New i7 Laptop AMA

You have played yourself so badly...

I built a computer for the same price as you with a keyboard and mouse(that will light up too) with far better specs:

i7 6700k (6th Gen)
MSI Krait Edition Z170 Motherboard (Inbuilt soundcard which is good enough tbh)
16GB RAM (Because gaming)
Sapphire RX 480
2TB WD Black HDD
Phanteks Enthoo Pro


Now if I just bought a decent £120 monitor and downgraded my 6th gen i7 to a 5th gen i7 I'd probably end up cheaper then your waste of money..

Just why would you make a thread about this...

I'd rather get a ready made laptop then build your own. Too risky.

Also i didn't realise that this processor is only dual core.

But I still think that the 8 gig memory it has is plenty, Plus it has a spare memory slot. Now i am left with the question, do i just install the spare 8 gig stick i have, to double the ram, buy another 16 gig stick, to make it 24 ( at the price of about £160, and if anyone knows of any cheaper 16 gig sticks of laptop ram please do tell me the link), or should i go all the way, and buy two more 16 gig sticks, and fit both of these, which will be the most costly option!

PS you know if you uninstall the antivirus software which comes built in to most computers these days (Avast and Norton) you can double the speed of the computer straight away??

Plus my computer is an acer, which is a top brand and the last five laptops i had before this one were all this brand. There's a thing called brand loyalty!??

SSD make's a big difference but is pricey. yeh can easily chuck out the DVDRW drive which is rarely used and chuck in a SSD.

Either have 256gb SSD+ or have mixture of SSD and HDD seems the general consensus

In tests more than 8gb was only beneficial for large file photo or video editing.
I bought a Dell Latitude i5, swapped out the HDD for a 256gb sad for £60, clones the is, using the 1tb drive as an external.
Even with all that and 3yr warranty it came to £450.
Plus Acer still has crappy build quality so good luck with it once the warranty finishes

I'm saying OP is trolling, if they aren't it's a miracle they're actually still alive.

Perhaps he has a credit card with interest free for 24/27 months or something?

Sure you did - on a machine that is limited to 16GB, sure you added another 8GB and somehow managed to nearly kill yourself - well maybe if you bought cheap and Chinese maybe...



It'll be around the same weight or maybe 300g or so more. My sister had one made by PC Specialist and I requested two drives. She specified that it needed to be really light

I however prefer business machines as they are built amazingly. I got a used HP Elitebook 8470p, where the hard drive was I swapped it our for an SSD. Where the optical drive was, I replaced it for something that holds a hard drive as I have no need for a DVD drive. Note this is only doable if either you have a DVD drive in your laptop or you have the space for an mSATA drive which I guess you don't if your laptop is "ancient" but you probably do have a DVD drive?

With regards to speed, RAM won't necessarily increase performance if you're no where near max. The SSD can do, though tbh Id say slowness is an issue with the Windows OS when it comes to one hard drive. For some odd reason I've often had my disk drive at 100% when I had a single disk. When I've had two it's settled considerably and it was easier to use and faster

I installed the OS and my programs on to the SSD, documents are on the HDD - you have to be careful with cloud storage as it wants to write to your SSD.


I've mapped documents, downloads, pictures etc... to my hard drive. My machine has 8GB of RAM. Adding in more RAM won't make it faster - it'll just mean I can run more stuff

A fool and his money are easily parted.

What a waste of money. Oh wait. You paid for it on credit cards. More debt that you don't need. Sigh.

I agree, he's going to end up on "Can't Pay? We'll take it away".

Well there are some benefits, for example I can buy a £600 TV using my Tesco's Credit Card with 28 months interest free and pay it off over 2-3 months and at the same time collect Clubcard Points. I personally, tend to use my credit card to pay for my food shopping/petrol in order to maximise the points I can earn but I can still pay it off at the end of the month with no issues at all.

Obviously it's not free money, but as long as you can afford to pay it off or over time (interest free) then I don't see what the issue is?

We tried a HP 8960 I think and at 6-7pounds in weight got rejected out of hand.
The Dell is about 4pound so eminently more portable

Posted from TSR Mobile

The difference between John and yourself is that you seem entirely logical and rational, with a means to pay. John takes out every credit card he can, and maxes the limit, all whilst unemployed and claiming benefits.

I urge you to read his other threads if you are not aware of his antics.

Absolutely. Very affordable. But if budget is tight get a mix of SSD and HDD. Personally SSD is well worth it.

With what you said you wanted to use it for, you may as well have spent about £150.

I love how hard you work to tilt people on TSR lol

With a powerful processor and a healthy amount of ram, my laptop boots up quite fast, and runs well as well.

