Alright lads, I'm looking for a new laptop as my current one is dying on its arse. Basically I'm looking for something lightweight and small since I travel a lot, but something I can still run some games on in my downtime. I'm in the US at the moment too so my maximum price range is $1200, so I was thinking of picking up the new Alienware 13, which for $1200 gets me this:
Intel® Core™ i5-6300HQ
Windows 10 Home 64bit English
8GB DDR4 at 2133MHz
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 with 6GB GDDR5
Apparently it's VR ready too but I'm not too bothered about that. For roughly the same price I can get a slight older model but the specs are: Core i7 6500U (2.50 GHz) 16 GB Memory 256 GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2 GB GDDR5
I figure I might as well go for the newer one but if I could find something decent for cheaper that'd be great. I've looked around for others but haven't found much though, so I'm just wondering if anyone can give their input on this or give me some ideas on other models. The main focus I suppose is going to be gaming, and I figure anything that can run some decent games will allow me to do a little bit of video editing and run Office too, as well as streaming the occasional movie.
>I'm looking for something lightweight and small
Gaming laptops tend to be neither, so have a good look not just at the technical specs, but also the physical ones.
>>25645 Then what's the best within that range? The Alienware 13 is giving the following measurements: Height: 0.92 inch| Width: 15.35 inches| Depth: 10.20 inches| Average Weight: 5 lbs.
I don't think it's too bad for what it is, and it'd certainly fit in my bag, but again if there's anything better than the 13 then I'd like to know.
2.2kg is perfectly respectable for a gaming laptop. That was a typical weight for a 13" ultraportable until a few years ago. The Razer Blade is a bit thinner and lighter, but it's also about $500 more expensive. A Dell XPS 13 is about 1kg lighter, but you get a slower processor and lose the dedicated GPU.
Is there any particular reason you are looking for a 13" over a 15" laptop? I would have thought that size would be more suited to your ultra-portable netbook type thing, you're not really going to get the most out of latest-gen Nvidia graphics on a screen that small IMO.
>>25665 I could get the the 15 for a little bit more but it's not going to be as practical in terms of size and weight. I'm ok with the smaller screen for the most part, but whenever I'm around a tv with an hdmi port I can just hook it up to that, which I would've been able to do in each place I've been in the past 5 months. Think I'm just going to pull the trigger and get the 13.
Rather than make a new thread I thought I would ask in this one if you guys can provide some quick advice for me. I appreciate that its my job to search around but as you will see I'm a bit fucked and could use some collective myth busting to help make a decision.
Yesterday I spilt coffee all over my laptop which destroyed the keyboard and somehow also damaged the screen. An easy if complicated fix if I can get my hands on parts but I need to face facts that my E530 after 5 years of noble service is too broken to risk further use given its largely held together with wishful thinking. This becomes pressing given I'm at the end of my thesis so its lucky I could get the files off it and really I need something for over Christmas to get some work done.
My specs aren't very demanding; a laptop that can handle a bit of wear and tear, watch pornography, in the rough price-range of £500-600 and maybe play KSP or EUIV if I ever get the chance. I'm tempted to use Lenovo again so I might give the ideapad 310 a whirl or the sturdier L560 both of which should be able to handle what I need. The thing is I'm led to believe the quality of lenovo products is not what it used to be and comparable products in the price range like Dell Inspiron and HP Pavilion seem to have gotten better.
The questions are: has there been a decline in the quality of Lenovo or is it just silly internet memes? Has HP gotten its shit together with all the nonsense that used to come pre-loaded on their products?
>has there been a decline in the quality of Lenovo
Thinkpads (especially the X, T and P series) are still built like bits of Soviet military hardware. Ideapads are plasticky tat on a par with the low-end Asus and Acer machines. Dell and HP's business laptops are solid, but they have some flimsy rubbish in their consumer range.
My recommendation is to buy refurbished. You let some other sucker take the massive depreciation hit from new. You still get a warranty and often the ex-corporate machines are practically new. You get a lot of refurbished laptop for your money in the £500-£600 range - expect a recent i5 or i7 processor, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, a large SSD, a discrete GPU and a full HD display.
>>25747 My recommendation is to buy refurbished. You let some other sucker take the massive depreciation hit from new.
I do this, and it's been fine, until...
My most recent machine, or reasons I can't begin to fathom, is bios-locked to stop it running VMs. Fuck's sake. Even dodgy russian sites don't offer a cracker, so it's swap the motherboard or live with it. Cygwin will have to do, I guess.
>>25747 I will give this a try, thanks for the informative post. My only fear is like what happened to >>25748 getting stuck with a bad deal and having to mess about sending it back or trying to fix it.
Are there some general tips to avoid the hassle? I suppose when using ebay its just a case of checking the seller reputation and not dwelling too much on bad luck.
Buy from a large, professional refurbisher that offers a full warranty. I've bought a lot of kit from this kind of outfit and they've been no bother at all. Look for the "eBay Premium Service" badge - these sellers get discounted fees and preferential placement in search results, but they have to maintain extremely high levels of customer satisfaction.
Look for listings that include a phone number, a VAT number, an address that's a proper commercial premises. Look for a full and accurate description, with an explanation of their product grading. Ask a question before you buy - the promptness and quality of the reply will tell you a lot about the seller.
Here's an example of a confidence-inspiring listing from a real business:
