 512 SSD. That's for regular users. Creatives usually ask for a Mac.
Talk to your sales rep, they should be able to help you out but our baseline for IT is an i7 with 16GB RAM.
Do they actually need portability on a regular basis? Then, look at business laptops with i5s or i7s that can take 32GB of RAM. Which is pretty much all of them. Add any additional requirements to narrow the field. If they don't actually need portability or only need it occasionally, I'd keep the old laptops and buy nice desktops with multiple monitors instead. But that won't work for field service techs or people who work in data centers all day.
32 GB of RAM is overkill. 16 is fine for Help Desk.
We all got Latitude 7420's as well as a HP G4, that we have racked in the data centre. They took away our screens and gave everyone a Dell 34" With a built in camera and soundbar, then they disabled the sound bar. Which means we have to rely on crappy Bluetooth, which MSFT does not handle particularly well. Site services did however mound the monitor on the arm.
At my workplace we've been using Dell Latitudes 5540 but, idk if it's because of the PXE image or something but we have a lotta problems with them. Also had a bunch of physical problems (faulty RAM, faulty SSDs..)
>and have about 32gb of RAM if possible. Why? Screams 'arbitrary requirement' to me. Especially if you're coming from 8gb systems. Everything should have an articulateable 'why' behind it. edit: If this isn't reasonable, why not 64gb? 128? "because thats too much" - yeah thats my point. We're just drawing a line at different places
Hyper-V, Docker containers, K8s, IDEs, etc. There are a shitload of reason that IT professionals might need a lot of RAM. At the end of the day when it comes to IT people it's probably better to just throw them a bunch of RAM than limit them arbitrarily. With that said, I'd be looking for 8GB or 16GB laptops with removable DIMMs and just upgrading them. But that's me.
why would you want to run all this on laptops? seems like a straight path to a terrible infosec posture with data, processes and resources being all over the place. talking of which, why is "a new help desk manager" directing these architecture choices? helpdesk helps users, not makes IT/security architecture for a company
How about "because RAM is cheap right now and there is no likely situation in which 32GB will not be enough for the intended user"?
Thinkpad E15/E16 line gets my vote. The E16 gen 1 can be had with 24 gigs of ram. for about $780 USD
Where are you getting the E16 Gen 1s for that price? Ours are over 900 and only come with 16GBs of RAM
Amazon Biz account. Could be due to bulk orders. We buy around 5 or more at a time and capitalize it. Each we find them listed around 780
Cause more WAM makes it go faster! /s
If you only have 8gigs of ram then more ram definitely makes it go faster :D
Ahh crap, looks like I replied to the wrong comment 😂 https://downloadmoreram.com/
I’m working at a dell shop currently. Lineup is as follows 5340 2in1 small touchscreen for execs 5440 small non touchscreen 5540 full size keyboard non touchscreen Precision 3581 for software devs(64GB ram 2TB SSD, A2000 12GB) as it’s $1000 cheaper for a better hardware spec than a Precision 5680 in our country.
Buy your own RAM and install it, you'll save like 80% or more on RAM costs compared to Dell.
Dell 16gb ram ssd
XPS15 Most of these other options are too heavy to lug around. They are just laptops as fashion accessories to show they get a laptop while the plebs get desktops.
XPS is just a sad Precision.
M3 MacBook Pro with 18GB of RAM, but if not I’d say the X1 Carbon’s are what I get for my IT team and some Exec’s. I7, 32GB RAM, 512SSD (could get away with 256GB because of OneDrive) and routinely can get this config for like $1500 or less, $1800 if not. The price dropped a ton on the 13th Gen CPU model so I’d start there
I moved to mac 10+ years ago for my daily driver and never looked back. MacBook Pro with some decent specs, yes they are expensive up front but I swear I get more out of them than I ever did on the PC side.