Need Laptop recommendations

been using my ACER since 2009. no complaints.

Dell Inspiron and throw a SSD in it.

Boot time falls from about 100 seconds to 20.

HP Pavillion best you can afford all price ranges from sub 300 to several hundred more. My i5 from 2014 is running awesome

If you care about gaming at all, get something with a gtx1060.

Anything gtx900, gtx800 or AMD is shit comparatively. AMD will be back on top in a year, but not now. If your budget is 1k+, 1060 is a no brainer.

If you don't care about games, and never will, at least make sure it has an ssd and a 45watt quad-core. No 15w U-series bullshit.

Acer is a top tier brand

My acer laptops out performed my Hp's and lenovas.

Never buy gateway or dell if possible

Thanks for the tips. I am not a gamer. Are most of you recommending a Windows computer?

Changing from a Chromebook is a big change and depends on your needs. They have very little storage as that OS is mainly for cloud based activity.

If you are going to switch your computing habits to a laptop that requires more installed software and offline computing, then I'd ditch the chromebook and opt for Windows 10.

I'll 2nd SSD if you can get for under $1k as well. I prefer ASUS (not ACER).

If you don't care about gaming, just make sure it has a 45watt i5 or i7 (no U-series processors) and an SSD.

Any 4000 or newer series i5 will be more than you need.

Aim for $500-600.

Dell Latitude E6530 or newer.Good price and reliable Win 7 Ult. 320GB SSD hard drive or bigger.16GB ram. Fast and reliable.

Watch out for the dell xx30s, a lot had U processors. They went back to HQs for the x70s.

The only thing that matters to you is an HQ processor and an SSD. That's it.

Another proud acer supporter here, f15 just picked up from microcenter, 500~$, 8gb ddr4, i5, 256 ssd, 17inch, preloaded w10.

Hardware and quality wise, this price is hard to beat. The O/S on the other hand.... lets just say Del *.* /f

Toshiba satellite
plus
Mint 18

best buy sells cheap reliable toshibas. know people who have, no complaints. other end, apple mac books expensive but super quick, dont break, seemless w other apple products, excellent sound and graphics, upgradeable, w great compact design

My Toshiba Sattelite P850-138 is working just fine. I opened it up once to remove a couple of years' worth of dust, but it's running as good as the day it was purchased in 2012.

pricewatch.com

Make sure you get a back lit keyboard. Worth their weight in gold.

Go to strip club that requires a cover charge and shirt. Pay the extra $20.

if you want something truly portable, elegant, convertible + latest most powerful/efficient 7th generation kaby lake intel CPU with a nice IPS multitouch display

[link to store.hp.com]


Personally i would wait for the surface pro 4 with a kaby lake CPU, because i like being able to draw stuff with a stylus, but if stylus is none of your concerns, the hp laptop is super sexy.

The surface pro3 with the fanlass m3 cpu can be found here

[link to www.microsoftstore.com (secure)]


As others mentioned, Acer has some really good offers when it comes to getting powerful hardware for little $$.
Of course, the quality will be mediocre but good enough still.

For example this acer

[link to www.newegg.com]

has a 17.3" screen, latest kaby lake intel CPU and even a 940mx nvidia GPU (the DDR5 version which is faster than the DDR3 one) which will even play the latest games and low to medium settings, like battlefield 1 for example.

It even comes with a 256GB SSD which is great for working with.

But that is more of a desktop replacement. at 7lbs it is barely portable.


A smaller 15" version of that acer with an even more powerful CPU and a SSD would be here

[link to www.newegg.com]

This one has a 1TB HDD as storage extra to the 256GB and uses the slightly more powerful i7-7500u kaby lake CPU instead of the i5-7200.

As far as CPU power goes, this is as good as it gets, unless you are willing to use a 6th generation CPU with 4 cores.
Not recommended as battery life will suffer and you won't have the VP9/HEVC hardware encoders/decoders with it.



Said all this, my favorite is the HP spectre and the surface pro still, which is more of a tablet than laptop.
Both with small screens and leightweight. Both using IPS screens which can be watched from wide angles.



But you said you had a Chromebook. If you loved your Chromebook, then all our suggestions are not really good for you.
Chromebooks have a much better battery life. The laptops i suggested are more versatile and can be used for some real work like adobe, blender etc. But maybe that is not what you are looking for.

You will have to be more specific about what exactly you want to do with your laptop.

Check out Amazon and make sure you have Prime before ordering.

There are numerous models many of which are moderately priced.

Dell, Lenovo, Acer and more.

We recently purchased a 2017 Dell 15 inch laptop, with 8 GB or ram and gaming video card. $459.00

The manufacturers have a lot of excess inventory right now. Its a great time to buy a PC or even a couple of them.

Prices are very low comparatively speaking.

I won't get into the debate about operating systems as it would take several pages to go through the pros and cons.

Good luck and happy computing.

If all you are going to do is use word and mcrosoft programs/ facebook a 200 dollar pc is good enuff

Buy a used MacBook Air from a reputable re-seller who cleans them up. I got mine for a little over $600 with 250 GB hard drive and 8 gig Ram. It is lightning quick. Will never go back to a PC or Windows product.

Last Edited by Squonk on 12/27/2016 05:35 PM

a review on the spectre i linked above

[link to www.fudzilla.com]

This one is in silver. I found the black/gold brown version i saw at their website much prettier but maybe it is not available.

battery on the spectre lasts for over 14 hours going by the review, which is damn good. At idle it was even showing 24 hours.

Mac is the only way to go

[link to www.newegg.com] great deal here

A great site that tracks prices and you can search in your price range. [link to www.gaminglaptopsjunky.com]

Thanks for the tips. I don't need a laptop for gaming. mostly for email, spreadsheets, and browsing. My toshiba chrome book 2 did a good job.

any recommendations for a good chrome book?

Is Linux Mint worth checking out for me needs or is that too advanced?

EBay

newegg refurb + ssd