Laptop Suggestions

[NPcomplete]

hi all,
I'm going to buy a new laptop but I'm confused which one to buy. So, would you please suggest one?
I want the laptop to be good enough for the following:
1. For programming.
2. For gaming.
3. For other things...


[EDIT]

I do not want Mac's.

[EDIT2]

Budget : ~700$

[Mats]

Do you have a budget?

[NPcomplete]

sorry! forgot to tell the budget .budget updated in original post.

[EwCjE3v7]

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/y-series/

Check these.


Chose carefully.

[BHX]

It really depends on your preference and needs. I mean I'm still using a Compaq Presario that I bought back in 2006 because it still meets my needs. I just changed out for a 2TB hard drive and installed a Linux distro onto it. I think I payed paid between $400 - $600 for it.

[EDIT]payed? really? Don't know what I was thinking when I typed that. Goes to show, proofread before submitting.

[EwCjE3v7]

Jan 30, 2014 at 7:04pm
BHX Specter (111)
It really depends on your preference and needs. I mean I'm still using a Compaq Presario that I bought back in 2006 because it still meets my needs. I just changed out for a 2TB hard drive and installed a Linux distro onto it. I think I payed between $400 - $600 for it.
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+1

[htirwin]

It seams like a laptop without a dedicated GPU is a whole lot cheaper in general than a laptop with a dedicated GPU. It also seams like modern Intel CPU's handle graphics pretty well.

The idea pad Y series seams nice, but I have heard they are not very-reliable (cheaply made).

[NPcomplete]

so, any other suggestions @htirwin

[NPcomplete]

is there any?

[Cheraphy]

Don't do laptop gaming. Unless you don't want to play state of the art on your computer. That's my suggestion.

[TheBeardedQuack]

I recently went looking for a gaming laptop and found that the best and yet budget laptops are still about £450 at least... And tbh you don't want anything for gaming if it hasn't got a GPU.

Pretty much anything can handle programming since it's just text editing and then a compiler later, the better the processor the faster it'll compile of course.

I think the laptop I had my eye on was either an Acer or a Samsung (sorry I can't remember the model) which had something like a Radeon HD 7650 at £400-450.


I've decided to forget about this and get a PC instead... Actually I'll be making a PC with 8GB RAM, Intel i5 @3.0GHz, Radeon 7750 1GB DDR5, all for <£400 (thats with all other stuff like power and case)

EDIT: I'm either going to sell my current laptop (Dell Inspiron 1545) which effectively makes the PC cheaper... Or I'm going to keep it and dedicate that to programming and other work-y things.

[NPcomplete]

PC's are always good than laptops in terms of performance but they don't have the mobility like laptops.

[rapidcoder]

Pretty much anything can handle programming since it's just text editing and then a compiler later, the better the processor the faster it'll compile of course.

Text editing requires much CPU for things like autocomplete or check-code-as-you-type to be fast. Which is having a compiler running in the background whenever you touch anything; and C++ is one of the slowest languages to compile. Sure, for a small project, any laptop would be good, but for large things with lots of heavy libraries (like Qt) no computer is fast enough. You need write-compile-run loop to be as fast as possible.

Also a good GPU becomes important when you want to attach a high-res external monitor or two. Most cheap laptop's integrated graphics is limited to single-link DVI, i.e. 1920x1200 or even 1920x1080. And for comfort programming 2560x1440 is nice, 2560x1600 is awesome and 4K is even more awesome.