Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

All purpose laptop needed

Last response: in General UK & Ireland Discussions
Share
July 17, 2012 9:27:15 AM

Hi,

I desperately need to replace my creaking old desktop with a new machine. It needs to do basically a little bit of everything and has to be a laptop, although since it'll mostly be for desktop-replacement, battery life and weight are not important considerations. Primary tasks will be:

Acting as a media suite for films & music (need to connect to SDTV).
Running development software, primarily Visual Studio & SQL Server.
Image editing with GIMP and/or photoshop.
Low-end gaming, primarily modern indie games rather than latest AAA shooters.
Office tasks, primarily with Google Docs.
Heavy web browsing, including site editing with WordPress
It also needs to be QUIET - minimal fan noise is essential.

At a guess I'm looking at something that has an i5 processor with a good clock speed, a sizeable amount of HDD storage, 8-16GB of RAM and a mid-range dedicated graphics card. Some SSD storage would be a nice for running the OS. But this is a guess: I don't know much about hardware. In particular I'm not sure whether my requirements would mean I'd benefit from the hyperthreading in an i7 over an i5.

When shopping I've had trouble because my needs seem to fall into a gray area between mid-range work machines, which don't have the graphics card and SSD, and low-end gaming machines which tend to skimp on RAM and HDD. Ideal budget is ~£750 although I'd spend up to £1000 if I could get a really good deal. So far, these are about the best I've turned up: http://www.medion.com/gb/electronics/CatalogBrowsingPro... But they're not ideal - at the top-end of my price range and with excessive graphical power I probably don't need.

I don't want a custom build. Suggestions on models gratefully received.

Cheers, Matt

More about : purpose laptop needed

August 1, 2012 9:59:37 AM

Core i7 machine works wonder as i am also using one. great result oriented machines.
!