New Laptop Advice

Hey MK, MA is right it's Excl vat sorry that was off my pricelist.

Oh ok thanks guys, looks like I'm gonna have to keep looking, thanks a lot for your help!

well here is my 2c, and im no IT fundu either, im just reading the specs off my laptop;) and im really happy with it if i must say the least,

it is an ACER 5742G, has an intel core i5 processor, 15.6 HD LED LCD, AMD radeon HD6370m card, 5gb of ddr3 memory, 500gb hdd, and some 6 cell li-ion battery, and had windows 7 home premium.

i know its not the greatest thing, but for what i use it for this laptop has been amazing AND affordable,

being out on the road all day and infront of clients its always by my side, the battery can last atleast around 2 hours with me constantly being on it, all day i have programmes open such as word and excell (sometimes 10 or more huge documents at a time), my browser and various work software and it really runs smoothly,opening and closing, switching etc is great. the only thing i had to do to it was upgrade to windows 7 professional, so i could run all of liberty's networking programmes and software, as you can imagine liberty is a huge company and the amounts of work i have to process sometimes are crazy, and this pc really handles everything well in my opinion,

i even use it for gaming sometimes and havnt had a problem yet, all my music and videos are quick to open and play.

sure there are far superior machines, but your requirments are the same as mine, needed something reliable and fast for the workload i do, and the best part is, i picked it up on special at increddible connection for R5499.00 value for money i recon is a win

Wow that does seem like a really good price for all that you mentioned, thanks for letting me know bud. Howlong ago did you get that? It seems like most guys are really happy overall with Acer and Asus, so maybe I should go down that route...

Thanks for your help bud! +1

pleasure bud, i really am impressed with it,not a single problem and im on it for the better part of my day, i picked it up around a year ago, awhile yes, but i cant imagine the price going up too much, being out for awhile now so might even be cheaper??

I checked now. you can still get that Acer notebook. Price is about the same

Cool bud thanks, will have a look at it now!

OK so I ended up getting the Gigabyte Notebook Q1542N with the following specs:

DISPLAY - 15.6" 1366x768 LCD
CPU - Intel Core i7-3610QM
MEMORY - 4GB DDR3
SSTORAGE - 750GB HDD 5400rpm
GRAPHICS - NVIDIA GeForce 640M/2GB
ODD - DVD SUper Multi
WIRELESS - 802.11 b/g/n + BT4.0
OS - Windows 7 Professional
*2 Year Global Warranty

Managed to get it for R8800. Good deal?

MK wrote: OK so I ended up getting the Gigabyte Notebook Q1542N with the following specs:

DISPLAY - 15.6" 1366x768 LCD
CPU - Intel Core i7-3610QM
MEMORY - 4GB DDR3
SSTORAGE - 750GB HDD 5400rpm
GRAPHICS - NVIDIA GeForce 640M/2GB
ODD - DVD SUper Multi
WIRELESS - 802.11 b/g/n + BT4.0
OS - Windows 7 Professional
*2 Year Global Warranty

Managed to get it for R8800. Good deal?

For what you are going to be using the laptop for that is perfect maybe even overkill, so i rate it will last you a long time before you will feel the need to upgrade again

As for the price i have no idea about laptop pricing lol

Cool MK hope you are happy with that one.
My cost at Rectron is R7980.00 incl Vat and you paid R800 more so it’s a good price.
I would just suggest you get an extra 4GB DDR3 1333 ram module it won’t cost you more than R200.00 incl.
Get Transcend ram it has a lifetime warranty.
You can install it yourself its easy.
Then that notebook will really be SWEET!

AE wrote: Cool MK hope you are happy with that one.
My cost at Rectron is R7980.00 incl Vat and you paid R800 more so it’s a good price.
I would just suggest you get an extra 4GB DDR3 1333 ram module it won’t cost you more than R200.00 incl.
Get Transcend ram it has a lifetime warranty.
You can install it yourself its easy.
Then that notebook will really be SWEET!

@AE don't you think that 4GB ram is more than enough for him? i realize that its only R200 but he mentioned he uses word and excel and he didn't mention he uses the laptop for gaming, so i cant see how he could possibly get close to using 8GB ram unless he opens a hell of a lot programs at once?

The HDD is 5400rpm, i think to buy anything less than 7200rpm is a mistake because he wanted programs to open up fast and a quick startup but it has been bought already...

You seem to be very knowledgeable on this so im also interested to know if he opened it and installed the ram himself and something went wrong with the laptop down the line would that void the warranty or is it like desktops where they don't care?, i want to do the same to my brothers laptop for gaming...

Hey Mr T
You will only see a difference in speed when copying large or volumes of files and it won’t even be that big of a difference maybe a few seconds.
Applications open in your Ram therefore you should have more ram if you want to multitask or open applications faster. Also windows 7 nearly uses 2GB of ram when its idle and no other applications running.
You can check most high end notebooks the ones that still uses HDD has got X2 500GB 5400rpm HDD’s cause it’s more reliable.
If you really want a difference you should go for a Solid state drive.

Most notebooks doesn’t have a warranty void sticker on the cover you have to open to install ram and you really can’t mess it up cause it will only go in one way.

So in the end, Yes a 7200 RPM HDD is faster but you won’t notice the difference. Increase the Ram and you will notice a huge difference and you will be able to open and keep open a lot of files and Apps.

Yea copying a "large" file namely 3.2GB takes 27 seconds longer on a 5400rpm which whilst isn't huge its definitely noticeable...

If applications open in your ram then how is it that in this vid they open 39 programs at once using the same exact setup with 4GB of ram in each laptop and the 7200rpm beats the 5400rpm by 20 seconds?

you say that increasing ram increases the speed that a program opens...im sorry but i have to disagree, ram actually has almost nothing to do with that...Im running 16GB and my old pc had 4GB ram are you telling me that say utorrent, word or excel opens faster on my 16GB machine? the only time an application will open faster is if you upgrade the hard drive as shown in the video...even if you are running 100GB ram it will not make a difference, If you want to see a NOTABLE difference in application response times a faster HDD is the only way to go...

The only time you will notice ram making a difference with regards to the speed at which an application opens is when the ram is under stress thus opening a single program in a system with 8GB of ram or 200GB of ram wont make a difference...and anyway the speed of ram is not how much you have its the latency and frequency timings that impact performance again if the system is not under stress...even then i overclock the hell out of my gaming ram and get maybe 1-2 FPS increase if im lucky...

Im running windows 7 ultimate with Mozilla open and a few background (3)apps ie asus smartdoctor and my reported ram usage is 1.72GB so if MK then wants to open a browser, excel,word and powerpoint he will still be fine...An yes 2 x hard drives are always more reliable than one

Look im not arguing with you or anything like that, im just saying that if you are not going to utilize 4GB of ram then upgrading to 8GB wont do a thing for you it would have been much better to go for a faster HDD or even better a solid state as you suggested...

sorry for the long post haha

Thanks a lot guys will look into that.

Just to let you know, I am interested in gaming, the only thing is on my old laptop I doubt Snake would've workedwithout freezing. Will definitely look into buying the extra RAM module, thanks for the suggestion AE!

Really appreciate all the help guys, thanks again!