Reply to: New Laptop - what spec?

[bobspud]

Or an ultrabook. But you pay a big premium for the design.


I don't think you need i7 or 8Gb RAM for your stated usage. A £400 job should do nicely.

Power is not the only thing you get from a Macbook Air. Did you know that they support the use of two 27 inch thunderbolt screens from a single port? This used to be restricted to only the mac book pro's but now its pretty much most of the range. To me that is the feature to have. My desk at home is clear of any cables and I can carry a light machine around if I am on the road. Yes you can get Matrox boxes that do it but its just another mess of cables to have to tidy.

[d000hg]

Mac Book Air. Job done. Yes its expensive but how much nicer is it to carry something that is properly light instead of a two tone pile of laptop...

Apple (United Kingdom) - MacBook Air

Or an ultrabook. But you pay a big premium for the design.


I don't think you need i7 or 8Gb RAM for your stated usage. A £400 job should do nicely.

[Spacecadet]

WTF have they done with the keyboard ???

Is there any laptop left with a grown up keyboard or is it all 'chiclet' ?

As with most things, the chiclet keyboards are quite good once you get used to them. As long as they are attached to a solid laptop they should flex less than the old style laptop keyboards.

What is bad though is when key like Home/End/Page Up/Page Down become "special function" keys and need a combination key press to access them

[Fishface]

Thinkpad T series

WTF have they done with the keyboard ???

Is there any laptop left with a grown up keyboard or is it all 'chiclet' ?

[ladymuck]

Or you could buy the same from eBay. A brand new Macbook pro costing £1549 from Apple cost me £1000 on eBay in a bid I won. The next guy won another bid for the same laptop from the same seller for £800. Go figure

Totally valid and an excellent thing to do when you know what you want and how much you should pay for it. Never done it myself as I'm not very trustful of people selling second hand (even new in box) computer equipment unless it's something fairly innocuous like a scanner or printer.

[amcdonald]

So you got a new laptop with a Haswell i5, but with a year old GPU, instead of 7xxM? Was that by design, or are they shifting their stock of 6xxM GPUs? I haven't looked at a new notebook for a while, so not sure what's been about.

And yes, it is quite bad that I'd consider a year old GPU outdated, but when you're buying a new notebook I'd expect new components - in my desktop I'm running a GPU that's a few years old now, but I can easily upgrade that whenever I get around to it.

No mines a 2nd gen i7 (Sandybridge I think), had it quite a while now and wasn't exactly expensive at the time I bought it.


I was just trying to prove you can run newish games even with an old graphics card as long as you've got a decent cpu and are prepared to dial down the graphics a notch

At home I've got 6970s for when I want ott graphics for gaming, for laptops I have them speced for running virtual machines, and virtual servers, gaming tends to come second when really. So lots of memory and a decent cpu and plenty of disk space, the graphics card I can cope with being a bit lame

[Ticktock]

If it helps when working away I can play Battlefield 3 on High on my lappy even with it decidely lame Geforce 630M (yes that bad), mainly because unless you run the graphics maxxed out it is cpu intensive so and a quad core i5 is enough

So you got a new laptop with a Haswell i5, but with a year old GPU, instead of 7xxM? Was that by design, or are they shifting their stock of 6xxM GPUs? I haven't looked at a new notebook for a while, so not sure what's been about.

And yes, it is quite bad that I'd consider a year old GPU outdated, but when you're buying a new notebook I'd expect new components - in my desktop I'm running a GPU that's a few years old now, but I can easily upgrade that whenever I get around to it.

[quackhandle]

if you get a Lenovo (mine is a T420s) you can remove the optical drive and stick in another SSD. (cheaper than having lenovo do it for you).

Plenty of vids on youtube showing you how this is done.

qh

[amcdonald]

If it helps when working away I can play Battlefield 3 on High on my lappy even with it decidely lame Geforce 630M (yes that bad), mainly because unless you run the graphics maxxed out it is cpu intensive so and a quad core i5 is enough

Do get an SSD, and as much memory as you can afford as those two things will prolong it's life as a development machince

[Scrag Meister]

What games?

Angry Birds or the latest and greatest Call of Duty at full resolution?

Most machines these days will manage the internet and the associated graphics etc, but games on the other hand depend on everything, CPU, RAM and GPU and even SSD v HDD to some extent.

Edit : See this was mentioned before, still stands.

Civ V system requirements

Pretty low Recommended spec considering machines these days.

[tranceporter]

I spend as much as I can possibly justify on the best spec I can, as it will then last longer and survive at least one, maybe two, OS upgrades. I also like mine small and light and have had two Toshiba Portege's over the past 8 years that have performed brilliantly.

If you're only going to use it for surfing and documents, this strategy will work out fine.

Or you could buy the same from eBay. A brand new Macbook pro costing £1549 from Apple cost me £1000 on eBay in a bid I won. The next guy won another bid for the same laptop from the same seller for £800. Go figure

[ladymuck]

I spend as much as I can possibly justify on the best spec I can, as it will then last longer and survive at least one, maybe two, OS upgrades. I also like mine small and light and have had two Toshiba Portege's over the past 8 years that have performed brilliantly.

If you're only going to use it for surfing and documents, this strategy will work out fine.

[IRMe]

I love the Samsung series 9 stuff, a laptop you can happily use on your lap and hardly notice carrying it about. No optical drive but most of my games come from Steam, or just serve the CD one time over the network.

80GB SSD is limiting but very fast.

[Ticktock]

Nothing special normal the Civ series - which seem to be more memory/processor hungry than graphics intense so probably do not need a dedicated graphics card

also cheers all - much appreciated

Even with Civ 5 you would be fine with a fairly basic machine. You'd probably do fine with an el cheapo laptop, and don't need to build spec up too much. If I were you I'd think about a budget first, then look at what you can get. I think I spent about £500 on my current mid-range notebook. It's got a decent Core i5 processor, 6GB RAM, dedicated graphics card. The only things I would have considered changing would be to put an SSD in (although of course I'd lose some capacity) and maybe to shove the RAM up to 8GB. I use it for gaming as well as work and most things seem to run pretty well, apart from Planetside 2, which runs pretty crappily on any machine.

[Bunk]

Perhaps. Vast quantities of knowledge and expertise have been handed over in pursuit of greater profits, they outnumber westerners considerably, and they lead the world at internet censorship, so on the balance of probabilities the Chinese are probably leaders of the pack when it comes to this sort of thing.

OTOH they are mostly shipping Intel silicon, which handles stuff like TPM, lights-out management access and so on, so it's quite possible that Uncle Sam has a tunnel leading into your back passage as well.

I think this and the Huawei thing are basically western governments thinking "better safe than sorry" as they are unable to tell with certainty if this stuff is compromised or not.

Whenever our government or the Americans denounce China's censorship I always suspect they're thinking "Lucky barstewards! I wish we could do that".