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Buying a New Lap Top looking for input.

The first thing you want to do is look at the needed minimum specs for any software you need. Realistically that should be easy to beat, but budget can effect that.
If you have a few minutes, then I would try to check out forums specific to those pieces of software, in case there is something like a video card, that doesn't play nicely with them. (normally too new, but maybe a different video card, aka non gaming, might be better)
I expect that might be where you big expense would be.
What you need is a case, with mounting screws, motherboard and processor (those can also be bought as a bundle, if your afraid to mount one), fan (as well as case fans), power supply, memory and storage.
My brother was afraid to build one for years, but had upgraded several. He finally built one a few years back, and wonders why it took him so long. The biggest worry, static. (you have already had that worry when upgrading)

Laptops are nice, but overall, desktops are still my cost effective preference.
 
Bought a Lenovo All-in-One a year or so ago when my laptop that I was using as a desktop died. I highly recommend an all-in-one if you want a desktop. I plugged in a keyboard and mouse I already had, turned it on and started loading software and copying files. Had it up and running in less than an hour. Been very happy with it.
 
being an it guy by trade, i would recommend hp first, followed by lenovo. i would not recommend dell. when the sis in law was looking, i told her to avoid dell, well, long story short, she bought one. within 6 months, she was on the phone with their customer support. then one day, she asked me to come over and talk with the tech guy, before she reached down the phone and strangled him (needless to say, his very heavy accent had something to do with it, and with my working with guys from india helped). she had completely reloaded the system several times, and by this time, she was quite frustrated with it. looking to keep my skin intact, i deferred from reminding her that i had advised her to avoid dell like the plague. i have had no problems with either lenovo, or hp. my laptop is a lenovo, and all others have been hp.
 
Re Dell. I got frustrated dealing with offshore tech help from Dell on previous machines and purchased premium next business day on-site support for this last system. All the tech support people I talked to were based stateside. Even with that it's somewhat of a trial and error process. They remotely diagnose a problem, overnight a part and the tech shows up next day to install it. If it works, fine, but it didn't, so more remote diagnostics another day awaiting parts and another visit by the tech guy. Still didn't work, so I ended up having to wait three days for them to send me a box to ship my system to their repair depot and was down for ten more days. When I got it back the keyboard still didn't light up....they sent me another new one and I installed myself. Next day business service does not mean your system will be fixed the next day :(. The parts they use are used/reclaimed, but still figure I got my moneys worth on the support cost. Thirty days left on the warranty....hope it holds up for a few more years.
 
larry merlau said:
scott and vaughn,, i have never thought i could build one but have dabbled with replacing ram and a hard drive in the past.. could you two give me a grocery list of what i needed to do this? what about the box to hold it need a new one or can i use a a old box that is to old to be upgraded to newer software..
Click to expand...

I kinda stumbled into building PCs while repairing an existing one a few years ago. The repair seemed easy, so I moved on to a build. The key is that the components are compatible. The motherboard (MOBO), processor (CPU), and RAM must all be compatible with each other, and the MOBO and power supply (PSU) have to be compatible with whatever case you use. Most hard drives will fit, but I'd recommend a solid state drive as the main drive. From there, it's really just tinker toys for big boys (and girls)! You can add CD/DVD/Blu-ray optic drives if you want, and can pretty much customize to be whatever you want it to be. I went with fairly basic, but highly rated stuff to keep costs down.

There are some really helpful websites that are a lot like wwing forums, cept that they talk computerese....Tomshardware.com/forum is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but you can google for more. Most are very helpful.

I took the easy route for my last build....I cloned an existing hard drive that had the OS I wanted to use, and just transferred the copied drive to the new PC. Made it really easy. Cost for this one was < $400.

- (1)GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-USB3 (rev. 6.0) AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 USB 3.0 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
- (1)AMD FX-4300 Vishera Quad-Core 3.8 GHz Socket AM3+ 95W FD4300WMHKBOX Desktop Processor
- (2-4)G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory
- (1)ASUS DVD-Writer 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 24X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 24X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM
- (1)Corsair CX500 V2 Power Supply
- (1)DREVO X1 SSD 240GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal Solid State Hard Drive 550MB/s
- (1)Xion XON 180 case
 
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Pulled the trigger and bought a 17" HP 2 weeks ago. Very happy with it. Now both of my computers are running Win 10. Still have Win 8.1 on my wife's notebook (that she uses mainly as a reader) and Win 7 on her laptop because she's got quilting software that won't run on anything newer.
 
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