Hello again, I'm back with more questions about hardware. So my current laptop which has served me faithfully for 3 years and is still technically functional, is now literally tearing at the seams. I've now got a lot of exposed metal next to the power supply and battery if I want my screen to stay open. So I'm looking to get a new laptop this weekend that doesn't pose an electrical fire hazard. (Side note: Duct tape didn't help near as much as I expected it would) My laptop is very much my main computer now, as I don't bring my desktop to uni with me and I doubt I'll bring it with me when I first start working, so it needs to be decent. Work wise I do a lot of word processing and data processing, mostly dealing with .csv's of weather observations and running them through as much python as I can. I'm also running python scripts which model simplified sections of the atmosphere and oceans. Gaming wise I'm spending most of my time playing football manager and Skyrim so lowish graphics is not a huge issue, though if there was the capacity to play more intensive games I wouldn't say no. From a hardware front I'm looking for at least 8GB of RAM and at least a 500GB HDD. A full sized keyboard is also a must, so the laptop being large or heavy is not something I'm worried about. A touch screen would be nice as I've not gotten used to having one on this machine, but it's not a requirement. Budget is £500-700 (preferably on the lower end because I'm paying for at least half of it and need to pay heating bills as well) (Also, side note: It's going to be a properly cold winter, especially from 21/11 onwards (in the UK at least)) My preliminary search has brought up this : https://www.shop.bt.com/products/ac...15-6--touch-windows-10-nx-g1sek-020-C9FP.html (This is the cheapest I could find it) However I've not really heard a lot about Acer as a manufacturer and a quick google suggests their build quality is pretty poor, thoughts?
i3 cpus are plentyful these days if you get a skylake based one, iirc ive seen a few with dedicated gpus floating about too
So how did it go with the laptop search ? If you still haven't found anything. (But now have a bigger budget for one id go for a I5 & gtx 950m or if they are in range of your budget a 1050 as gpu) Worst case scenario if you are strapped on cash is that you can go for a used laptop like a lenovo T520 or more recent model & ignore the gpu part for now.
Ended up going with : http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-17-5767-laptop/pd?oc=cn57607&model_id=inspiron-17-5767-laptop A bit more than my initial budget because fuck it it's Christmas. (And my shallow water model is more intensive than I remember and I need it to run many, many times.)
