Cheap Latops

[calvegas04]

I would get an intel over an AMD personally, I feel they are more reliable. I would do AMD if you wanted to do any light gaming on the laptop.

 

[GATTACA!]

Forgot about Prime Day. Gonna wait it out, thanks for all the input. My main problem is that there are SO MANY CHOICES that it makes it really hard to compare/contrast.

Back in the day, I just built my own rig and I have a pretty great desktop still... but these fully packaged laptops just have so much going on I'm scared of making a bad buy.

My two suggestions would be 1) don't worry too much about hard drive space or specs. Switching out or upgrading a hard drive is one of the cheapest and easiest mods you can do. So if you're debating getting something with all the features you want vs a larger hdd or sdd go with the features. Additionally as many people have noted ssd's are the new rage. Unfortunately their price point it still relatively high in terms of GB per $. IMO the best bang for your buck is a compromise between the two with an SSHD. They are basically a combination of a large HDD and a small SSD. All the programs you use the most and your boot operations are stored on the SSD while you files and rarely accessed applications go on the HDD portion. The speed differential will be negligible and you will be able to get a 1TB SSHD for the cost of a 250 GB SSD. I just put a 1TB SSHD in my 17" 2011 macbook pro and it runs as fast if not faster than the day I bought it.

2) Forget about the disk drive. You'll be taking worse specs everywhere else in order to get the disk drive on an older model. disk drives are almost obsolete at this point and it's only going to get worse. Plus if you get a laptop without and you realize you desperately need the drive you can always grab an external disk drive on Amazon for under 50 bucks. The only scenario I wouldn't recommend this for is if you plan on watching dvds on the go. Like in the car for instance. Then an external drive isn't really feasible

 

[Irish YJ]

I would get an intel over an AMD personally, I feel they are more reliable. I would do AMD if you wanted to do any light gaming on the laptop.

In terms of reliable, how so? I've got 3 Desktops and 4 laptops currently between my house and office. Mix of AMD and Intel and have been building PCs with both for over a decade.

From a CPU perspective, I've never had and "unreliable" CPU. It's either fast or not, can multi task or not, either good at graphics or not. All are which are "knowns" (per spec or by researching benchmarks) before I did the build or bought the laptop. The only unreliable things in the mix are typically HDs and Motherboards IMHO.

Rarely have I had issues with CPUs or RAM. The only exceptions were when cooling or power were not adequate or flaky. I've had a few bad out-of-the-box CPUs, but more times than not they have been Intel (most issues with older I7s). The new AMD A architecture flat out beats today's Intel pound for pound unless you are doing extreme heavy lifting in some specific areas. Don't get me wrong, Intel is great, but AMD is a much better bang for the buck, if not a better bang regardless of buck.

 

[NDdomer2]

Oh, this is about cheap laPtops. Let me know when the latops are being discussed, duper interested in those....

 

[zelezo vlk]

So any good Prime Day deals?

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[IrishLax]

So any good Prime Day deals?

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Yeah could've gotten this for $250... instead went with a heavily discounted 2-in-1 that's like the HP Pavillion but instead was the Lenovo Yoga. Was $600 off.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Dang. The $799 one? Not exactly what I would call cheap, though it does look like a good deal. I just can't pull the trigger on that yet.

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