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Help Gareth decide on a laptop to buy

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Thrillho:
I have decided a laptop would be a good idea for various reasons.

I'm looking to get one on credit so that I don't have a huge hole in my pocket. I'm getting a 1TB hard drive in it because MUSIC.

I know not to get a Dell because in my experience they have zero customer service. What would be a decent brand to get?

Also, I know s'nowt about the bits that go inside it apart from that. I want a computer that runs quickly with a lot of tabs open and videos playing, but at a bare minimum cost because I won't use it for games.

Also, fuck Windows 8, but I'll get it if I must.

SOMEBODY HALP MEEEEEE

mtmerrick:
Things to think about:

-you wanted speed but not necessarily power. Best way to do this is with a SSD,  but they don't come as large as 1 to. So how much storage do you actually need (as opposed to want)?
-avoid AMD/ATI chips like the plague
-what Screen size were you thinking about?
-How much battery life do you want/need?
-is weight/thickness a concern?
-Do you need a disc drive?
-feelings towards touchscreen laptops or convertible/hybrid PCs?
-i know you said "minimum cost", but roughly how much do you have budgeted out for this thing?

Thrillho:
I love you Primo.

What's an SSD? And as for need, I guess I only need maybe 500GB at this point. Screen size I'd not considered but I'd like quite a big one. Battery life I want as much as I can get. Weight/thickness doesn't bother me much. I do need a disc drive for ripping music and watching DVDs. No desire for a touch screen.

No idea cost wise. Maybe £300ish? What is that, $550?

snalin:
More opinions coming soon, but an SSD is basically a super-fast hard drive. It's much more expensive than "normal" hard drives per GB of storage space, but the programs installed on it runs much better. If you have Windows living on an SSD instead of the good ol' hard drives, your start up time will be more than halved, and everything will be a good bit faster. I'd not recommend getting 500GB worth of SSD, as that'll be expensive, but a small SSD for programs plus a large, cheap and slow drive for music and movies is pretty much perfect.

snalin:
A small SSD drive for the OS and your programs, and then a large HD drive for files like music is perfect, and shouldn't be too expensive.

One thing to look out for; in some online shops, you can get the extra harddrive instead of a DVD drive. If you (like me) haven't actually used a cd in years, that's a good alternative, as it'll get you both the SSD speed and the affordable HD without the laptop having to be fat enough to fit those two drives and space for a DVD. Also the kind of online shops where you can mix and match component sounds like what you're looking for - usually when you buy pre made options, the components scale together. So they combine the big hard drive you need for music with the kind of processors and graphics cards that are much better than what you need, and if you get something with the kind of power that's enough for your needs, it'll probably have too little drive space.

If you're not playing games, you can save a lot by finding computers that doesn't have any fancy graphics cards. I think most onboard (included in the motherboard) graphics solutions these days can handle HD streams and movies fine, so ditch all the alternatives that says GTX or NVIDIA anywhere on the specs listings, as they can quickly add some hundreds of USD to the price.

The hybrid tablet/PCs are, in my experience, often not big on storage space, so if you get one, you'll need that extra storage from elsewhere. Also touching screens on laptops are stupid, but that is, I realize, a very subjective opinion. Still stupid. Unless you think not having to have a mice would be the best.

Windows 8 isn't that bad - ask someone you know (or someone here) with a bit of google-fu, and you can strip away all the stupid from 8 and be left with a slightly faster 7.

Otherwise I'll need a budget to give actual advice. Something like this will cover everything you need comfortably, but if that's too expensive, you can get by on cheaper alternatives. Note: does not have the SSD we've been talking into the skies.

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