What's a good laptop to buy?..

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  • #362
    Little green man
    Participant

    For the past decade or so I’ve been leasing a laptop through the education department and its been a pretty good deal. A new laptop every 3 years with full warranty and insurance all for about $11.50 per fortnight.

    But they’ve increasingly been making it more difficult with this laptop. Now we have to take the machine in and hook it up to the network to ‘activate’ the various licences every 3 months, we no longer get the Adobe products for free (my main incentive to have this laptop) and a few other things.

    So, if I were to simply go out and buy a new laptop for myself, what sort of specs would I be looking for…?

    One essential requirement is that it has a CD/DVD player as much of my software, including my CS6 Photoshop, is on CD/DVD (no, I’m not going to pay $50.00 per month for Adobe’s CC version when I have a perfectly good copy of the same thing here on CD). It’ll need a decent amount of RAM – my current laptop has 8Gb which works great, and a decent sized HDD (my current one only has a 128Gb SSD of which 90Gb is taken up with OS and other education dept. software. I have to use an external 1Tb drive to store my stuff). It needs to hook up to an external 23″ monitor.

    But otherwise what sort of processor and other specs should I be looking for? Any brand name notably better than another? I currently have a HP and its works fine as far as I’m concerned. Budget is around the $Aus500 – $Aus1500 mark

    #363
    NovaFlash
    Keymaster

    I would like to advise you not to limit your choice of laptop simply by looking at whether it has a CD/DVD drive or not. For a small price you can get a separate CD/DVD player/writer that connects over USB, so that ‘limitation’ can be easily overcome. If you limit on this criteria you’re missing out on a lot of laptop choices for no really good reason. I mean, how often do you use CD’s anyways? during installation. Then never again, right?

    Minimum cpu: intel core i3. i5 or i7 are better.
    memory; if you’re lacking in memory, get an expansion. these are fairly cheap and easy to put in, i can even guide you through it myself. most come with 8gb nowadays anyways.
    harddisk: always SSD, don’t get spinning rust, you’ll regret it. i’d personally want a minimum of 256gb in my laptop. if you can’t get a cheap one with 256gb ssd, then get a cheap one with a standard spinning rust harddisk and replace it with a separately purchased 256gb ssd you can buy elsewhere. Should cost around 120 ausd.

    #364
    Little green man
    Participant

    Ah, ok. Good to know then. An external CD drive will set me back about $90.00 and a 4 port USB hub (because I’d be running out of them..) is another $20 – 40.00

    I was thinking about something like this –>

    http://www.harveynorman.com.au/computers-tablets/computers/laptops/hp-15-ay056tx-15-6-laptop.html

    or this –>

    http://www.harveynorman.com.au/computers-tablets/computers/laptops/hp-15-ay045tx-15-6-laptop.html

    Home site –> http://www.harveynorman.com.au/computers-tablets/computers/laptops/laptops/1065?gclid=CJ-ytr617dACFdF9vQodg2QKLA&gclsrc=aw.ds

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