[Technology] Geek help - New Laptop - What Do I Need?

[Greavsey]

As well a decent processor and memory the thing that slows a machine the most is the disk. I would recommend buy one with a SSD (solid State) drive. The drives have a smaller capacity but you can add an external drive for storage or use cloud based storage.

Great advice, thank you! I reckon budget is maximum £1500...

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

What does OP need? Needs to research a laptop that won't be banned by airlines in case it bursts into flames

 

[tinx]

I've recently bought the latest Macbook Air. It will do everything you need to do and more, I went for the 13 inch screen 256Gb SSD hard disk 8gb memory and it does everythign I need with no drama at all. Think it was about £1200. It replaced a MacbookPro from 2011 thats still going for my Son but was showing its age abit after 8 years good service.

 

[ozzygull]

This thread has bounced my thinking about getting an SSD drive for this late 2011 Mac to get some more life out of it. I've got an expensive bit of CAD software that won't run on more recent versions of OSX, so a Mac upgrade for me is the mac +£2k worth of software. Think I'll opt for a SSD and keep saving...

I have not replaced one in a MAC so I do not know if the process was the same. My daughter was given an hp pavilion i5 processor and decent amount of memory but it was so slow and noisy. I uninstalled any unnecessary software but task manger just show the Disk IO being hammered. I was trying to run a windows update on it and it was so frustrating I decided to just replace the disk. Creative labs are really good they have a compatibility checker (https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/upgrades/creative-labs) so you get the correct part and provided they imaging software to copy your data.

My daughters laptop was a pain to replace the disk, as I had to take it fully apart to get to it. Which is a disgrace of a design as hard drive failure is probably the most common fault, and majority of people would not attempt what I did. So they have to pay or bin it.

Anyway the result of doing it was amazing the machine now starts in seconds instead of minutes, it is so much quieter and apps all work fine.

 

[Shropshire Seagull]

Another Microsoft Surface Pro advocate here

Bought an entry level Pro 3 about 4 years ago and upgraded to a Pro 4 last year.
Awesome piece of kit, versatile, use anywhere, 9 hours of battery and happily runs all MS products inc big Visio and Excel files

I've owned in excess of 30 computers since the 80's and the Surface Pro is head and shoulders above anything else I've owned or used.

 

[RandyWanger]

Thanks - is there anything that I need to watch out for in particular to get Adobe Creative Cloud working as best as possible?

As much RAM as you can afford and a SSD, bigger the better too as Adobe products love to run things in temp files and can soon full up a 128GB SSD with a multi layered asset file open.

Mine is a:

2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Radeon Pro 555 2 GB
Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB
256 SSD

So far, so good.