New laptop

[Raffa]

Hi all,

Looking to get a multi-purpose laptop, and I could use some advice from you guys on choosing one. Unfortunately I'm a total nublet with computers (I use one hotkey in dow: "x"), so I think I'll stick to buying a pre-made laptop.

Now given that I'm off to grad school for 4 or so years, the main purposes of this laptop are:

1. Gaming
2. Storing data, such as essays, emails, all that stuff you need while living in the bubble of Uni
3. Laptop to still be doing OK after four years

I have pretty much zero idea how big any data is gonna be (don't know what the rough size of Dow is for comparison's sake...yeah). So:

1. 8 GB or 16 GB?
2. Recommendations. Alienware? Macbook? For once I can actually choose from some top of the range stuff so any and all suggestions are welcome.

Gratz in advance, from someone with no knowledge of what makes a computer good. I'm at your mercy :p

[Torpid]

Novatech gaming laptops are very cost efficient I have a good experience with them. (they're UK too!) Just note that whenever you're gaming on a gaming laptop you must use a cooling pad or you're stabbing your laptop each time you game.

8GB is really sufficient for most things these days. Ram isn't the issue usually with slow computers when gaming - poor graphics cards/processors are usually the bigger problem. Dedicated video ram is more important than onboard ram once you've crossed that threshold of 8gb onboard ram.

The cool thing about Novatech laptops is that even though the main thing motherboard and the rest of it is pre-made you can actually customise the processor/ram and other very important attributes. For example I mainly use my computer for reading, writing and gaming. Any music I listen to isn't downloaded, it's just played on youtube. so, right now I have 35 tabs open, steam, sticky notes, anti-virus, DOW so I need a decent chunk of Ram, yet because I rarely download stuff - I don't download music, I have few computer games and I don't deal with media on my PC - I didn't need a big hard drive so I got 8gb of ram for the price of 6gb by choosing to cut the size of my hard drive by 75% just because I don't ever use HDD space.

They're not the very best, but honestly for cost-efficiency they are superb. Don't dare get an Alienware whatever the hell you do, they are the most overpriced things I've ever discovered! You're just buying the brand.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/laptop/gaming ... 5,6,32&o=2

Also don't forget you have to frequently dust a laptop's ventilation shaft's with compressed air much more so than you do with a desktop since you can't pull some modern laptops apart and especially don't want to if you aren't tech-savvy. Laptops are about putting more power into smaller processors and then putting smaller processors into smaller cases. Laptops get hot and you have to give them real care.

[David-CZ]

Personally I have good experience with laptops by mysn.eu. You're practically paying solely for the hardware and for it being assembled. No fancy brands. They also offer a wide range of different models each with customizable parts.

Also for some reason I can't load the novatech website.