Laptop advice

[Maz]

Hi guys,

 

I'm looking to replace my 6 year old Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop (2GHz Turion 64 processor, 2GB RAM) as it's coming to the end of its lifespan. There are a lot of deals online and I'm a bit overwhelmed by the choices available to me, so I thought I would once again ask on here for advice. I kept it separate from the build PC thread as it's not a PC I'm after but do merge if it suits better.

 

I have a desktop PC for most of my needs so it would be a laptop used primarily for work. My last laptop weighs about 3kg so anything I buy now will probably be an improvement in terms of weight and form factor etc. I don't want a massive screen, my last one was 15" so anything that size or smaller would be fine for me. I'd like a VGA port and a DVD writing drive, but I know there are USB ones out there so probably less of an issue. I already have a 1TB Buffalo HDD so don't mind a lesser amount of storage space in exchange for better performance.

 

I will be mainly using the Office suite, SPSS and MATLAB on it, and occasionally Skype. I want something that boots up quickly and is not going to lag horribly on the rare occasions that I'm away from home and want to play a game of LoL or play WoW or whatever. The most film-watching I'd be doing on it would be random anime, I'm not one for watching HD movies on portable devices.  I don't mind whether it's a tablet or not, although Tom thinks I might get good use out of a laptop-tablet hybrid at conferences etc. A comfortable keyboard is important for me too. I'll be doing most of my data entry on the PC at home or work so I'm not fussed about having a numeric keypad, but I will be doing my thesis over the next 6 months so being able to type at full speed is pretty vital. Portability and power are the key things on top of that - I need to be able to run that SPSS-MATLAB-Word/Excel combo without crashing/frustrating lag. I know battery life is a bit of a joke on most laptops but one with a longer battery life for train journeys etc would sweeten the deal, certainly.

 

In terms of OS, the toolboxes I use for MATLAB only work with Windows 7 so I'd need something able to run whatever bundled OS (probably 8) and Windows 7 on VM as well.

 

Lastly, I wouldn't be wanting to spend more than £600 (ideally less than £500). But I want this laptop to last me at least as long as my Dell has, so good build quality is important too. I don't care if it's not a pretty-looking thing, it's the functionality that I need.

 

Laptops I have looked at include:

 

Lenovo Yoga 11s

 

Toshiba Satellite U920T

 

Dell Inspiron 15R

 

Lenovo G505s

 

I've looked on Ebuyer also but there's a lot of stuff on offer that's much of a muchness, and thought it would be better to see if anyone had any recommendations!

 

Thanks in advance

Edited December 31, 2013 by Maz

[Gragneth]

The only thing I would say is pay attention to the "graphics" options.

 

You say you want this for work and such but still to play LoL or WoW or the odd game. Most laptops don't come with graphics cards and use integrated graphics solutions. This normally boils down to the processor doing the graphics in some way. Honestly I have never test one of these on games but I do not expect them to be that good. You should be able to get something with a dedicated graphics card from £600. However the thing with laptops is you can get really good processors, ram and storage size for £500 or less. Beyond that what you mainly seem to be paying for is the graphics card.

 

If you just wanted it for work only you could go £400 easy. If you want gaming options it will be the cost.

 

 I recently had to procure a lenovo laptop for my research group that also needed a graphics card and found a steal at £600 however that doesnt seem to exist anymore. However I would say the build quality of lenovo is so-so. It doesn't feel as strong as a sony or a dell and the keys to feel cheap.

Edited January 1, 2014 by Gragneth

[Nacey]

Integrated graphics (IGP) have come a long way, and LoL is extremely generous with what it will run on. I built my sister a machine based on the 3220T (2.8GHz) and the IGP runs LoL super-smooth with everything on max except shadows. Didn't see a dropped frame at all.

However, Loz is still right. Most mobile CPUs have heavily underclocked IGPs (mostly becuase of heat) and the CPU itself is always going to be underclocked compared to an equivalent level desktop chip. Finding a laptop that will play games adds significantly to the budget.

Because CPU model names are ridiculous, here's a cheat-sheet you can use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i3_microprocessors#.22Ivy_Bridge.22_.2822_nm.29_2

The higher up that table it is, the better it is. You may find stuff not listed here but 90% of laptops are using these chips.

Oh, and just to get it out of the way early, don't buy anything with an AMD CPU, they are all pretty bad right now.

The main issue you're going to have is that very few companies makes small laptops that are any good for gaming. People who buy small laptops are interested in portability and battery life. And if you do find one, it's probably not going to come in under £600. As a base you're looking for something with a decent CPU, 8GB, and an SSD. The last part is the key to dreamy boot times and a lag-free desktop/office experience, because any modern CPU can run MS Office, it's disk performance that is the bottleneck.

I really can't find anything that fits your requirements. Which factor are you most prepared to compromise on out of portability, gaming and budget?

I don't think this is a problem but I'll mention it: VGA-out is pretty much a dead standard, but all laptops have some form of video-out (usually a variant of HDMI or DP), and you can convert back to VGA if you need to. Ideally you shouldn't, though, because VGA sucks.

The part I'm struggling with most is the MATLAB stuff, I don't how demanding that is. Is there a recommended spec somewhere for the stuff that you use, to give me an idea?

