Back to windows 7 for me

d8m

I'm in the market for a new laptop and have been checking out the specs on the Macs and as much as I would like one I cant really justify spending the money needed to get one with the specs I would like.

I'm coming from a dell CAD workstation so the specs I am running are still pretty decent but the machine is just old and on its last legs. Not after a CAD station this time but still want something at least comparable.

Windows it is!

Any recommendations?

digitalscream

@d8m - I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (sourced second-hand from @Sporky), which is absolutely bloody excellent. 3200x1800 resolution, 13.3" touchscreen, 2.1GHz Core i7 CPU, 8GB RAM and a SSD you can actually upgrade (unlike the ones Apple use, which are proprietary and force you to buy from them at exhorbitant prices). Battery lasts for yonks, too (I get about 6 or 7 hours out of mine).

The only negative is that the RAM is soldered to the board and unexpandable; however, in practice that's not really an issue. It's a phenomenal machine, and very light. You can pick them up for between £300 and £400; the newer versions aren't actually all that much better.

Sporky

digitalscream said:

ou can pick them up for between £300 and £400; the newer versions aren't actually all that much better.

The Pro 3 was worse in most respects, and in the current range you need to go to the 900 to better the Pro 2.

digitalscream

Sporky said:

digitalscream said:

ou can pick them up for between £300 and £400; the newer versions aren't actually all that much better.

The Pro 3 was worse in most respects, and in the current range you need to go to the 900 to better the Pro 2.

That shocked me, too. Even though I've recently upgraded my desktop to a latest-generation i7, I never feel particularly handicapped when I have to switch to the laptop; it's a position I've never really been in before.

57Deluxe

New MacBook... £1750 - £2350 ish!

http://www.alphr.com/apple/apple-macbook-pro/1004644/hands-on-with-the-new-macbook-pro-and-its-touch-bar

ThePrettyDamned

Sporky said:

digitalscream said:

ou can pick them up for between £300 and £400; the newer versions aren't actually all that much better.

The Pro 3 was worse in most respects, and in the current range you need to go to the 900 to better the Pro 2.

Is there a model with an ssd, i7 and upgradeable ram to a minimum of 16gb? 

If there is a used model that would do that, it could tide me over for six months while I work on starting up. 

ThePrettyDamned

A cursory Google has shown a few, but none with 16gb ram. There are some dell business laptops that fit the criteria for around £550. 

It got me thinking though -my current laptop has an i7 (4th gen I think - NOPE 3rd gen) and 8gb ram. It's a dell inspiron.

I'm wondering how easy, or not, it is to jam a couple more sticks of ram in and replace the hard drive with a Samsung evo 850. Would be cheaper than a laptop, means more pennies saved for when I can afford a good desktop and monitor -not to mention already having a 500gb Samsung ssd to put in it. 

Edit: Cursory looking on the Crucial site shows 8gb is RAM maxed out, as it's a third gen i7 3632qm. However, a 750gb MX300 SSD is £170 or so, and would almost certainly give me enough of a performance boost to make do for a couple of months, before being transferred into a new computer as a second storage device for RAW files - no spinning disks!

So, given my laptop now has Windows 10, how easy or hard is it to put the OS onto a USB Stick, remove the old drive, pop the new one in and install Windows 10 onto it? 

It only has space for one drive, and no m.2 format, so it'll involve me moving everything from the old drive onto the new one, starting with the OS. But to be honest, all I have installed alongside windows is Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Google Chrome, Microsoft Office and that's about it! So I'd expect swapping to an SSD to give quite a real performance boost, and the bottleneck will probably be RAM. 

Sporky

My Yoga 900 has an i7-6500, 16Gb of RAM and a 512Gb SSD. The available configs vary over time - when I got mine there was £400 cashback and a free upgrade from 8Gb of RAM so it's worth keeping an eye out.

Also different configs from Lenovo direct and the different retailers.

ThePrettyDamned

Sporky said:

My Yoga 900 has an i7-6500, 16Gb of RAM and a 512Gb SSD. The available configs vary over time - when I got mine there was £400 cashback and a free upgrade from 8Gb of RAM so it's worth keeping an eye out.

Also different configs from Lenovo direct and the different retailers.

That would do. 

The waters are muddied by my finding of refurbished workstation pcs. I know that Lightroom and photoshop don't take great advantage of multi core processing, but they have a bigger cache in the processors, nvidia quadro graphics (not really needed for me, tbh, but possibly will accelerate a few tasks), reliability, and tons of ram -which will be useful. 

I found a six core build with a 1tb hard drive, 400gb ssd (for OS, apps and Lightroom catalogue) , low end quadro graphics and 48gb (!) ram. 

It seems a bit too good to be true, and I wonder if it would be slower for using older processors and quadro graphics. 

Perhaps it's best I just keep saving. How boring. 

Does the lenovo yoga have an output to connect to another screen? I can't imagine a laptop screen will be colour corrected. My current laptop hides reds and clipped red a bit so everything prints a bit minging 

Sporky

The Pro 2 had micro HDMI. The 900 has USB-C, which'll give you 4K on Displayport or HDMI via a £10 adaptor.

Axe_meister

I've seen a couple of Mac Pro 2.1s on eBay with 8 cores and 32GB for around £400.
whilst not so great for single threaded stuff these would still be very capable machines. OK not very portable.
Although I'd probably boot up into windows.