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On 02/12/13 21:38, Richard Brown wrote: > Hi All > > Thank you so much for all the replies. It has been interesting and > has given me thought. I wanted to ask a further question in terms > of laptops or computers generally. When spending money you > obviously want to get the best value for money. So when considering > a laptop I wanted to consider factors that would help choice. > > Currently, I use a laptop to build websites, check emails, photo > and video editing and playing movies, listening to music, watching > iPlayer. Not too power hungry I would say. So when considering my > purchase should I: 1. Go for the best cpu 2. Go for the best gnu 3. > Best ram 4. Best hd etc.... > > It was interesting visiting the Lenova site to configure a maxed > out laptop but I don't need it. When I was thinking about budgets I > can purchase a MacBook Pro for £900. So if I get it under that I > guess I would have saved some money! So can someone help me decide > what specs to look for first please? > > Thanks This is all hugely subjective of course, ultimately you have to be the arbiter of both your acceptable budget and your desired specs. But I think it's safe to say that for most of us, money is in short supply and a new laptop is a relatively major purchase (especially as you're on a linux mailing list: therefore you are probably quite a nerd and planning to really use the hell out of this thing for a good few years). I'm very pragmatic when it comes to laptops - I'll accept almost any piece of old crap, batter it into some semblance of functionality with a heavily customised Linux install and simply use it to destruction. I don't remember the last time I even bought one: I subsist on second or even third or fourth hand bangers but saying that I'm still quite careful about looking after them physically. Currently I've got a bright purple (!!) Acer Aspire One 10" netbook with an appalling Atom CPU, 1Gb of RAM and a very slow mechanical HDD. It's dented, scratched and rather pathetic... and I really like it. It's tiny, has great battery life and runs a massively customised Debian install with all my sysadmin tools on it. It's a little life-saver. On the other hand, about 3 years ago the missus needed a laptop too, and unlike me, she wanted something solid, reliable with more power (she runs medical analysis tools, SPSS, image processing, etc for her job), an actual guarantee/warranty and that didn't require my expert intervention every 10 minutes just to keep it running. Critically, unlike me, she knew she'd spend a lot of time using it exclusively for years - she doesn't have a massive bad-ass workstation or three to fall back on. So, no arguments there - I bought her a brand new 15" MacBook Pro which I think cost at list about £1200 at the time, minus her student/staff discount (she's a junior doctor, so qualifies for both). I'm banned from unnecessarily tinkering or "improving" it, and being an Apple, it actually does a good job of staying stable and not borked under the tender administration of a normal user. I guess what I'm saying is each to their own: my craptop actually does all the things you want yours to do surprisingly well - only CPU intensive stuff like encoding/compiling lets it down, it even plays 720p videos perfectly well. So maybe you can get by with a freebie too, if you don't mind doing all the constant work tweaking and maxing configs out all the time. But then again, if you don't have a full-on workstation either, and this laptop will be your main/only computer for the next five years day in, day out for everything you do: well, surely you'd be mad not to invest a fair chunk of change in it. In that situation, even I'd be tempted to splash a grand on a Retina MacBook Pro myself, although I'd linux it up immediately. Decisions, decisions eh? The rest of them seem to like ThinkPads, and they are good machines: it's one of the few laptop makes that I almost never have dropped off to me for repairs, because they are really hard to break. They're not as good since Lenovo took over but you could do a lot, lot worse. Ignore everyone telling you to buy a laptop from some obscure boutique though, that's a dumb idea. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq