You'd probably be better off buying a desktop and a cheaper laptop, unless you needed the portability for work?
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Buying New Laptop Assistance requested
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No, it wouldn't get used for work...plus I don't know what work might be...since I have 2 months left before my layoff is complete (ie. I'm out looking for a new job right now)...
I also don't want to have to deal with maintaining two personal machines right now. So I want one laptop that can be my main home machine, that also goes with me whenever I go anywhere.
Eh, my advice would be a cheap $350 laptop with minimal graphics for Civ 4 games, and throw the rest at the PC. You can get a lot for $1000 in a desktop, not so in a laptop.
(September 2nd, 2014, 15:43)Krill Wrote: Eh, my advice would be a cheap $350 laptop with minimal graphics for Civ 4 games, and throw the rest at the PC. You can get a lot for $1000 in a desktop, not so in a laptop. I can confirm that random $300 laptops bought at Walmart successfully play Civ 4  (not my purchasing advice... it was an emergency situation)
Fear cuts deeper than swords.
Yeah, not saying you'd want to use that $350 machine as your day to day PC but they can be damned useful if you have to travel. I think the most important thing is to price up the components to build the desktop and then compare that to the uber-laptop you'd want to buy.
Here is an interesting link to a $1300 PC built with nothing to start with. Dual monitors, solid CPU, great GPU, nice case, SSD with HDD for storage...I'd have a slightly larger SSD, the Samsung EVO 250GB are getting stupidly cheap now and a 2TB HDD is hardly that much more expensive but will certainly hold all those stored videos that can accumulate, and the AMD 280X is good enough to run pretty much any game at 1080p and cheaper than the nVidia 770.
There just isn't any real reason to get more expensive stuff than in that build (maybe different screens, a different case due to taste). It's just good enough to run pretty much anything for the next 5 years.
Thanks for the research there on the desktop thing. I do think I'm still pretty set on getting a laptop as my main machine, so am going to try to find something suitable enough. Will probably be checking out Costco, BestBuy, NewEgg, SagerNotebook, etc shortly for what kinds of options I can find for decent (under $1800) prices. I may obtain a desktop again after a couple years or so if I end up determining that the laptop doesn't do everything I've dreamed of....but right now, a good laptop is my target.
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