Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Time to buy a new laptop

Apple sucks. End of story.

Point. Proven.

Not at all, Ken. You got played.

Hey, be nice to Ken.

OK, so Apple verse....all the others....aside.

Getting back to one of my earlier questions, is there a preferred type of memory, type of screen, processor, or anything in particular that should be avoided?

Not that I'm aware of, Mike. I do highly suggest that you get a laptop with a high capacity SSD. I also suggest you store any media on an external hard drive, thus leaving your SSD (main drive) dedicated for your OS and programs. When using an SSD as your main drive (on a laptop or desktop), it should be kept as clutter-free as possible.

Peace

This used to be the case, but such care is no longer really necessary.

The "write endurance" of modern SSDs is above the threshold where most consumers need to worry. They are much self-healing in that they come with plenty of spare storage cells to replace ones that have worn out from too many write cycles. Unless you're filling filling your drive nearly to capacity (more than 90ish%), and then deleting a bunch of data, then filling it again, over and over like you would if you were doing video production or something on it -- then you don't really need to worry about your SSD any more than you did with spinning disks.

That being said, be sure to get a high-quality ssd that's as big as you can afford so that you don't fill it too quickly. 1TB drives are pretty reasonable now. I'll leave it to Ken or others to recommend a brand.

That is, if you feel like installing your own SSD in the laptop. If you do, get a Samsung 850 EVO or Pro. There are subtle differences, and the Pro will last longer. But you'll pay a premium for that.

If you don't feel like installing your own SSD, you're stuck with what the manufacturer will put in it (and they probably won't tell you what brand it is).

I'd probably stick with an Intel CPU, preferably in the Core i5 or i7 range rather than i3 (or worse yet, Pentium or whatever their mid-low range is these days). No preferred type of memory, other than a large amount (8 or 16GB if you can swing it).

Screen type is a fairly personal choice, but my preference would be a high res "retina" type; e.g. 2650x1600 at 15" or better. I don't know how many of those are out there.

Last time I checked (6 months ago) you still paid a silly premium to buy a laptop with an SSD installed. At some point that will change, but SSDs don't seem to have hit the mainstream yet.