More of a problem is that when i opened it up, i had to crack the case because one of the screws wouldn't come out. Also in the process of doing that i have damaged the sound card, so that the stereo function, and headphone port, have both gone, which is more of a problem. It looks like i am going to have to send it off to get it repaired, probably costing another £100.

Btw i do claim benefits, because i have a disability. I get £260 a month, and no housing benefit. My wife pays me a contribution towards the bills, and she is repaying a loan i gave her when she was in africa. I understand people on here don't like me spending on credit cards, but i honestly don't see what the big deal is. It's my problem after all, how i pay it back.

More of a problem is that when i opened it up, i had to crack the case because one of the screws wouldn't come out. Also in the process of doing that i have damaged the sound card, so that the stereo function, and headphone port, have both gone, which is more of a problem. It looks like i am going to have to send it off to get it repaired, probably costing another £100.

Btw i do claim benefits, because i have a disability. I get £260 a month, and no housing benefit. My wife pays me a contribution towards the bills, and she is repaying a loan i gave her when she was in africa. I understand people on here don't like me spending on credit cards, but i honestly don't see what the big deal is. It's my problem after all, how i pay it back.

Yup it is your problem. Don't come asking for help when **** hits the fan then! I use credit cards too btw, but they're paid in full

And you had the nerve to question my understanding of upgrading laptops




If you can't afford it, you shouldn't buy it. Live life within your means, not spreading debt across god knows how many cards. I'd hate to see how much interest you're racking up month after month. Perhaps if you had a job things may be different, John - you have a degree, after all!

why not mac

Quit going on the offensive thanks guys. I am not begging for help, just having a discussion. And the reason why i didn't get an apple is because i have never had one before, and they are still too expensive in my eyes. I will stick to windows ten thanks!

Quit going on the offensive thanks guys. I am not begging for help, just having a discussion. And the reason why i didn't get an apple is because i have never had one before, and they are still too expensive in my eyes. I will stick to windows ten thanks!

And you had the nerve to question my understanding of upgrading laptops




If you can't afford it, you shouldn't buy it. Live life within your means, not spreading debt across god knows how many cards. I'd hate to see how much interest you're racking up month after month. Perhaps if you had a job things may be different, John - you have a degree, after all!

I don't personally mean to be offensive towards you, John, and I'm sure many of the other posters on this thread mean well too - we just don't like seeing you mess up your financial life!

unless of course they were being really arrogant about it in the first place - that they'd deserve then imo

Read back a few pages and find where John was being a little bit hostile towards my understanding and you'll see why my response was justified.

Oh no I'm in agreeance with you here. In this case, I reckon John was the arrogant one

I finally got a new i7 laptop on my credit cards for just under £750, complete with 8 gig ram a 1 tb hdd, a cool sounding sound card, a monitor with such good resolution i have to squint, and a keyboard that lights up. I already have a gaming mouse. But I am thinking about saving up and buying 2* 16 gig ram memory sticks, to max out the memory. Then i really will have a cutting edge laptop won't i? The only things it will be lacking being the dynamic hdd and the graphics card, but seeing as i don't even play games on my laptop, i still think it will be pretty neat when i get this extra memory. Not that it isn't now!

Just to also say you can't really add a graphics card to a laptop

I also specced this out and not knowing exactly what you have, you could have got it for £650, though that's based on the details you've given to us

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/ultraNoteIII-15/

with a 1tb hdd 16 gig ram and i7 processor it comes to £669 inc vat, which is basically what i paid.

You say that i am a none it guy, but i am learning programming, and i have worked with pcs all of my life. From the days of the bbc micro, and i remember when 450 meg was considered a state of the art high performance hdd.

Just quit the personal attacks thanks.

with a 1tb hdd 16 gig ram and i7 processor it comes to £669 inc vat, which is basically what i paid.

You say that i am a none it guy, but i am learning programming, and i have worked with pcs all of my life. From the days of the bbc micro, and i remember when 450 meg was considered a state of the art high performance hdd.

Just quit the personal attacks thanks.

You say that i am a none it guy, but i am learning programming

Ok, but some of us are seasoned professionals in the field and I think this is why people get frustrated when you ignore good advice.

As for me, I remember the days of the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, when 64k RAM was so awesome. Floppy disks were floppy; disk drives were mostly tape, and I earned street cred for actually having one of those new-fangled hard drive things. We used to have to park the drive heads before moving the computer anywhere, and my friends and I would take the entire PC to each other's houses to play games. Heaven help any of us if our dads found out that we had forgotten to park the drive before transit. I am still alive, thankfully.

Best of luck with your coding journey. Hope you get as much from it as I have (then change careers twice over because you can )