best deals on custom laptops?

Antique_Guitars

My laptop is in hard disk failure mode so need to get a new one quickly. Max budget 1.3k need something that will last me a good 5 years or so.

Best websites?

wibble

Slap in an SSD while you make up your mind? No point rushing a big purchase!

Iamnobody

What will it be used for? Unless it involves any of; Music | Graphics | Gaming - I wouldn't ever consider spending anything like £1.3k

Antique_Guitars

Yeah I want to do a bit of recording and gaming plus a bit of 3d CAD work

digitalscream

Not really sure - I wouldn't really consider a laptop for any of those use cases - but if you really must, make sure you get a screen with decent resolution. 1680x1050 at a minimum, and very preferably 16:10 ratio. 1080p sucks balls, and 720p is even worse - especially for recording.

Antique_Guitars

Yeah I don't really have much of choice I wanted a proper pc setup but various things mean that can't really happen unfortunately. And now with this hard disk failure gubbins it's all kinda stressful.

Fuzzdog

Another vote for slap an SSD in there and take your time.  You might not even feel the need for an upgrade, the increase in general system speed is really quite stunning.  I was a bit shocked at how quick my old desktop ran as soon as I ditched the magnetic spinny things!

xmrchi

Can I just say after using pcs and laptop all my life I bought a macbook last year and I it's the most impressive computer I have ever used, really powerful, intuitive, and a joy to use, but then again I have the best of both as I have a windows home built Base unit for gaming and music, if I was to choose between the two I would have to keep the Mac, ssd pci express hard drive, 12nhour battery life, graphics which will actually play my games and a great screen and interface,

I always hated apple for their mobile devices but they know computer better than most and going back had the best gui, etc before windows.

Although saying that I have to agree with some of the comments, you don't need to spent that much 1k will do everything you want, just make sure the processor is Haswell or better.

TTony

If I was spending £1.3k with a need for recording, gaming & CAD work, and a 5yr time horizon, I'd be getting a desktop machine.  And maybe a little tablet for the fun stuff.

5 years is a long time in computer-land, even though the pace of change has slowed a lot as the technologies have matured.  

Laptops are a bugger to upgrade, PCs are easy.  I'd want something that I could easily upgrade with better graphics cards, more disc (etc) if I was going to keep it for 5 years.

£1k for a decent spec PC, and £200-ish for a tablet-type machine for the simpler browsing/email tasks.  There, I've even saved you £100 already.

johnnyurq

Tony has it in a nutshell Laptops have a limited time at the bleeding edge and after a year or so are looking old spec wise.

digitalscream

Simpler browsing/email/etc - Chromebook. Brilliant little things...I even do a bit of actual coding work on mine (although it does need an external server to run everything on). Cheap, lightweight and really well-judged in terms of capability.

I'm eagerly awaiting the next breed of Chromebooks with quad- and octo-core CPUs, and 1080p screens. Shouldn't be long now.

digitalscream

OK, just spotted this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/156-gigabyte-p35k-ultrablade-p35k-cf4-core-i7-4700hq-16gb-ddr3-2x128gb-ssd-1tb-hdd-nv-gtx-765m-2gb-b?ProductId=84479

Fairly monstrous laptop, that - two 128GB SSDs in RAID, 1TB hard drive, 16GB RAM, quad-core i7 CPU and a 1080p display for a grand.

Antique_Guitars

Looks interesting cheers, I have to say don't really understand any of this hard disk gubbins anymore.

If I was going custom could I just get one or two ssd drives and avoid the old fashioned type altogether?

digitalscream

Antique_Guitars said:

Looks interesting cheers, I have to say don't really understand any of this hard disk gubbins anymore.

If I was going custom could I just get one or two ssd drives and avoid the old fashioned type altogether?

You could, but you'd be paying a lot more for your storage that way (and it'd be very much dependent on whether the chassis had room for that many drives).