What Laptop Do Your Field Technicians Use?

We are using surfaces. Mixed results. Love the small footprint, hate having to carry hubs and adapters and they're not exactly rugged.

All my guys use Serface Pros

The Surface Pro can be rugged if you buy a decent case for it, similar to smart phones in that aspect. However, if rugged durability is the most important factor, the Toughbook and Toughpad are still king. 

What is the advantage of the Surface over a normal laptop?

I am curious to know what kind of specs one would want in a field laptop that would run diagnostic software as well as run something like Milestone for demos.

I gave my laptop to a tech so I need a laptop and am in the market. Great topic.

We use whatever we can find at Costco. Technician laptops don't usually last long around here...

Dell and Lenova laptops.  We have surface 4 tablets also, issue with them is for the money you get more bang for your buck with a laptop.  Video demands put on by the higher resolutions tend to work better on laptops also.

Surfaces can be a pain with adapters also.

I use a Dell Latitude E7250 with a solid state hard drive and Windows 10 Pro.

It works great for me, has a network jack, USB ports, light weight (less than 3 lbs.), bright sharp display and boots up in less than 30 seconds.

It also has a touch screen if you like that (I prefer mouse, much more accurate)

The Panasonic Toughbook is the only way to go. Native DB9 (Cisco switch programming), touchscreen, waterproof, and a heater to warm up the hard drive in the event you leave it in your car during a snowstorm.

Mine is still going strong after 3 years. It's fallen off the ladder three times, water spilled on it twice, and got rained on during an IP camera install.

Be sure to only load the basic/necessary business TOOLS on the laptop so it boots up fast and performs fast.

Remember, TIME IS MONEY.

From my experience, the Panasonic Tough book seems to be the most liked field tech laptop.

Honestly, we have a bunch of the older reconditioned Motorola laptops that came from one of my municipal customers and were used in squad cars for a few years. They are tough as nails, look like hell but I swear by them. We have tried the Surface pros and they were too much hassle. as I said before try the new Triplett 8071, its better than a laptop in many situations.

Depending on the "environment" the people work in, I would pick laptops that offer speed (Time is money) and durability at the same time.

CDROM drives are very clumsy and ask for trouble with the laptops.
Most of the driver software is downloadable, and if the engineer is prepared he/she will know what software to use before driving out.

If not it's easy to have all drivers of the hardware you work with installed or as zip file on a storage somewhere.

Now to the Flavour, that's always a good question and fully depends on what the company is willing to pay.

If there are rough conditions there are great rugged laptops on the market dust, water resistant.

In normal conditions i would go for a laptop with not to many toys and tools also here the brand, is personal choice.
Google is your friend for "rugged laptops site: " and "durable laptops site:"
(SITE:US / UK / DE /NL etc etc for your country)

Regards J

It was taking too long for someone to do this.

Lenovo E460 laptops here; they offer a lot for the money and have a relatively small footprint. When equipped with an i5 and SSD they are plenty fast too.

Our techs ONLY use Lenovo notebooks/laptops. "Why?" you ask.

I also happen to own a computer company that sells, supports & services network, computers & laptops. Lenovo is the system that fails the least. Dell is the laptop that needs regular repairs, mostly because they are flimsy and parts fall off. When we repair them, the Dell is pure junk in terms of build quality, fit & finish. I sell & service virtually anything my clients ask for (Dell, HP, Panasonic, Sony etc.) but if they want my recommendation, I always recommend Lenovo. I almost never see them back for repairs & I likely won't be hearing complaints from clients who take my recommendation.

I don't get anything more from Lenovo for favoring their product other than a better quality & more durable system.

Sorry Jon, I must respectfully disagree with you. I should have mentioned that we only sell & service the business class equipment. We have serviced many Precision & Lattitude systems and my opinion stands that these are sub-standard quality as compared to much of the other main stream systems for build, fit & finish. When I think of Dell, I think keys falling off, touch-pad failure, loose screens etc. I have been in the business for 28 years so no shortage of experience. We are Dell authorized and I will only sell them if I have to. I sell 5 times as many Lenovo's as Dell but Lenovo experiences 1/5 of the failures. Most failures we see are bits breaking off and screws etc. rattling around inside.

I have a Dell leasing account and I swear I will never buy another Dell. I swear every Dell I owned in the last 15 years ended up with catastrophic failures, bad motherboards, screen failures. I do not think I ever replaced one just because it was old.

My wife works in the IT department of a local large company and they swear by Dell.... 

Does anyone use a sub $500 laptop with good results? My uses are pretty limited to Hik VMS and SADP tool, basic router programming etc. 

I used a refurbed Lenovo 200 ish something or another, maybe a 240? My former employer bought it at www.microcenter.com (they have 2 local stores here in Atlanta)

As operations manager I ran Quickbooks, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, etc, tons of web browser tabs, etc. I occasionally had to use it in the field and had all the discovery tools, Smart PSS (Dahua VMS), etc on it.

Refurb cost was around 350 I think. Of course I had a monitor as well. It performed fairly well, was a tad sluggish around PowerPoint, but nothing crazy.

I have a pretty quick computer at home and it sets the bar pretty high for everything else I touch. When I double click word, I expect to be typing instantly... LOL

Any opinion on this Lenovo? Seems like it has a lot built in for the price. Am I missing anything or does this look like a decent buy? 

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Y70-17-3-inch-Touchscreen-2-6-3-6GHz/dp/B015GXPX7K/ref=sr_1_12?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1488582524&sr=1-12&refinements=p_n_feature_four_browse-bin%3A2289792011%2Cp_n_feature_five_browse-bin%3A7817224011%7C13580790011%2Cp_n_feature_twelve_browse-bin%3A9521908011%2Cp_72%3A1248879011%2Cp_36%3A2421886011

The last place I worked at used Dell Precisions, M4700 I think. Core i7's with nVidia Quadro graphics. Very nice machines, but very big and heavy, not the sort of machine you want to be using while on a ladder adjusting a camera. Where I currently work we use a mixture of Acer Aspires/Toshiba Satellites/Lenovo IdeaPads, whatever we get from JB Hi-Fi on that particular day. I myself have an IdeaPad, Core i7 with 12GB of RAM and Radeon graphics. Not a bad machine, but not the sort of machine that I would prefer given that I tend to prefer enterprise grade gear, even for my own personal use at home.

Dell ATG Latitudes

Lenovo P50 is what we recently deployed for our senior technical staff. Our old Lenovo W540 models are getting passed down to the techs. Techs rarely get brand new laptops.

I just got a new laptop and realized it did not come with a ethernet port. What do you all use for USB to Ethernet dongles?

Do you buy one that comes with a driver or set up what come with the computer?

We have gone through 3 different brands this year and settled with Lenovo.  Not sure if the brand matters but I required a minimum of I5 processor and solid state hard drives.  I went with the Lenovo series because it had several options I liked.  It can fold into a tablet, solid state hard drive, biometric finger swipe, I5, and backlit keyboard.  We have had zero issues so far.  I have been very happy with it.

Does anyone use the Bitlocker encryption that comes with windows 10 pro? 

FWIW We did buy the Lenovo E460 and it is pretty nice. We got it with 16GB RAM and 250ish GB SSD. It boots up pretty quickly and so far so good.

I bought a 1TB USB drive I planned on syncing with Google Drive and apparently Google says it is a bad idea to use a removable drive for Google drive. Can cause problems. That was disappointing as there is no way I can fit everything onto the last 120ish GB hard drive I have left.

I am thinking to manually copy my Drive contents to the USB drive weekly.

I use Dropbox and use selective sync for my Surface Pro 4 due to the lack of space. I only sync what I need. It seems like that feature was added to Google Drive last year. There's no way I need every single file synced when in the field.