Hello, I am shopping for a laptop that has a great battery life, isn't flimsy, and has sturdy keys. I have a Windows Surface Pro 3 at the moment and am on keyboard #3 due to use. I am not looking to spend more than $500 on it. If it's also possible to upgrade RAM, etc, that's a bonus. Can run Indesign and isn't a tablet/computer. Thanks!
I am not familiar with indexing, so can only say look at the recommended specs for the software. Other than that any laptop can run a word processor. Though for writing I find it helps to pick up a Logitech USB mouse kb combo. I generally find laptop kbs have a softer touch. I prefer the firmer touch of a more tradition kb, and I hate track pads. Dell and HP both make good general use laptops. If you are going to do upgrades, check the warranty. While ram and HD upgrades are easy enough to do yourself you may void the warranty. External HDs are inexpensive and make a good back up device.
I would recommend a laptop with an SSD (Solid State Drive) as the main drive. They are fast as hell. The less load times between you and writing, the better. ASUS computers are sturdy and have never let me down. The one I have, has lasted me for around 7 years so far.
If you're looking for a good laptop keyboard, I like Lenovo Thinkpads for keyboard quality. I'd recommend trying out the particular model you're looking at to ensure you like its specific key feel, but Thinkpads are generally thought to have good keyboards. This may be a moot point if you plan to dock the laptop and use an external keyboard, but if you plan to write on the go, I'd recommend considering the keyboard since that's what you'll be using 99% of the time as a writer.
It's a matter of taste, I think. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad sitting around that has a very sensitive (or possibly faulty) keyboard. It sometimes gives me a letter two times. I do all my writing on a HP Chromebook, but that would require you to do everything in Google Docs. If that is something you could live with, you get great battery life, and you'll probably be able to find something in your price range. And that's it. It doesn't do much of anything else. It does porn alright, but other than that, you can forget about gaming or indesigning. So it's a trade off. Either way, I've always rather enjoyed the HP keyboards, so a more versatile machine of theirs would probably do the trick as well. It's just gonna laugh at your budget, though. They charge a bunch of bucks extra for that HP logo.
I see Mellel version 6 (Mac only word processor) has been released. Very solid with wonderful support for styles. Mellel's auto-titles feature is pretty cool, too. In Mellel, you don't apply a text style to put something in the table of contents, you apply an auto-title. In auto-title configurations, you get separate control over TOC format, format in running headers, cross references, and a couple of other things. It's not Word. I think Mellel is far, far nicer. That's just an opinion, of course.
Taste and model age. Thinkpad keyboards have gotten worse and worse since Lenovo have gradually replaced the original IBM tooling. Taste aside, their 'best' (measured as travel, reliability of keystroke and correlation of 'click' feedback with registered keypress, lack of RSI issues) that can be used today are those still using the old IBM type keys, which takes you up to the X220/T420. After that they went to chiclet style keys, which are great in their own way, but bottom out too soon and cause more RSI. Recent models have just got worse and worse and I've had a lot of issues like you with key sensitivity or lack thereof. Recent Thinkpads have basically none of the advantages that made the old models a different category of laptop to usual consumer grade ones. They aren't strikingly ugly, they don't have military-grade reinforced chassis, you can't spill coffee on the keyboards (until the X220/T420 they had special coffee channels under the keys), you can't swap the hard-discs, you can't disassemble two old beat-up ones and assemble a new working one out of the bits. If its just for writing get yourself an X220/T420, max out the RAM, turn off Windows' fancy animations and other speed hogging features, and don't run many programs or tabs at once. (Or run Linux, but I appreciate that's geekery too far for most.)
Random trivia on the side: In the military, military grade means "meeting bare minimum requirements at the lowest possible cost." So, kinda the opposite of military grade for the public. (Not looked very much deeper into this yet, take this trivial information with a grain of salt.)
Military personnel are famous for breaking things. So military grade means the standards are set make things hard to break by the average idiot.
What do you mean by sturdy keys? Are you talking about the letters wearing off so you can't see them anymore?
Wrong. Very wrong. Military grade means that it was the cheapest thing from the lowest bidder, and the government still over paid because when funded by taxes, who cares. We still break things in ingenious ways, but military grade items are also usually prone to malfunction even if left on a shelf. When the government finally has had enough of it, they sell them in bulk at pennies on the dollar to surplus buyers who then market them to the civilian population who assume anything adopted by the military has to be the best. Joke is on them. I am currently signed for $52,000 worth of computers in the Army and they drop like flies so fast, 3/4 of them are either in the repair depot or being turned in as non-functional. It's a struggle to just keep my little shop all up on working machines.
Have more faith in the average idiot. ;o) We had a cat who needed just one footstep to set my laptop to Chinese, and my mother is an absolute genius at breaking the entire internet. And I don't mean in that Emma-Watson-is-legal-now sort of way. I mean, literally managed to stumble into the Router settings and cancel internet.
Idiots are why I make sure there are no big red buttons anywhere near me. Cats can be extremely evil. My daughters cat would come in my room while I was sleeping and steal my pillow. Sounds like you need a better PW on that router. Lol
