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Hello,

I am in the process of finding office laptops for clerical workers. Their work mainly involves MS Office, Outlook, and web browsing. My department has been buying the Dell Latitude E5xxx series for years but are looking to branch out to other manufacturers.

Specs we need:

i5 processor

8GB RAM

500GB HDD

Windows 7 Pro 64

We are manufacturer neutral, what suggestions do you have and how is driver support from that manufacturer? We’ve had some issues with Dell and Windows 7 support recently. Our company is not Windows 10 ready and absolutely need computers with Windows 7 support.

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We have had great success with the Lenovo Thinkpad T400 series laptops with our business. They are a business class, well tested notebook. They don’t put all the bleeding edge things into them, but rather what works for larger enterprises. We also bought a bunch of Thinkpad Yogas which worked well, but we did have some small issues with those. The T series for the most part has been good for us.

Isaac

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I would recommend the Lenovo E55-570 Series they are Win 7 Pro Compatible as well as 8 and 10. Also HP Elite Books are a great option, as well are powerful for running Auto Cad, and Solidworks.

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You’re going to have issues getting any if the newer laptops to win7, ms wont drop the updates after this month

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/04/windows-7-8-old-cpu-updates-blocked/%3Famp%3D1

Time to get the org to win10!

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We have used Lenovo’s T400 series for external employees. They seem to have held up well physically but Lenovo support is atrocious. It took about 4 hours on the phone with tech support to get recovery media from them which they then shipped to my local police department for some reason (after telling them I wasn’t the PD, they’re 5 miles away). The media never ended up working anyway. Those Lenovos are running Linux now.

I was unaware of the lack of support for Kaby Lake. Thanks for the input! My System Admin is on vacation this week but I will discuss this with him when he returns.

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No Image Found,

Agreed on Lenovo support. We have had our own difficulties with them as well, but I’ve worked with HP and Dell before and I can’t say they are much better. They all outsource over seas to people reading scripts and canned fixes. Unless someone else knows of a way to have better success with their tech support, I think your going to run into that with most large hardware manufacturers.

Concerning the recover media. Did you know you can download the media? Go here: ** LenovoRecovery - Lenovo Support US **. You put in your info and download a utility. You run it and it downloads the recovery media and lets you burn to a USB stick. If that doesn’t work, you can order physical copied from there too. Perhaps that might help you getting that recovery images.

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Thanks for all of the Lenovo mentions! Sorry to hear that your support experiences were less than great. For future reference, if you do need help with anything, you can always go to the Lenovo Vendor Page (tagged below) and reach out to the GG on there.

For your original question, your specs are pretty flexible and you can easily find something in that range. As mentioned, something in the T-Series range will be more of the high-end professional laptops and our E-Series will be more affordable. Depending on if it’s in your budget, the ThinkPad T470 is one of our T-Series ultrabooks. It’s $1,231.65 for an i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD. On the other hand, if you want to stick with the 500GB HDD and 8GB RAM, it’ll be $944.10. Let me know if you have any questions about devices!

@Lenovo

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What about the HP ProBook 450? You can use Windows 7 Pro (downgrade rights) and if your company is Windows 10 ready you can just upgrade for free.

I’m buying the elitebook series for years now and never had real driver problems and a plus is the good service hp is offering.

They also often update the drivers, and if you take a look at the Pro Book 450, the latest driver update was this month.

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Thank you for the mention, Dennis!

Michael, if you would like more info on the HP ProBook 450 , feel free to tag or PM at any time!

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We order HP Probooks almost exclusively. Pretty easy to pull apart and work on when necessary, and there’s a small spill tray under the keyboards for the inevitable crumbs and other “oopses” users are notorious for. Not foolproof of course but better than exposed circuitboard. Also fond of the nine-key built in, as a lot of laptops axe this for space or to better center they keyboard.

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I would again highly recommend the HP Probook 450 series lines. We have been purchasing the G4 line for a few months and they are fantastic laptops. Be sure to start looking into Windows 10, as many manufacturers will not sell Windows 7 anymore (I want to say that as of October last year they stopped shipping them with Windows 7).

@HP

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Thanks everyone for their replies. Unfortunately, most of these systems are using chipsets that do not support Windows 7. We have no tentative plans to upgrade to Windows 10 and are hitting a major roadblock because of this. Our vendors’ warehouses are empty of Windows 7 supported computers. I got the last 6 Dell Latitude E5550 computers from one of our vendors. I feel like there may not be options for Windows 7 business machines anymore.