I Need help choosing a laptop that is not too expensive

Discussion in 'Which Laptop should I buy?' started by Allie, Feb 16, 2016.

  1. Allie

    Allie

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    Hi. I started school for graphic and web design and I have a mac computer, but cannot afford to get a mac laptop too. I need a pc laptop that can handle running the adobe programs and I have found some, and would like any advice I can get. I also will use the laptop for other personal things, I mainly use the desktop for school. Here are some that I have found, and if you have any other suggestions to other laptops please let me know! Thank you.

    http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9855972&CatId=17

    http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9854649&CatId=17

    http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8909090&CatId=17

    http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9885541&CatId=17
     
    Allie, Feb 16, 2016
    #1
    IBMPC8088 likes this.
  2. Allie

    IBMPC8088

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    It really is your lucky day. You can have both a mac and a PC with the types of specs you're looking to get here. If you haven't heard of a hackintosh yet, be sure to google this:
    Niresh's Mac OS X Mountain Lion for AMD and Intel 10.8.5 1

    and look for the ISO. Once you download the ISO, you can either replace the OS of the system with that to have a "real macintosh" on PC hardware as the main OS, or you can keep your Windows OS that it comes with, and install this to virtualbox instead. That way, you can run your Windows and your Apple Mac OS X out of a box on your computer at the same time and do everything you want to with both.

    You would be using and booting the machine normally with Windows and running programs on it as usual, but you would have a special program called Virtualbox which lets you install and run a virtual version of OS X with it, and any Mac programs you need or want to design with.


    As long as you have at least 4GB or higher of RAM, you are able to do this. It looks like all of these models have 6GB or higher on the ram and plenty of space and processor speed, so you should be fine with it. There are AMD and Intel versions of the Niresh builds for different releases of OS X up to Mavericks, and slightly older versions of OS X will work even if the newer builds don't yet.

    Most of the features they're adding to laptops for ram and storage space are more than people will ever use for school for personal things. I'm more of an Asus laptop enthusiast, but based on the model there are good laptops out there of various brands from Acer, Dell, and HP. With quadcore CPUs and DDR3L ram, you're not going to have too many bottlenecks anywhere. Any of those 4 are relatively good choices, except for a few minor things which I'll mention below here.

    I would try to go for the 1TB hard drives rather than the 500GB ones though. The extra space can come in handy if you like to download a lot of music or movies. The only exception is if it were a 480GB or 500GB SSD drive. If you can get a 500GB SSD instead of a 1TB 5400rpm drive, then I would go for the 500. If it's a 500GB 5400rpm drive, then you may want to go to the 1TB if they're both magnetic. Most people aren't going to use even 8GB of ram that many of these laptops come standard with now, but even still, I try to select one that has a minimum of 12GB to 16GB max on the motherboard that it can be upgraded to, just for future considerations. The Asus ROG (Republic of Gaming) systems will let you go up to 32GB of ram on them.

    1333mhz DDR3 ram is good, but if you can get 1600mhz or higher, I would go for that instead since the price differences are relatively cheap unless you can get nearly double the ram when you purchase it. As long as it can support 1600mhz ram on the board, you would be ok to upgrade to that speed and sell the chips it came with later if you wanted to go that route.

    The more video ram the system has, the better your video performance for intense graphics applications will be. Most of the video cards are overkill with 2gb to 4gb of dedicated video ram which is not shared with the system ram in most cases anymore. Unless you plan to play some really serious games or do some very serious video editing in realtime, 2gb of video ram is more than plenty. Even 1gb of video ram is more than most people need even if using it for some intense video applications.


    As far as the processor, try to lean towards Core I5 or Core I7 quadcore or an AMD A10 quadcore or higher. You won't need all that power today, but the way bloatware is released, you may need it tomorrow. And even if you don't, it's better to have it and not need it than to need it later and not have it. If you can get more tham 2MB on processor cache, that would be a good idea, too. 2MB on cache is plenty for fetching instructions and caching them to execute programs faster, but if you can get 3MB or 4MB cache or higher, it would be smart to go higher there, too. The better the specs you can get for a laptop today, the less you'll have to upgrade it tomorrow and the longer you can use it productively to stay ahead of the curve and market trends.
     
    IBMPC8088, Feb 16, 2016
    #2
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