Friday, July 6, 2018

For business use, don't buy a laptop with higher than 1080p resolution

The high resolution screens available today are amazing for graphics and gaming, but absolutely horrible if you need to use any traditional/legacy applications. The main application that gives me trouble is Quickbooks Desktop Pro. We have version 2016, and I don't imagine they're going to fix it anytime soon since they seem to (rightly) want everyone to move to their online version. We've been using Quickbooks for over 15 years, so we're using some features that simply aren't available in the online version. I'm sure we'll move to the online version at some point, but it won't be any time soon. I'm certain there are other desktop applications that similarly have a problem with high resolution monitors - specifically, the text and windows are too small to see, and scaling doesn't work correctly at all. It's just ugly.

The higher end business laptops (Lenovo Thinkpad T, P or X series; Dell XPS; etc.) generally offer a 1920x1080 pixel option as a base, then higher resolutions and touchscreens cost more. In my experience, you'll be the happiest with the lower cost 1920x1080 option. Whether you get a touch-enabled screen or not is up to you, but definitely skip the high resolution screen.

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