13" or so laptop recommendations sought
 

I am in the market for a travel and home/couch use laptop. I think I'm looking for a 13" (or maybe 14) laptop. Looking for an i3 or i5 intel chipset, at least 4GB of RAM, a 7200 rpm drive or ssd with windows 7 64 bit OS. I'd like to keep the size and weight under control (wouldn't we all), say less than an inch thick and under 5 lbs.

In a perfect world I'd buy a Dell because of a plethora of adaptors laying about the house, but they seem prone to only selling 32 bit OSes or otherwise unable to meet these criteria. Asus has some contenders at new egg. This machine doesn't need to be a desktop replacement or a tablet--have one each of those. It ideally will last three or four years. Thoughts?

Tons of choice at the 14" size. At 13" or lower, you're looking at biz-spec'd notebooks.

Lenovo T410s or HP Envy 14.

I am asked too often so I wrote this up http://chxrambling.tumblr.com/post/2562603667/notebooks

It doesn't meet your i3/i5 criteria, but I'd give the new Macbook Air a look. I did and I bought it for travel. It's integrating surprisingly well in to the corporate environment and at about half the depth and weight you mentioned, it's amazing to travel with. The SSD drive (or at least the way it is implemented in the MBA) makes the slower processor amazingly fast.

I've heard some folks say the best Windows laptop is a Mac running Windows.

Sony Vaio Z.

Note that my post above (and now in my signature) happens to compare the T410s, the Macbook Air 13" and the Vaio Z :D

Right now, I'm a big fan of the Toshiba Portege R705 - i5, 4GB, 500GB, DVD drive an d8 hours battery life. Can be found for around $799.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0041O425K...YATY3J22YJXQ1&

Decent video performance, good build quality, and only a tad over three pounds.

Or he could get a standard MacBook / MacBook Pro (I'd go for the 13" pro myself). And yes, a Mac running Parallels (or BootCamp) version Windows is the way to go.

Also, my 17" Macbook Pro gets about 7 hours of battery life, I hear the smaller ones do much better.

Yeah, from the guys who own a Mac. :D :D

+1

The Portege R series is an excellent choice.

Second that. Had been shopping around for something similar myself and ended up buying the R705-P41 a few weeks ago from Amazon. It doesn't have bluetooth but a small adaptor fixed that. Very happy so far and like not having to tow around a 5.5 lbs unit!

The Toshiba is another 1366 x 768 display... the manufacturers figured they can slap a HD label on this and get away with it. An 1400 x 1050 screen was 1 470 000 pixels, 1440 * 900 is only 1 296 000 (174 000 pixels less) while 1366*768 is only 1 049 088 that's another 246 912 pixels, it's really bad...

Most people don't buy 13" laptops for the predominate purpose of playing HD videos.

For normal computer uses, particularly at this price point, 1366x768 is fine.

The Z-series Sony is not worth ~four times as much.

Depends on your needs. I love mine, and would hardly call it "really bad".

1366 x 768 is HD. Not sure what you think Toshiba is trying to get away with.