Buying a laptop (educate me)

[Strichev]

In a few months (yes, I tend to plan such "investments rather carefully) I'm going to find myself in need of a laptop. Since buying a laptop and building a desktop are vastly dissimilar, I thought I might just as well ask you people about them. Laptops that is.

Share your experience and wisdom. Be it a plastic casing compared to an aluminium one, various sizes, SSDs, processors, firms...everything...post it. I need to acquire a general feeling for the things the market has to offer, for there is hardly anything worse than running into a store or a web-site and blindly pick the first thing one sees.

[Sath]

Laptops are not suitable for hardcore gaming, whatever the description might state, unless you buy various other stuff to make it somewhere near to one.

If you are looking for mediocre gaming on the move, go for a 2 gb Graphics card one, along with a core i5(core i7 is way too overrated and overpriced), 8 gb ram at max, 1 tb Hard disk, and an optional SSD where you can install your OS and other applications that you might want to open a tad faster. The rest are standard things like cooler, usb mouse, earphones and whatnot. This much will handle most of the games with ease, except graphic intensive games.

Pretty much thats all you need.

[Mickk]

Laptops are not suitable for hardcore gaming, whatever the description might state, unless you buy various other stuff to make it somewhere near to one.

If you are looking for mediocre gaming on the move, go for a 2 gb Graphics card one, along with a core i5(core i7 is way too overrated and overpriced), 8 gb ram at max, 1 tb Hard disk, and an optional SSD where you can install your OS and other applications that you might want to open a tad faster. The rest are standard things like cooler, usb mouse, earphones and whatnot. This much will handle most of the games with ease, except graphic intensive games.

Pretty much thats all you need.

Not exactly true about hardcore gaming, you can play hi-spec games on a Laptop, but it won't be a great experience, simply because laptop keyboards usually aren't positioned properly for playing games, due to most of them having a 'finger mouse pad' built into the front edge of the laptop.

Also, 'gaming' laptops tend to have a short battery life, a few hours if you are lucky depending on the settings you use.

The other thing is that 99% of laptops WILL come with an OS pre-installed, along with a bunch of software made specifically for that brand of laptop.

When I got mine a few years back (Toshiba Satellite), the instructions basically said, "Plug it into mains power using provided equipment, press the on button and follow instructions", which I did and my new laptop proceeded to self install the OS, in this case Windows 7.

My advice is to go into a computer shop, look at the various laptops there and there should be a good variety if the shop is any good, check the specs on the laptops, then compare prices for what you get.
Spend as much as you can afford, but my advice is not to bother with anything more powerful than an i5.

Personally, my Toshiba Satellite A660 (google it to see what it looks like) is pretty good for what I payed for it. It has decent sound, thanks to actual mini-speakers and a pretty good screen and graphics, but due to those and a few other things, it's battery life tends to be pretty short when it's off the mains power.

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Mickk: One orginal, 4 clones. Telp..teleh....mind comu...comi..come...talking ability.
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[dirmaster0]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop as well, owned it for 3-4 years now and its still running fine. i3 w/ 8GB RAM & 500GB HD. I also work on computers for a living, and the Satellite series is probably the line we see the least (which is good, they're a pretty solid line of laptops that can take a fair amount of abuse). I would caution you to stay away from the HP Pavilion line of laptops, and the Gateway NV series as well.

For a run of the mill laptop, I would suggest getting an i5-i7 CPU with ~8GB RAM, 500-1TB HD w/ Windows 7/8. We sell a fair amount of the Dell Inspiron line of laptops at work, but I would still go for a Toshiba Satellite model. Good luck!