Need a New Laptop - Help? (1 Viewer)

[links_slayer]

Our ~10 year old desktop is becoming quite sluggish and it's time for an upgrade.

Can anyone please recommend one and/or a place to buy online? Probably 90% of the time will be spent browsing the web and using Word/Excel/Outlook. We both have tablets so we're all set there.

I know essentially nothing about the different components and get easily overwhelmed when faced with all of the different options. Some of you seem really savvy so I know you'll help me out

Thanks!

 

[pltrgyst]

They're commodities these days. If there's no need to get fancy, just buy an all-in-one from some place like Best Buy. I3 or A8 processor, 8 gigs ram, 500 gb hd, touch screen or not, as you prefer. The Dell I'm posting this from was $379 last month with a 24 inch display, wireless keyboard and mouse, Win 10 installed.

 

[Anthony Martino]

Are you looking for a laptop or a desktop? Your title suggest laptop, but your post suggest desktop

 

[links_slayer]

laptop, looking to replace desktop

 

[links_slayer]

They're commodities these days. If there's no need to get fancy, just buy an all-in-one from some place like Best Buy. I3 or A8 processor, 8 gigs ram, 500 gb hd, touch screen or not, as you prefer. The Dell I'm posting this from was $379 last month with a 24 inch display, wireless keyboard and mouse, Win 10 installed.

good stuff. thanks larry

 

[Anthony Martino]

With laptops you're generally going to:

1. Pay a higher premium for it over a comparable desktop
2. Find that the CPU, memory and hard drive are usually slower than their desktop counterparts in most consumer models

So you may find it still sluggish, depending on what you get. If you're comfortable sharing your budget it would help to narrow down options for you

 

[CdnBeerLover]

My $0.02...

1) They are pretty much a commodity. For the tasks mentioned, an i3 w/500 GB hard drive and 4+GB of RAM is fine.

2) I would still recommend getting a machine with a dedicated graphics card and memory. Why? See the next point...

3) Will you want to watch a video (YouTube, etc) in high-def, or hook it up to an external monitor to do this? Check the screen size and resolution. I would suggest a resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p). 1366x768 (720p/1080i) is common in smaller/cheaper notebooks. These machines will usually have an HDMI out port, which is handy.

If you get a machine with integrated graphics, increase the RAM requirements by 2GB.

4) Get a machine with a decent wifi connectivity (AC1200 or higher with 2.4G / 5G connectivity). Almost any machine these days will have an ethernet port that handle 1Gbps.

5) Note that many machines are not shipping with an optical drive (cdrom / dvd) anymore. That may or may not be an issue for you, depending on your needs.

6) Make sure it has USB 3.0 ports. Just about anything will these days, unless it's exceptionally cheap.

My usual machine is an Acer 3830TG ultrabook (13.3" screen, i3-2330M processor, 4GB ram, dedicated Nvidia graphics card w/2GB memory, 750GB hdd) that I purchased in 2012, and it runs Win10 just fine. It can't handle the latest, greatest games, but I don't expect it to. It works fine with the latest version of LibreOffice and Chrome/Firefox. I have no idea about Outlook. Only thing I wish was that the resolution was higher than 1366x768 for some uses.

 

[ACE'S FULL]

Also based on you and your wife having tablets you may try to do a fresh windows install. Back up all your important files and reload windows. This has helped me in the past from a sluggish standpoint. Being able to build my own PC's personally I think laptops are a waste of cash with tablets in the house. They do everything that a laptop can and will do. Many have mentioned to get a decent laptop is going to cost 2 to 4 times as much as a comparable desktop.