laptop recommendation

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Forealz

Limp Gawd
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May 7, 2007
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I'm looking for a 13-15" laptop with a quadcore i7 something, at least 8GB of ram, preferably a SSD, long lasting battery life and hopefully something light as well. Also, it needs to be comfortable to type on. Does anyone have a recommendation?
 
What's your price range?

My first thought is the Thinkpad T430/T430s. You can configure it to have everything you want at least, for a reasonable price.

Though most people I think get it it with a standard HD and add an SSD -- it has room for both, and apparently it doesn't severely impact the battery life.
 
The T430 doesn't support i7 QM. Depending on how hard your requirement for a quad is, I would still take a look at it. If you absolutely positively need a quad, your options will be limited if you want something reasonable in terms of price, design and weight.

There's the ThinkPad W530 which will do, but it is kind of heavy. In the same category - and many people don't like to hear this - is the 15" MacBook Pro. The Mac would probably be the lightest laptop in this class (especially if you take the new one without optical drive). If you run OSX, battery life will be better than with any Windows laptop. If you run Windows, it will be worse. HP has the 8570w which is supposed to be pretty good but it is very heavy.
 
I'd prefer a Quad, but I suppose I'm not sure how much I need it. Occasional photoshop will be the toughest task, more often it will be doing the normal daily computing thing.
 
A lot of manufacturers save the quads for 17" due to heat issues and IMHO 17 is one big machine to lug around. I would get a machine with a dual core and mSATA drive. I just found out that my Vostro 3450 supports mSATA drives (undocumented feature) and I am going to add one in for speed as the primary boot device.

I have an i7 2640m and it is more than fast enough for my needs
 
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OrangeWolf said:
What's your price range?

My first thought is the Thinkpad T430/T430s. You can configure it to have everything you want at least, for a reasonable price.
Click to expand...

My first thought was also a Thinkpad. They have great keyboards and the build quality is exceptional in my experience. You could configure the specs online to what you want although it would probably be cheaper to get the base Thinkpad with a 5400rpm HDD and probably 4gb ram and upgrade those yourself.
 
Forealz said:
I'd prefer a Quad, but I suppose I'm not sure how much I need it. Occasional photoshop will be the toughest task, more often it will be doing the normal daily computing thing.
Click to expand...

If your looking for a quad core cpu but don't want to spend a whole lot of money you could always go with one of AMD's APU's The A8's are great! generally lower base clock rates I think like 1.7ghz at most on all 4 cores but they have a turbo core feature that boosts 2 cores to as much as 2.5ghz when needed, don't quote me on the exact clock speeds but I have an HP dv6 with a quad core AMD A8-3500M and I couldn't be happier with the performance.
 
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HP's EliteBook line will take quads in the 15 and 14" line. I have a 2630QM in my 8540W and a 740QM in my wife's (my old) 8440W)

Dell's Latitude E6x20 and E6x30 series should be able to do it as well.
 
Take a look at sager. They offer quality 15" laptops which you configure to your liking.
 
Lenovo T530. Quad core option. 1080p display. Switchable graphics.
 
Im currently running an older Asus 15' laptop K53SV. its running the 2630qm I7 and an old 540m card. I think it was 800 bucks when I bought it.
They probably offer a newer one with a better video card now
I added the SSD though and bought 4 additional gigs of ram to save money.
 
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