Spend for Desktop, or Save for Laptop?

[Arciones]

I am an American student, a sophomore in high school, and I've been wanting a better computer for a while. Considering the amount of time I spend on the computer for both academic and leisurely activities, I think the money that can be put into a new computer would be worth it. The computer I currently own is plain terrible, frustrating, and sluggish. It has pretty low hard drive space (70 GB), an extremely weak/old graphics card, and a relatively weak/old processor. (I don't feel the need to list the specific names of my specs because I've been told time and time again that they're garbage. However, if you do genuinely need to know them, just ask.) I feel anchored to "bad" games, I guess, because I simply can't run anything else. I'm interested in many, many games, but I'm stuck with stuff like flash games. On a side note, recently, I've been interested in graphics design with Photoshop. Funny enough, my computer can't smoothly run the free trial of Photoshop I downloaded a while back.

I have $850 in cash. I've been thinking: should I spend the money on hardware this upcoming Holiday to build a new computer, or should I wait until college comes more around the corner and purchase a laptop? I am quite nervous but also tempted; I've never spent anything near the magnitude of $850 and I feel like I can easily squander it and screw myself over. Should I purchase the parts this Holiday, and then bring the desktop to college in a couple years, instead of buying a laptop? Am I too early to be thinking about college finances? I'd like to hear some thoughts. Thanks in advance.

 

[staste4290]

This is a tough question. Everything sounds like you should get a desktop up until college. However, I'd say if you spent your money now on a desktop that will allow you to do the things you want to do like photoshop and game, then thats what you should do. By the end of your Senior year I'm sure you can save up enough money to buy a laptop then, plus it wont be out of date, whereas if you buy one now, chances are for college when you really need it you could have bought a much better one for the same money. So in my opinion desktop all the way.

 

[synphul]

That would be my choice too, a desktop for now. $850 would get you a really nice system compared to what you have and more horsepower for the money than a laptop. As staste4290 mentioned, if you get a laptop now for college it will be 2yrs old by the time you need it for college. 2yrs is a fair amount of time to save up and depending what you need it to do in college you may be able to get away with an inexpensive chromebook or lightweight laptop when the time comes.

For running things like photoshop it's doubtful that an equally priced laptop will run it as well as a desktop pc. Same for games. Plus if you go the diy route you can better proportion your money to the things you need by say going with a budget case and applying more of the budget to ram and other performance components to get the most out of the programs you'd like to run.

 

[kwa-e]

For 650USD I think I can come up with a good PC (It's DIY, But it's pretty easy. Trust me.) that will run games well and photoshop pretty decently aswell, and you can use the extra 200 dollars and save up for a decent laptop by the time you get to college. How does that sound?