I need to buy a laptop so I’m not using my work cpu for personal things.
Main uses…
excel spreadsheets,
pay online bills (if didn’t want to use phone)
basic family photo editing and where I do annual family slideshow videos with music in the back ground. I’m guessing I could/should save videos on external hard drives??
So my question… what kind of laptop should I buy and what are the minimum memory/RAM whatever type stuff do I need? In college I always bought the cheap $250 laptops from Best Buy and last for a year or so but was terribly slow.
I just need it to perform the tasks I mention above and not be slow and for the money be something that lasts as long as possible proportionately to the cost.
If you can tell me minimum specs I need, certain brand and what I don’t need or what I should stay away from it would be helpful. And if possible, post some links to laptops for sale you would recommend for me. There’s too much sales type fluff for the avg person to really know what’s good and how much cpu they actually need.
If you were asking about TVs I could do this easily. There are a handful of go to bang for your buck TV models, plus a couple of high end ones for bigger budgets.
For laptops, keep in mind that almost all of them are built still, I believe, by about 2 or 3 Taiwanese companies and then a more recognizable brand name gets slapped on them. So if you’re buying brands, it would be based on tech support.
As far as specs, any windows based PC will probably do what you want. You’re best off just watching for sales.
I actually don’t like that particular Dell that much getting half the ram in a half the storage and you’re paying for a high refresh rate screen which you don’t need. However, I wanted to list it to show you the difference and how pain. Just a little bit more, could get you a lot better specs.
Dell runs so many specials that I guarantee you can probably find a similar respect Dell to that ASUS machine for probably around the same price. Just got to look.
So looking at that ASUS specs… what should I be looking at and what is important for me at a minimum? I’ll have this on (2) larger dual monitors so laptop screen size doesn’t matter
For a basic use machine all these 12th gen CPUs are complete overkill. So get one with a decent amount of RAM and a decent sized SSD for storage. Go bigger if you end up saving tons of pictures / video / media files locally.
Everything else on that machine should be fine. I don’t like the wifi chip because it’s not wifi 6 compliant. But if your home network ain’t WiFi 6, there’s no point. And wifi 5 (dual band 802.11ac) isn’t slow…
Everything else is personal preference.
The screen is big, with a standard TV refresh rate. It has a mediocre but fully serviceable camera… Not sure what else you want from it based on the very basic usage you said.
I’m not married to that model. It was just one of the first couple I came across on that Slickdeals link.
Almost any laptop you buy that isn’t a neutered Chromebook will probably do what you need it to.
Just thought about battery - that might matter to you and I’m terrible with laptop battery advice. I leave mine plugged in 24/7 so I don’t care
Personally, I’d try to get a 1 or 2 TB SSD. They don’t cost that much more. If you’re in a configuration tool on a sellers website (eg Dell) and it’s an upgrade option, I’d probably pay for it.
Personal pref here, but I vote for AMD over Intel. I consider Intel laptops to be more like personal heaters with blow dryer attachment. At least that’s what my Dell was from work. In general you will get better battery life and run lower temps on AMD vs Intel in two comparable systems.
Thanks for all the info. If anyone else has any opinion, let’s hear it. And if anyone sees a laptop for sale they recommend, post the link. I’ll be looking around over the next few weeks and will be pulling the trigger soon.
I don’t know much about laptops but if you want something that’ll last ages, go the ThinkPad route. Mine has been through hell and back and she still runs perfectly.
Buying a laptop is very subjective as to which you should buy. It depends on your budget and your needs. Based on your needs just about any laptop will work. You can go out and buy the latest and greatest for $1800 - $2500 that will last you 4 to 6 years or you can go buy and economical model for $400 - $600 and buy another economical model in 2 - 4 years. You don’t need anything more than an integrated video card for what you are doing. RAM of 8GB to 16GB and any processor on the market today would work fine. Don’t buy a large integrated hard drive or a SSD unless it is cheap because you don’t need the read/write speed. Software is moving to subscription based platforms and don’t matter much anymore. If it were me I would go economical direction, buy an external hard drive and a large monitor.
My home office setup has a Dell basic laptop (Corporate PC), a custom built Desktop, and a MSI Stealth Gaming laptop. I run with a HP 32", Dell 43", and Dell 24" monitor setup. I do not play games anymore, but I run AutoCAD in 3D and need the graphics for drawings. I also built my desktop because I wanted the flexibility on power versus cost in certain areas, i.e. 64GB RAM but only an integrated graphics card.
I actually bought a Chromebook to test out for the comedy of it for personal use since those are the only laptops we have for use at work. and it does fine with all the normal everyday stuff. although the photo editing software could be better. although with improvements in tech I do wonder if I’m just better off just sticking to tablets down the road.
