Computer Related > Replacement Laptop Computing Issues
Thread Author: zippy Replies: 13

 Replacement Laptop - zippy
My current laptop is 5 years old and whilst not issue free** I do like it, but I think it's time to consider a replacement and I may* be looking to get one come Black Friday.

It was a beast when I got it and it's specs are:

17 inch screen
Aluminium construction (it's a bit heavy)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HK CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.70 GHz
NVIDIA GFORCE GTX 1070
256gb solid state drive
1,000 gb hard drive.
16GB DDR4 RAM

At the time it cost <£1k.

If I do get something new, I want it to be something that "blows this one away"!

I have totally lost touch with the market. What sort of specs should I be looking for?

*Toying with the idea. My guess is something more pressing will come along to claim my laptop cash stash.

**the internal battery holds a charge for about 10 minutes. Sometimes the disks are not recognised. WIFI hardware intermittently reports failure.
 Replacement Laptop - smokie
I've never been that knowledgeable about laptop spec but yours looks like it ought to be pretty damn good, despite its age.

Still, if you're going to chuck it out when you get the new one, I'll take care of that for you :-)
 Replacement Laptop - zippy
That's my dilemma. I think to get anything better I am going to have to spend well over £1k.

I would if I could guarantee mind blowing performance in comparison to this one.
 Replacement Laptop - smokie
Mindblowing doing what though? Word and a bit of browsing? Or are you a gamer? I suppose knowing that might help with advice anyway - eg you only really need expensive video cards for playing the latest games at high quality, or crypto-mining? You are already running an SSD which is about as fast as you'll get diskwise (the newer ones are a bit quicker but not much, and I think they might be PC only. You can now get 1 1Tb SSD to replace your mechanical one, that might help a bit.

I can't imagine really how you could better it with hardware but you might be able to tune it a bit if you know what you were up to, My PC is a much older processor than yours but it is pretty quick at most things, cos I am able to tune it and I understand enough to maintain it at optimal performance (within the limits of the hardware of course).
 Replacement Laptop - zippy
Games. Not necessarily the newer stuff. My fave is Civilization 4, but I like all the detail turned up.

Flight sims as well.

Excel spreadsheets and often calculation intensive, sometimes 10's of minutes or so of calc but not huge in size.

Updating programming skills.

I have been given a 2nd hand drone (in good nick) so no doubt some video editing.
 Replacement Laptop - Falkirk Bairn
LG Gram 17 inch i7, 16G memory, 1TB SSD
I have had it for 12 months - runs well. Lightweight, excellent screen
It cost me £1200 - a Costco special price which has been repeated in the last 12 months. Currently around £1500 the last time I looked.
 Replacement Laptop - Biggles
If you want value for money, a Huawei Matebook 16 with a Ryzen 7 processor for £680 takes some beating.
 Replacement Laptop - Crankcase
I finally ditched my Huawei phone after I looked the traffic it was sending. I’d blocked it using pihole from contacting China, which it was doing every few minutes. I had to have a Huawei account (again, lots of chat back to China) to use lots of the features as well.

It then fell back to trying to contact some .ru sites, at which point I thought I’d pick a different manufacturer.

Outside, when it was just using the sim in the normal way, it was outside the pihole too, so all that China and Russia chat was happening all the time, whatever it was sending.

Just made me uncomfortable, though not surprised.
 Replacement Laptop - Zero

>> Just made me uncomfortable, though not surprised.

Yeah wouldnt touch Huawei stuff with a barge pole.
 Replacement Laptop - smokie
Apart from the SSD size (which Zippy could upgrade himself easily enough for about £100 tops) and maybe the weight, FBs one look similar to the one Zippy already has.
 Replacement Laptop - Zero
If I were zipster, I would invest a couple of 100 quid, change the battery, update the SSD and reload windoze....
 Replacement Laptop - zippy
>> If I were zipster, I would invest a couple of 100 quid, change the battery,
>> update the SSD and reload windoze....
>>

Thanks for all your thoughts and ideas.

I think Zero is right. Sourcing a good battery is going to be difficult though.

It beats current £1500 laptops by some degree graphics wise and is is just little slower than many laptop i7 chips and having seen some new non-gaming i7 chips, it blows them out of the water!

For example many £1500 laptops come with an RTX 3050 graphics card. My 5 year old laptop's 1070 card is at least 30% faster (all other things being equal).

I think I would need to spend at least £2500 on something spectacular and don't have the budget or more appropriately, the need or case for that at the moment.
 Replacement Laptop - smokie
I can't see you've mentioned the brand but it's probably worth going for a pukka OEM battery if you can find one. I got a cheap one for my knockabout Dell laptop and it is barely better than the duff one it replaced.
 Replacement Laptop - zippy
>> I can't see you've mentioned the brand but it's probably worth going for a pukka
>> OEM battery if you can find one. I got a cheap one for my knockabout
>> Dell laptop and it is barely better than the duff one it replaced.
>>

It's a Lenovo.

I had purchased some cheap power adaptors (the cable keeps fraying as I sit the wrong way around and twist them).

The cheap ones are about £75/£80 now. They were £50. Never again. They didn't last 6 months before some capacitor popped or they over heated.

A new one from Lenovo, when they have stock is £120 and, touch wood, has been going strong for some time now.

I will try and source one.
Latest Forum Posts