Question Laptop for Student life

xxHAPPYxx

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Sep 3, 2015
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I am going to university soon and need a laptop. I will be taking my PC with a 1080 in it for gaming but I need something a little more portable and business like.

Budget: £800
I don't need much gaming capacity although some would be nice as intel hd graphics from what I remember are atrocious. I need it to have a nice display and good battery life, I love watching movies. Also the keyboard must be comfortable.

Any thoughts?
 

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
Pretty open ended, but there are a lot of laptops that fit the bill. As for comfortable keyboard, not really a thing on laptops. There are some high end laptops with mechanical keyboards, but results will vary depending on how you like your keys, and key layout. Most are pretty bland chiclet style these days.

17" laptops will sometimes come with numpads which can be useful. There are systems with the keyboard moved to the front edge of the laptop, people often don't like them since there is no wrist support.

15" ultrabooks are fairly standard. Most will have Intel iGPU only, but occasionally MX class low end Nvidia graphics, hardly suitable for gaming.

I would simply look at anything that comes with a GTX1050/GTX1050Ti and call it a day. Should be plenty of i5 and i7 options.
 

punkncat

Polypheme
Ambassador
Our son is in college and uses a laptop almost exclusively now. He tried to use various tablets and "other" devices. For the power and usability within a very Microsoft centric world, he found the laptop to be the best situation.

My own suggestion would be to find something along the lines of an i5, onboard graphics, rugged, and cheap as you can find it. IF you are knowledgeable enough go ahead and do an SSD swap from HDD yourself and save some mad cash. I wouldn't worry too much about having more than 8GB of RAM for the usage. Rugged for the backpack and toting around, cheap for the theft possibilities.
I would suggest investing in a good AV solution. With that said, keep in mind that most university require you install some manner of "spyware" as what they refer to as anti cheat software.
Your biggest hurdle is going to be battery life, particularly if you are doing a full load course semester. Thus why I recommend lower power proc.
Something to consider if you aren't concerned about battery life is something powerful enough to run a virtual machine in and thus sandboxing the universities required programs. In my son's machine I identified no less than 8 "virus" that the school requires him to have in order to take tests, get on their internet structure, and such.
 

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