Laptop Computers

Necrath Evilcraft_sl said:

So I have never in my life shopped for or owned a laptop. I am looking to get a decent 15inch or so one as a gift for my mother. Would like to keep it around 400 dollars but I am flexible. She just needs it for facebook/web broswing sort of basic stuff.

Anyone have some suggestions? It would be greatly appreciated.

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If it's a basic facebook machine then anything for sale at any retail store will suffice for the most part. You'll find that the actual specs between brands don't really vary much at a given price point and they all mostly use the same (ie, cheapest) internal parts anyway.

Necrath Evilcraft_sl said:

So I have never in my life shopped for or owned a laptop. I am looking to get a decent 15inch or so one as a gift for my mother. Would like to keep it around 400 dollars but I am flexible. She just needs it for facebook/web broswing sort of basic stuff.

Anyone have some suggestions? It would be greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

If it's just facebook and web browsing, chromebooks are really solid for this. Significantly less prone to viruses, no need to mess with driver updates in case you are the go to tech guy for your mother. Long battery life. For basic usage, you can go to find one off Groupon goods and be done with it.

So I'm gonna be buying a laptop in the next month or so for the first time in years, it's mainly gonna be to dick around on some EQ emu servers and other low requirement games.

Pretty much any laptop in the 400~ dollar range should suffice right? Or should I spend a little more and get one with a dedicated video card?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-17-3-...&skuId=4793900

Are the AMD laptop processors any decent now? I was thinking about getting this one for school and slapping a 256GB Samsung SSD in it. Not too keen that it only has 6GB Ram, but I'll only use it for Word/One Note and shit like Testout.com so it should be ok. I know at one time AMD laptop processors were just pure shit and I'm hoping that's changed.

Haha, AMD. This isn't the mid 2000s.

Last AMD I bought was an FX60 back when AMD used to outperform Intel (2005?). That was pretty short lived and Intel have been considerably more powerful ever since.

I don't even think AMD even attempt to be the most powerful anymore. They seem to focus on budget CPUs.

Possibly the greatest laptop ever released with a service life measured in months?

Inside the Razer Blade Stealth laptop

Seriously never had a Razer product that lasted and I've only ever bought their top of the line stuff.

I dunno I was somewhat joking because I don't know who's actually manufacturing it. I wouldn't lose total hope until finding out that.

If that was another brand I would be far more excited, though.

My blade 14 has been going strong for almost 2 years now, I had to tighten a fan that was loose but other than that I've had no problems. Their mice on the other hand I've had 2 go out on me in the same amount of time.

So, I moronically spilled a bunch of water on my Asus ROG laptop and a few keys are not longer functioning. I don't think that water damage is covered under warranty. What do you guys think my best options are for repair?

Prova_sl said:

So, I moronically spilled a bunch of water on my Asus ROG laptop and a few keys are not longer functioning. I don't think that water damage is covered under warranty. What do you guys think my best options are for repair?

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How long has it been? Usually water will dry up over time and everything works fine. Just make sure you don't use it until it's had plenty of time to dry.

It's a pain in the ass to take laptops apart and make repairs, but it's definitely doable. Finding replacement parts can be a challenge though, and they are generally absurdly overpriced.

Question:

I just formatted a buddy's laptop, an ASUS GL752VW. It has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M, which I installed the drivers for. The laptop does not have the "Optimus" deal listed in it's bios.

Is there a way to completely by-pass the Intel integrated chip? Or just go through nVidia Control Panel and manually set the global 3D renderer to the nVidia card which I've already done? My worry is that his Autocad/other engineering programs are going to default to the integrated Intel GPU rather than the dedicated GeForce chip.

Edit: May have answered my own question but if anyone has additional thoughts let me know. Seems I'll just have to manually set it in each program like Autocad. Stupid design in my opinion. What the fuck is the point of a dedicated GPU if it isn't the default... by default.

It's been almost a week now. A few keys are completely non-responsive. The model does not allow me to pull out the battery, so it was difficult to quickly mitigate the damage.

I'm not sure if there was a particularly large windows update as well, or if other aspects of the machine are damaged as well. It took me almost 10 minutes to do an update yesterday; for this machine that seems like quite a lot of time.

I think I'll look into options locally. Thanks for the insights.

Thinking about scrapping my desktop and purchasing a laptop. I'm going to be moving around a lot for school/work starting in less than 6 months and the convenience of a laptop would be extremely helpful. I want it to be usable for both gaming and video editing, which luckily for me tends to have similar specs. I want to future-proof the machine as much as possible, which means being able to render video in 4k for editing purposes, but because editing 4k video on a laptop is both extremely expensive and extremely foolish, I think I'm just going to go for a 1920x1080 resolution monitor with the ability to hook up to an external 4k monitor if I need to do that. Can anyone recommend anything?

Here's the specifics I'm thinking of:

• i7 Quad Core with speed of at least 2.6 GHz. Hyperthreading support is necessary for being able to render things efficiently on the video editing side.
• NVidia GTX 970M+, with at least 3GB of VRAM. A 980 would probably better if I want to future-proof the machine for gaming but from what I've seen, I can get a 970M with 4 GB VRAM much cheaper than a 980M with 3 GB VRAM, which may be better for video editing.
• 16 GB of RAM minimum, but would be much more comfortable with 24+. This is spec that I'm having the most trouble finding right now. If I could get a 24 GB RAM machine and only meet my minimum specs for everything else, I'd probably do that.
• 15"+ monitor. 17.3" is the hot standard right now but the way I see it, when I need to get serious for video ediitng I'll hook it up to an external 4k monitor. How does gaming look on 15" versus 17"?
• USB 3.0 support. USB 3.1 (Type-C) support could be really good for future-proofing, or Thunderbolt support would be amazing for compatibility with current external drive technology.
• Internal storage is not a huge deal for me. My desktop currently has my OS and video editing software on a 10k RPM HDD, but as I understand it those have been completely discontinued for desktops and are even rarer to find for laptops (if they even exist at all), so I may want to go with a cheaper SSD + a 1 TB 7200 HDD. I'm willing to compromise here to reach my price point, though.

I want to see how much of the stuff in the above list I can get for around $1500. The hardest part so far seems to be getting over 16 GB RAM without hitting $2k.

The real issue you're going to run in to is finding a mobile motherboard that even supports anything more than 16gb of ram. Very very few of them (if any?) will have more than a pair of dimm slots, so you're talking about either having 16gb as your cap with a 2x8 setup, or maybe getting 32 with a 2x16 setup, but holy christ I don't even want to think about the pricetag on 16gb mobile memory chips.

That said, your best bet is probably sager if you want that kind of hardware customization without paying insane alienware or razr prices.