Hello, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here it goes.
I'm looking to purchase a cheap Microsoft laptop to use for hardware projects. I ran into some problems using my mac and I don't want to risk another episode of driver incompatibility issues.
I know I need a USB 2.0 port to connect the Arduino to it but wasn't sure if there was anything else I should be aware of.
I would watch out for the laptops with "Window 10S" (allows only applications from the Store to be installed.) There is a Store version of Arduino, so it might be OK; I'm not sure about how various add-ons like the board manager behave.
I've got a somewhat similar system (with windows 8.1, though.) The 32GB flash "disk" can be a bit "tight" for "big" things like OS upgrades. Especially since something like 10GB gets taken up by the "recovery partition." You can add a flash card and a usb flash drive for extra storage (though it might be slow for applications.)
sundeeptoor:
I'm looking to purchase a cheap Microsoft laptop to use for hardware projects. I ran into some problems using my mac and I don't want to risk another episode of driver incompatibility issues.
I know I need a USB 2.0 port to connect the Arduino to it but wasn't sure if there was anything else I should be aware of.
Assuming you have checked that there really is a problem with driver compatibility and you intend to keep the mac for everything else, you certainly don't need much to run Arduino, and I submit an old second hand laptop is just fine. My Dell 505 laptop for Arduino cost $42, of which $35 was the going rate for the kosher XP Pro sticker on the back. What else do you need?
Get a laptop with as many USB ports as possible - the one I am writing this on has three.
If this laptop is primarily for use with an Arduino and if you normally use a MAC then I suggest you load Linux on the laptop and forget about Windows. No driver problems and the technical underpinnings will be more like a MAC.
If you are going that route check online before you buy if LInux will work. There are probably very few for which it won't work but some have weird WiFi issues that can take time to resolve.
I really like windows tablets but I can't recommend this HP model
I use Dell Venue 11pro (64bit edition)
It has Intel Atom Z37xx CPU which is enough for fullHD videos and almost 4K
You can easily use almost all program. I use Adobe photoshop&lightroom.
It might be a little pricey more than this HP but it will worth it.
You can easily choose another tablet that has 4 cores intel Atom Z37xx series or Z83xx series CPU.
I can only complain about WiFi quality.
It seems connected but hardly stream 1080p from my NAS.
Which make me crazy everytime
Like a number of posters above, I've used older (Windows XP or Vista) laptops with Arduino both with the native Windows OS or with a dual boot installation of Linux (Lubuntu). The advantage of the latter is that there are lightweight Linux distributions that can run on older hardware, but which are under support from the developers.
That said you might consider using a Raspberry Pi or similar Linux/ARM single board computer which can host the Arduino development environment. I've done this with headless installations where one would run the Pi remotely from a Windows/Mac/Linux machine. The advantage here is that the Pi itself may play a role in one of your embedded computing projects.
I once bought a cheap laptop because I had an older version of Windows and my new tax software wouldn't run... And, I didn't want to upgrade my operating system and work on my taxes at the same time...
That went fine (and I got my taxes done) and I eventually upgraded my older computers. I ended-up connecting the "extra" laptop to my living room stereo to play MP3s. And, I regretted not spending a bit more money to get a computer with an HDMI port so I could have also used it to play videos.
So... Think about what other uses this computer might have, and if you're thinking about a refurbished computer, consider getting one with Windows 10 so you don't get stuck with an outdated operating system.
I have two Win7 computers that won't run Win10 and as-of now, that's not causing any problems. At work, I use an XP machine and even a couple of Win98 machines, but these are running some older special-purpose test programs, they don't go online, and we don't expect to ever upgrade the hardware or software or add new software.
An older laptop should work very nicely with Puppy Linux. I used the version Tahrpup 6.0 CE for a long time. If you have an old laptop there does not seem any point using a newer version and when I last tried it the newer Xenialpup was not as complete. I had the impression that the enthusiasm for keeping up with the latest version of Ubuntu was not as strong as it had been.
You can run Puppy Linux completely from a USB stick.