Good laptop for EFI live only
- Thread starter 455buick
- Start date
Kinda all of the above if ya really think about it lol. I just don't know much about laptops at all. Battery life would be good. Screen size is kinda what ever, something average. Don't really want the laptop to be too small. I have no idea on pricing for these at all.
I use 13" laptop I got for $250 for efi live only. Works perfect. The app doesn't need much cpu so pretty much any cheap laptop will work
^^ what he said. You may be better off with a used
laptop. then you can always get a new battery from Amazon and get good runtime. standard screen sizes are normally between 13 and 15 inches. smaller then that any they are going to be hard to see all of the tables. great for potability. also will tend to use non standard keyboards. above 15" gives a lot more room for display content and a full sized keyboard. often has a slot for a second hard drive or DVD drive, etc. Mine is a 17" and does fine for tuning in the vehicle but I'll admit it is a little larger then optimal. but love the screen real estate and number pad. good battery life at 4 hours bit some of the little ones are pushing 8+ hours now.
the newer compact or netbook or what have you are now using the M.2 and NVMe type hard drives which are somewhat like using a thumb drive as a hard drive but internally. good for getting bumped around because there is no moving discs and sliding arms like the traditional types. so if you are getting a somewhat newer one you can see if it contains one of these. the operating system can take up to 10 gb or more and saved files and software can quickly eat up space so I'd shoot for a minimum of 100 gb of storage but you can realistically get away with 40 gb or so if you where mindful of getting rid of junk files and other unessential programs
For CPUs, EFI live can run on much older hardware. an old Celeron processor could do it. but I'd stick with at least an intel i3 or or equivalent as it still has to run windows and boot fast enough to make it worth using. if you are planning on keeping it off the internet for most of its life and really only using it to update EFI live or email tune files, etc then older generation windows such as XP or 7 is preferred over 8 and 10. but no new laptop can be found with anything less then 8, maybe even 10 now. some are even being shipped with 11 on them. I'd shoot for finding one with windows 7 if you can
Toshiba, HP, Dell & Lenovo all make good laptops. I really like the Dell Latitude for their simple straight forward work design. made for business so not a lot of bells and whistles or other flashy stuff. just a simple workhorse. I have an HP now but if I was to do it again I'd probably go with a latitude.
laptop. then you can always get a new battery from Amazon and get good runtime. standard screen sizes are normally between 13 and 15 inches. smaller then that any they are going to be hard to see all of the tables. great for potability. also will tend to use non standard keyboards. above 15" gives a lot more room for display content and a full sized keyboard. often has a slot for a second hard drive or DVD drive, etc. Mine is a 17" and does fine for tuning in the vehicle but I'll admit it is a little larger then optimal. but love the screen real estate and number pad. good battery life at 4 hours bit some of the little ones are pushing 8+ hours now.
the newer compact or netbook or what have you are now using the M.2 and NVMe type hard drives which are somewhat like using a thumb drive as a hard drive but internally. good for getting bumped around because there is no moving discs and sliding arms like the traditional types. so if you are getting a somewhat newer one you can see if it contains one of these. the operating system can take up to 10 gb or more and saved files and software can quickly eat up space so I'd shoot for a minimum of 100 gb of storage but you can realistically get away with 40 gb or so if you where mindful of getting rid of junk files and other unessential programs
For CPUs, EFI live can run on much older hardware. an old Celeron processor could do it. but I'd stick with at least an intel i3 or or equivalent as it still has to run windows and boot fast enough to make it worth using. if you are planning on keeping it off the internet for most of its life and really only using it to update EFI live or email tune files, etc then older generation windows such as XP or 7 is preferred over 8 and 10. but no new laptop can be found with anything less then 8, maybe even 10 now. some are even being shipped with 11 on them. I'd shoot for finding one with windows 7 if you can
Toshiba, HP, Dell & Lenovo all make good laptops. I really like the Dell Latitude for their simple straight forward work design. made for business so not a lot of bells and whistles or other flashy stuff. just a simple workhorse. I have an HP now but if I was to do it again I'd probably go with a latitude.
Pretty much any modern regular laptop will work fine, although i have no experience with apple products to say they work with efi ok.
I've wondered if efi would work with a tablet.
I've wondered if efi would work with a tablet.
as long as the tablet runs windows it should work. the software is not compatible with Android, linex or or other operating systems. it would be a little obnoxious trying to type in all those cells, copy and pasting, etc without a keyboard. it would be cool to use one as a monitor or to use the scan tool and see the graphs and gauges but setting it up would be a pain
You can run EFI Live in Linux. Depending on what flavor you run there are some stability issues. I have mainly had issue with getting the drivers for the V2/V3 to properly unpack and install. However I use windows 11 on my production laptop. I’ll link it below. It’s a tad bit over kill but it’s what I went with. More importantly then the laptop I highly recommend getting a cloud based storage set up for you or your customers tunes. If anything happens to your laptop I.E damage/lost/stolen you still have all your stock files/revisions timing tables and what not.
shorturl.at/tJLS8
shorturl.at/tJLS8