[Maz]

Rightio, avoiding AMD rules out a few of the ones I was looking at. Thanks for the cheat sheet too, I didn't even know there were different versions of the i3 core, gah. I wanted the VGA because I often use my laptop for presentations and being able to plug straight into a VGA projector has come in handy time and again. But I can use a converter, it's no big deal. Hopefully more conference venues will start providing HDMI plugs as time goes on.

 

Out of all the things to sacrifice it'd be the gaming, it's work I'd be using it for the most, including taking it abroad.  Being able to play LoL is just a nice bonus and not in any way essential. WoW ran fine on my old laptop so not really worried about that XD

 

MATLAB runs fine on my current laptop - as long as it has 2GB RAM and 4GB space that's all that matters for it, there are 64 bit versions available for Windows 7 and 8. It's the toolbox I use that's more picky - it requires an OpenGL 2.1 or better graphics card and Windows 7 only. I'm not bothered about it running perfect display timing etc, it's purely so I can code shit wherever I happen to be and then I can tweak it on the computer I'm actually running the experiment on at a later date. Otherwise I'm mostly using MATLAB's basic data processing capabilities so just  the minimum specs are fine. I wouldn't actually care about this at all if it weren't for the fact that I'm pretty likely to be continuing to use MATLAB after I've finished my PhD (sob).

Edited January 1, 2014 by Maz

[Gragneth]

Well according to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units#Seventh_generation

HD Graphics 4000 (graphics for any intel without dedicated graphics card) can do Open GL 4.0 on windows.

[Nacey]

Yeah, OpenGL 2.1 came out in 2006, it isn't a thing you need to even think about, every single graphics card and chip on any new machine will support it.

 

HD Graphics 4000 (graphics for any intel without dedicated graphics card)

Slightly pedantic but not every CPU has an HD4000, there are a bunch of different IGPs. Actually they are all listed in that table. But yes, every single one of them supports at least OpenGL 4.0 so it's a non-issue.

I'll make a proper post later about laptops and stuff but first I have to go argue with some dumb people.

[Gragneth]

HD 4000 does seem to be the most common one though.

[Nacey]

Right. Basically it's dependent on the CPU generation.

Sandy Bridge used the HD 2000/3000.

Ivy Bridge used the HD 2500/4000.

Haswell uses a bunch of different chips but they are all numbered HD 4200 and up.

The reason you're generally seeing 4000s around is because Haswell's mobile chips mostly only showed up 2-3 months ago (it takes time for OEMs to update their models) and generally Intel use the higher-end IGP on mobile CPUs (the theory being that you probably don't have a dedicated graphics card so a better IGP is of more value to you).

Once Haswell starts to properly penetrate the laptop market, then you're mostly going to find HD 4600s on most stuff.

(As always, the model numbers are not linear or really very helpful at all, so this is mostly just an interesting aside rather than anything you should worry about when buying a laptop.)

[Maz]

The Toshiba Satellite U920T-11C seems like the best deal to go for. Intel i5-3217U, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM with the option of expanding to 8GB, and Toshiba are offering a refurbished version of it for £490 with the same warranty as if I bought new from Ebuyer. I'll sleep on it tonight, and if I'm still liking it tomorrow I'll probably purchase.

[Nacey]

Biggest issue I see with that is that the screen has a really low resolution for the size. That DPI is going to make it look pretty bad, especially for text. I don't know how much it would be an issue for you, it's a really personal thing. At an attempt to compare to something that you will have seen, it will look a little worse than an iPad 2, which personally I find kind of awful but your mileage may vary. That's just in DPI terms, the panel is probably also generally not as good as the one on an iPad 2 but I don't know that for sure.

Other than that the specs seem fine. It's a fairly decent CPU for a tabtop and the RAM is expandable to 8GB if you need it.

128GB is pretty small by the time you install Windows (~20GB) and some apps/games so make sure that's going to be enough for your purposes, remembering that you need to leave about 10% of an SSD free or you screw up the performance. Having said that, you won't find anything bigger within your budget so that's probably just something you'll have to deal with.

[Maz]

Yeah, basically if I wanted a bigger SSD I'd have to pay so much more, more like £1300. The screen resolution doesn't bother me really because I don't plan to watch HD movie content etc on it anyway, the most I'd be watching on it would be anime, really (and I'm a heathen and watch free low resolution crap on Crunchyroll so HD's wasted on me anyway). I already have a 1TB Buffalo HDD so I can just put music, games, videos etc on that if I want to. I have a desktop PC to do the majority of work on, so this laptop isn't going to see heavy use except for times when I'm going away, and having a SSD to travel with will be great, not to mention it has 2 USB 3.0 ports unlike a lot of other laptops that are still switching over which suits me for file transfer.

 

On the SSD I'm planning to just have Windows, Office Suite, MATLAB and SPSS so it shouldn't be a problem. I don't think there's much else that I couldn't run from an HDD.

 

I've ordered it and it should arrive in the next few days

[Nacey]

Movies will look fine on it, it's still a 720p screen. It's actually text that looks a lot better with high DPI. It's probably fine for your purposes anyway, and the spec seems fine otherwise. Let me know how it works out.

[Maz]

Well, I love my Moto G so I'm sure this will work out fine too. Thanks for your advice, guys!

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