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MovedGoalPosts · 18-09-2014, 14:28

I'm really struggling with this for a general home / office use, internet, wordprocessing, email etc, machine that would last 3 years or so. Portability is less of a concern, but reasonable keyboard is important as there will be a lot of text entry, which is why tablet and small screens aren't really suited.

There seem to be quite a few lappys out there with 15" screens, current i5 CPUs, 4GB and sometimes more RAM, permutations of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. But they are all handicapped by 5400RPM hard drives.

It seems that manufacturers see storage capacity as more important than performance, but with many people having external drives, NAS and even cloud space then a really big drive isn't essential? For some even a 120GB SSD would suffice on a general purpose machine to fit the OS, Office and some local data storage. 240GB SSDs could be ideal. How much difference would that make to a laptop price between a 500GB or even 1TB HDD that are commonly fitted and a SSD? £30, £50?

What I don't want to be doing is buying a lappy that immediately gets the HDD thrown out for a SSD. I've seen a couple of options for the Hybride SSB/HDD drives, but I'm not convinced that offers the real performance gains when arguably it's someone booting up and going straight to Office type applications, or interweb, rather than keep reading the same smaller bits of cached data over and over.

I realise that for the use specified even an i5 CPU might be overkill, but I find nothing worse than a sluggish computer.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

18-09-2014, 14:28	#1
MovedGoalPosts Inactive Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: 127.0.0.1 Age: 61 Posts: 15,868	Laptop - 15" screen, SSD, i5 CPU for £500 I'm really struggling with this for a general home / office use, internet, wordprocessing, email etc, machine that would last 3 years or so. Portability is less of a concern, but reasonable keyboard is important as there will be a lot of text entry, which is why tablet and small screens aren't really suited. There seem to be quite a few lappys out there with 15" screens, current i5 CPUs, 4GB and sometimes more RAM, permutations of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. But they are all handicapped by 5400RPM hard drives. It seems that manufacturers see storage capacity as more important than performance, but with many people having external drives, NAS and even cloud space then a really big drive isn't essential? For some even a 120GB SSD would suffice on a general purpose machine to fit the OS, Office and some local data storage. 240GB SSDs could be ideal. How much difference would that make to a laptop price between a 500GB or even 1TB HDD that are commonly fitted and a SSD? £30, £50? What I don't want to be doing is buying a lappy that immediately gets the HDD thrown out for a SSD. I've seen a couple of options for the Hybride SSB/HDD drives, but I'm not convinced that offers the real performance gains when arguably it's someone booting up and going straight to Office type applications, or interweb, rather than keep reading the same smaller bits of cached data over and over. I realise that for the use specified even an i5 CPU might be overkill, but I find nothing worse than a sluggish computer. Any thoughts or recommendations?