GRcade

My laptop is currently getting on a bit (it's an older model of the Dell XPS 15, a good six years old now) so I'm looking to replace it. I need it primarily to write and watch dumb gooseberry fool, I don't game on here often but I assume whatever laptop I end up getting will be powerful enough to play most indies. Don't want an Apple really, because strawberry float Apple.

Current front-runner is the Lenovo Ideapad 710S 13 inch, but I wanted to get some advice from you guys. Would the cheaper Indepad 500s be more than enough for what I need, or is there something completely different I should be going for? I'm happy to spent upwards of £1000, but £700-800 (the cost of the 710s) would be ideal.

Knoyleo wrote:I got myself one of these - Dell inspiron 15 7559 laptops recently, and it's great. With the new vulkan api, it runs Doom comfortably, so performance wise, it's great. The sub woofer it claims to come with is a bit gooseberry fool, but chuck some headphones in and your sorted.

The version I got doesn't have an SSD, but there is a more expensive version that does, or you can just add one to the cheapest version yourself. The more expensive ones are also 4k rather than 1080p, but I doubt it has the grunt for 4k, so you're probably better off getting the 1080p version so you can run everything at native resolution.

Should be more than enough for your needs, and well under £1k

I recommend a MacBook Air.

Skippy wrote:My laptop is currently getting on a bit (it's an older model of the Dell XPS 15, a good six years old now) so I'm looking to replace it. I need it primarily to write and watch dumb gooseberry fool, I don't game on here often but I assume whatever laptop I end up getting will be powerful enough to play most indies. Don't want an Apple really, because strawberry float Apple.

Current front-runner is the Lenovo Ideapad 710S 13 inch, but I wanted to get some advice from you guys. Would the cheaper Indepad 500s be more than enough for what I need, or is there something completely different I should be going for? I'm happy to spent upwards of £1000, but £700-800 (the cost of the 710s) would be ideal.

That's way over the top.

There have been a few deals on recently, you could probably get a laptop to do all that for around £300. Spending up to £500-£600 could get you something with a discrete graphics solution.

Up towards £1000 and you'd get a fairly decent gaming laptop for current gen titles. Its insane to spend that amount for what it sounds like you are going to use a laptop for.

I've now had three Lenovo devices and I find them a bit unreliable, personally. I bought a Y510p a couple of years ago and it went tits up. Fortunately I had three year warranty. They tried to fix it a bunch of times and then replaced it with a Y700 which is running fine ATM but I've only had it a couple of months. The guy at the shop said that they have had loads returned and they are always breaking.

Also I have a Yoga Pro 2 tablet which I just find a bit ropy. It's a bit crash prone. At the moment I wouldn't buy another Lenovo device as I don't think they have good reliability. If your after a good laptop I would recommend Dell or Asus.

The price is more about future-proofing it. Owned my last two laptops for 6-8 years and would like that to continue. As for gaming, it would be good to be able to do it, I just don't see myself making use of it all that often. I've also come to the conclusion now that I want a 15inch screen, which rules out the 710s

I got mine from PC Specialist. You get a few basic shells to choose from, but can then customise it to pretty much your exact specification. Because I was after a fast laptop without a lot of extras (I didn't need an enormous hard drive or Blu-Ray player, for instance) I was able to get what I wanted for a good price. Totally free of bloatware as well.

Recommended from me.

Skippy wrote:The price is more about future-proofing it.

What are you future proofing it against?

If you only want it for mainly writing and watching stuff with occasional gaming thrown in then there's not really much to look at getting.

A current gen i5 with 8GB of RAM and probably some sort of SSD, if you really want to go for a bit more gaming power then get one with a Nvidia graphics chip as well (although I think the new 10 series chips are coming to laptops soon so if this is a factor you might be best off waiting to see about them). You definitely shouldn't pay any more than £800 for all of that. And that's an absolutely top estimate, any more and you are probably wasting money.

There is no such thing as future proofing and the price of laptops in general has drastically gone down. When you are spending over the 750 quid mark or so you're probably buying into marketing and design more than anything else, this is where the profit margins come and stuff gets unnecessary.

I would look at Asus and some of the higher end Dell designs are quite good too. I'd also try to avoid something with poor battery life and that runs hot, which is generally the case for the overpowered machines. You want an actual quote for that battery life, and then half it. Remember batteries deteriorate over time.

I do recommend an SSD. You can also upgrade RAM beyond 8GB for peanuts, I'm still on 4GB and I do a hell of a lot of work across multiple apps and very rarely reach that ceiling.

more heat than light wrote:I got mine from PC Specialist. You get a few basic shells to choose from, but can then customise it to pretty much your exact specification. Because I was after a fast laptop without a lot of extras (I didn't need an enormous hard drive or Blu-Ray player, for instance) I was able to get what I wanted for a good price. Totally free of bloatware as well.

Recommended from me.

I'm backing this option with the budget.

You can get so much better value for money out of it and get it spec'd to your tastes.

Can't go wrong with a full HD screen, 8GB Ram, 256GB SSD and a decent Intel i5 for far less than anyone else will offer.

How does this look?



I'm currently split between one of these and a Lenovo Ideapad 710s. Decided I'd be happy with a 13" screen now

Looks pretty good to me.

Do you need a regular hard drive in addition to the solid state drive? All it will do is add weight and drain the battery faster. I'd rather go for 500GB SSD and be still under budget and buy an external hard drive if I needed more storage space.

This Laptop might be of interest, its Windows 7 but there are still ways to upgrade without paying I think...

http://www.debenhamsplus.com/p/1132242/ ... nal-laptop

If you just want it for writing and porn Netflix, why on Earth is your budget so high?