Hobby Developer - where to buy new laptop?

What's your budget? Don't go under 8GB ram anyway

If you go down the second-hand route, beware of laptops with the RAM soldered to systemboard because it won't be upgradeable. That said 8GB should be fine. Here's one on ebay for peanuts.

Wait for black Friday or the next Amazon warehouse sale and pick up a gaming laptop that'll have the best spec, packed with ram, ssd, gtx graphics card, 120hz screen etc.
Have a search on Amazon UK for ASUS FX503VM-EN184T, if one of them hits the warehouse you could have a serious saving.
Can also do grand theft auto or oculus when your bored.

Can you buy a laptop from work, all our laptops are sold off every 3 years and they are usually 1k less than their equivalent 2nd hand market price.

John_Mc wrote: »

I thought that too and went with an XPS 15 with 4k screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD etc.

It's not a great laptop as it suffers from thermal throttling. I'll be avoiding Dell from now on I think as the thing cost me €2400

It's easy enough to fix e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/7orxcs/how_to_get_your_xps_15_running_cold/. Another alternative is to adjust the maximum clock speed and voltage used by the hardware, this requires a little bit of BIOS table editing, it's not hard.

But yes I agree that Dell should not ship a laptop costing that much which doesn't work right out of the box. I would say that the XPS 13's don't have those issues (and indeed I'd never buy a 15 inch, too big, not portable). Also, don't buy the top end CPUs!

Niall

Esho wrote: »

Thanks Niall.
How do you recognise one of these on eBay?
I had a look but nothing stood out to identify them

Key identifiers of ex-corporate laptops are that they'll be a Dell, a HP, or a Lenovo, and they will be missing an operating system due to their hard drives being securely wiped, or they are missing any hard drive at all due to them being crushed. Note that ex-corporates are bulk licenced for their Windows OS, they'll have a sticker with serial on the bottom, or Windows during install will auto-activate because the activation key is hard wired into their BIOS. Generally it'll be Windows 7 though.

There will be a number of vendors on ebay.com who mass recycle ex-corporate laptops. Look for laptops less than $150. You'll eventually bump into someone like https://www.ebay.com/sch/PC-Laptops-Netbooks/177/m.html?item=312267841792&epid=170463668&hash=item48b49d2100%3Ag%3A1TIAAOSwuZpbxfjC%3Ark%3A13%3Apf%3A0&_ssn=e-cyclepro (note they were the first vendor I found, there are many, I have no experience with this specific vendor).

On that vendor listing I can see some amazing value. Haswell CPUs with 8Gb of RAM for $150, Sandy Bridge CPUs with 16Gb of RAM for $110. Just be careful of screen resolutions, many corporate laptops are the lowest possible resolution, and I'd swap a higher resolution for an older CPU any day seeing as CPU performance has barely budged in a decade.

Also watch out for IPS panels vs TN panels. IPS panels have far better colour reproduction.

Finally, if you do go this route, do not under any circumstances use any hard drive or SSD they supply you with. Make sure you ATA secure wipe it, and reinstall your own OS. Some would even say best never use any such drives, as nation state actors proactively target large US multinationals with hard drive firmware worms. That said, most US multinationals have become far better at protecting their networks from that stuff in recent years.

Good luck with your search!

Niall