Let's talk Laptops...

I just bought a new desktop. I got more for my money that way. To get the same specs on a laptop that I got on my desktop would've cost a couple hundred bucks more. I had desktop/laptop before iPads, and the only thing I really used my laptop for was surfing the net.

Just my $.02. Dell is having a nice sale right now.

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Budget? And, what software will you be using for photo editing? and vector graphics editing?

And by Civilization, do you mean the most recent one, or the original?

Does it need to be a laptop? As stated above, desktops offer more bang for buck particular for workstation/gaming. But if you're talking about photo editing in terms of cropping and adjusting brightness, and gaming in terms of the original Civ, then all of that is pretty easy on any machine. Something like Inkscape isn't tough on PCs all that much either.

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I actually have a desktop computer that works pretty well for me right now. I do want to add more RAM. But it fulfills my needs on that end. The laptop is replacing my wife's old laptop. But if I'm doing that, I might as well get one that we'll both use. That way I'm not back in the doldrums of the house away from the rest of the family all the time.


I use Inkscape for vector editing. My desktop has 4 GBs of RAM now and it runs slow when rendering certain files. From what I've gathered, more RAM would help solve that issue. For photo editing my plan is to purchase Lightroom. I don't think I'll need the full Photoshop.

Budget is probably no more than $700 or 800, but it's flexible.

As for Civilization, I mean Civ V: The Complete Edition. I just purchased that on Amazon for a ridiculously low price. Problem with Civ is that I can go in the office and stay there for hours. Then I get to hear the wife complain about that.

She wants it for light web-browsing and synching her iTunes account. I figure I'll probably end up using it way more so I want to get one with specs that will work for my usage.

You can run Civ 5 on integrated graphics, but the experience will be much better with some sort of dedicated GPU.

Perfect all-around laptop for exactly what you'd be using it for: LINK

Swap out the hard drive with a 500GB SSD and you're still under budget. (And if you don't get the SSD, you are dumb).

SSD: LINK

Hard drive enclosure: LINK

Instructions for Cloning: LINK

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So when you do that and clone the SSD and then install it in place of the hard drive that came in the machine, does the hard drive in the enclosure function just like an external hard drive when you connect it via USB?

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if you clone the current hd with a new ssd..
then you replace the hd internally with the ssd.
the ssd now has your operating system and whatnot on it..
you can take the original hard drive inside the computer that you had cloned and put it into an enclosure case and use it as an external hard drive via usb for additional storage. you can delete everything off it.. reformat it.. and use it as new storage.


they also have some laptops that are a hybrid of ssd + hd.. so like your operating system is on ssd and then you still have the tons of storage of a standard hd.. this gives the best of both words and maybe an affordable option.

(i think they have that^) not exactly the brightest computer person here.

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they also have some laptops that are a hybrid of ssd + hd.. so like your operating system is on ssd and then you still have the tons of storage of a standard hd.. this gives the best of both words and maybe an affordable option.

(i think they have that^) not exactly the brightest computer person here.

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Yes. I have seen that option out there as well.

Thanks everyone for the help.