Which laptop to choose?

IanM

IanM

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Hi! I'm purchasing a laptop in a couple of days time, but unsure which one to take. Both are going for the same price.

Laptop 1: (GAME)

Intel Core i5 3230M 2.60Ghz
4GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD
3 year on site warranty

Laptop 2: (Chaos Computers)

Intel Core i5 3230M 2.60Ghz
4GB DDR3 RAM
1TB HDD
1 year carry in warranty

So do I go for the longer warranty or larger HDD?

Currently I'm leaning towards the longer warranty...
 
Laptop brands? Also the longer warranty is a massive plus on a laptop. If you need more storage you can always get an external drive later on
 
Laptop 1 any day... then rip the drive out and replace with a SDD when budget allows for it - will massively improve the performance, reliability and battery life. You wont regret it.
 
grim said:
Laptop brands? Also the longer warranty is a massive plus on a laptop. If you need more storage you can always get an external drive later on
Click to expand...

Laptop 1 is Acer and Laptop 2 is Lenovo. Same thoughts regarding the storage space.
 
Not enough info. Why is everyone always leaving out the GPU/Graphics card details on laptops? Even retailers seem to think it's not important. They all happily listed the size of the HDD, something that is THE easiest to swop out, but the GPU?

There's a huge difference between a lappy with Intel Integrated GPU vs. AMD/Nvidia dedicated GPU .

EDIT: Looking at the price, i will assume it's Intel integrated graphics. Need R1k-R2k more on your budget for the dedicated GPUs to filter in ;)
 
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I'd say it's worth looking for a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. Many apps these days offload the work onto the GPU and it makes a big performance difference. ie. a graphics card is not just for games. I picked up a Sony Vaio Core i5, 4GB RAM and 1GB GPU for R6500 from Incredible on special about 2yrs ago and it's served me well. Battery life is still +2hours.

If you're dead set on the above two laptops though, Option 1 definitely. I've dealt with Acer's support and they're a pain in the ass but they're good. Their turn-around time is reasonable. Note the battery is not covered by the warranty and is usually pap after about 2yrs. Good news is that replacement batteries for Acers are cheap.. and so are the accessories such as power adapters etc.
 
Thanks for the input so far guys. Budget is a bit tight so 6500 is around my limit and it's only going to be used for office work and a bit at home, so the GPU doesn't really matter to me. There is however still a couple of things I'd like to find out before buying (which is not stated in the ad), like if it has any USB3.0 ports etc.

Thus far it's looking like the most of you guys are leaning towards Laptop 1 from Game. I'm going to my local shop in lunch to go see the laptop and play around on it a bit.
 
The_Unnamed said:
You can hardly call the 710M a dedicated GPU. Its only marginally better than the HD 4000.
Click to expand...

True, if you compare them as stand alone entities they are most likely similar. However this is not what "dedicated" means. The above 710M comes with 2GB memory , the HD 4000 got 0GB , and taps into shared memory.
 
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