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Laptop Suggestions

salman85

salman85

Well-known member
I'm planning on a buying a laptop for personal use at the Boxing day Sale.I'll be using it at home only.No official work.

Need some suggestions.My budget is $500.

Suggest.
 
D

Daemon

Well-known member
If you're going to use it exclusively at home get a desktop instead? Watching shows is way better on a nice big monitor.
 
smalishah84

smalishah84

The Tiger King
I was going to recommend mac for personal use but then I just saw your budget :p

There should be lots of Dell and HP deals coming along since these 2 companies are not doing as well as they were hoping to. If you are looking for strong processing power then your budget is quite low
 
Top_Cat

Top_Cat

Well-known member
It's not a simple question, honestly. There are freakin' heaps of laptops around the $500 mark with massive array of h/w configurations so to come to a specific brand/model is really tough. That said, the Acer Aspires here are popping up a lot lately so they're probably a solid option but it depends on whether it's to be used for games (moar graphix!), office stuff (moar CPUssss!) or sciency apps (moar RAM!). Also, for that price, I doubt you'll get a laptop which doesn't share system RAM with the GPU but, if you can, will do better on games. That said, programmers are getting better at dealing with shared RAM and, with that in mind, one more consideration is whether you need an optical drive. If not, consider a tablet I reckon. If you need a keyboard, some have full-sized keyboards or get a Bluetooth one. Unless you really need the bigger monitor, most of the reasons to buy a lappie over a tablet disappear if you don't need that or a DVD drive.

For any laptop buy, though, there are general guidelines which work most of the time what;

- Never buy one with a Celeron processor. Ever.
- If you can get brand/model info for the h/w inside a laptop (manufacturers are a bit cagey on this), see how well the speeds of the components match up. A computer with slower/cheaper components which are speed-matched will get you a better overall experience than if you have a beefy CPU but slow RAM
- If you have to compromise on anything, compromise on hard-disk space and buy an external/networked drive or use the cloud to store big files like 'legally' downloaded movies/music. This is harder if you want to game, obv.
 
R

Rentalplus

New member
I am using Dell Laptop from last 2 years and there is no problem in it. My brother is using Apple Laptop at home and it gives clear pictures in videos.
 
ganeshran

ganeshran

Well-known member
You should get a Dell Inspiron for that budget. Though i suggest Lenovo Ideapad which would cost around 700$
 
Valer

Valer

Well-known member
Top_Cat said:
it depends on whether it's to be used for games (moar graphix!), office stuff (moar CPUssss!) or sciency apps (moar RAM!)
Click to expand...
You what? If your program needs more than say 10000x10000 (or so) matrices* you really really don't want to be using a 500$ laptop for the computations.


*A size you can easily storable (several of) in ram.
 
Valer

Valer

Well-known member
Stata/SPSS/R/most distributed computing projects are cpu (or gpu if you get a gpu build) limited even if they have poor handling of sparse data.

Note that most stuff like that is still just lots of matrix operations.
 
Top_Cat

Top_Cat

Well-known member
You're being really obtuse on this for some reason. If you're studying that stuff, you won't need a cluster. If you're doing serious computation for your job/post-grad/doc, you won't be in the market for a $500 laptop. But if you want to run science-like apps for fun or study, you'll need more RAM. I don't see anything controversial about that.
 
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