Powerful Laptop recommendations

[Admin]

My relatively new windows asus laptop cannot keep up with me. What should I be looking at (windows not mac please).

I really would have thought this spec could keep up with my needs,

Simultaneous working on: Excel, Gmail, several browswer windows, google analytics sometimes in live view, skype, dropbox etc.

 

[OhNoNotHim]

It should be able to. Do you have an SSD?

 

[Admin]

No, but that was in my mind for next time. Small one (hybrid) or total SSD?

My laptop doesnt need to move, be light, be able to do yoga or have a touchscreen. So far I have avoided windows 10 and 8 for that matter,perhaps its time..

I wont buy asus again on principle, its been poor. I used to like Sony. I might try lenovo?

 

[ian]

You'll not hit a score much higher than that without an SSD, fyi

 

[Admin]

More RAM
Close MS Office

Not many on offer with more than 8gb ram. Ms office is necessary Im afraid. Only really use Excel and openoffice just aint the same.

 

[Admin]

I got a HP one like this but only paid £850 with cashback earlier this year

http://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=N9Q47EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB

I'm sure i saw some for £2k with 24Gig of ram somewhere though

That looks good, big SSD, 16gb ram, i7, that should do the job. Has your HP been good so far, my asus crashes for no good reason.

 

[accelerator]

Spec-wise, that Asus should have been fine for your requirements, so if it was too slow, it's likely to have been a fault with the machine.

For a new laptop, then brand-wise I would look at Dell or Lenovo. I think most laptop brands have some reliability issues, but these two brands generally seem to be best for me. I guess it's because new laptop models come out all the time, you can never tell what will be really reliable, as each model is different. Look for a popular model from Dell or Lenovo and reliability should be above average.

I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 which I use with a dock and two external monitors. This set up is fine although the screen size of the SP3 is too small for my eye comfort. However, Microsoft is soon bringing out the Surface Book laptop/tablet, and that looks to be a very good machine. There is a high spec model with very good performance levels.

Rgds

 

[Edwin]

An SSD can make a huge difference, and they're not particularly expensive these days.

They also tend to be one of the things that crops up in the Amazon Black Friday deals (i.e. this week) going on previous years.

A 500GB one should do you fine, unless you have a reason to keep a massive amount of data on the machine itself rather than on external storage.

Apart from that, a lot of the slowness could be down to the services and programs running in the background. It's very difficult to diagnose as every system is different, but you want to look through what's running under "Startup" when you run 'msconfig' from a command prompt. Also depends on how comfortable you are fiddling with settings - there can be a lot of unnecessary stuff there (like auto-updates for every piece of software under the sun)

Other offenders include Services that don't have to be run, toolbars and add-ins, etc. etc. It's a pretty hardcore process trying to get a PC fully optimised, but it can be done with a lot of Googling, patience and plenty of backups along the way in case things get messed up.

A few other things that can slow down the machine (not even close to being an exhaustive list)
- Windows Indexer
- Fragmented hard drive (never defrag an SSD, btw - they're built differently and so all that will do is wear out the cells quicker)
- Windows Experience Program

 

[Edwin]

BTW, is there any way you could add more RAM to the machine (even if it means throwing out the current memory and replacing it with higher density modules)? If you had 12GB then you could dedicate 3-4GB to a RAM disk to use as scratch/temporary storage, and potentially see quite a good speedup that way. The other advantage of a RAM disk is that every time you restart the machine you're also clearing away all the clutter, because the RAM disk normally gets rebuilt from scratch every time the machine starts up.

But an SSD is definitely the simplest and most obvious improvement. My 3 1/2 year old laptop has run like a dream since I replaced the HDD and went step by step through every startup item, service, background windows function etc. turning stuff off left, right and centre.

 

[Edwin]

Oh, and if you really want to give your laptop a speed boost and can bear to see your interface "uglified" then search for 'Visual Effects' in the Start menu search box, then choose "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows" then either:

A) Choose "Adjust for best performance"

or

B) Choose "Custom" then pick and choose what to keep. Personally, I've only got the following settings ticked:
- Enable desktop composition
- Show thumbnails instead of icons
- Smooth edges of screen fonts
- Smooth-scroll list boxes
- Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop
- Use visual styles on windows and buttons

My desktop machine only rates a 5.0 Windows Experience index, but with the above display changes, an SSD, a RAM disk and everything I can find to safely turn off turned off, programs open instantly and I can have Word, Excel, Skype, Notetab+, and about 40 browser tabs open at the same time, plus email, and still everything ticks over at blink-of-an-eye speeds.

 

[Edwin]

One more tweak, worth testing to see if it affects the stability of your system.

1. Search for 'Advanced system' from the Start menu search box.
2. Choose "View advanced system settings"
3. Click over to the "Advanced" tab
4. Choose the "Settings" button next to "Performance"
5. Choose "Advanced"
6. Choose "Change" in the Virtual memory section
7. Change the setting so that "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" is unticked, and the "No paging file" option is selected.
8. Confirm the change (Windows will throw up various warnings)
9. Reboot

Getting rid of the paging file entirely will mean that Windows will never chuck bits of itself onto disk when it starts running out of memory (disk access is hundreds of times slower than memory access, so as soon as Windows starts paging everything slows down) but the downside is that you could see bluescreens if Windows really runs out of memory resources. That's why you have to experiment carefully with it, and keep an eye on your system afterwards to see if you notice any instability.

 

[philiporchard]

Ah, so that's what you do with your time Ed... I'd been wondering!

 

[Skinner]

My laptop had a windows score of 7.7, upgrading to newer drivers knocked me down a little. Its well worth trying older and newer and beta drivers to see which ones give you the better performance increases.

A standard WD Black gave my storage a 3.9 score, a samsung pro ssd pushed that up to 7.9, running 2 samsungs in Raid 0 made no difference to the score and only a marginal increase, so moving to a decent SSD will massively increase your speed. Remember if you keep the normal hard drive in your machine, make sure nothing it running off it, as that drags you down.

Faster ram, using normal 1333mhz ram gave me a score of like 5.7, but moving to corsair vengeance 1833mhz and overclocking it, pushed me 7.8.

A clean install every 6 months keeps you nice and swift too.

If your looking at a new machine rather than upgrades, would need more information about your usage and budget.


Edit, I should add that you're not likely to push any machine to scores high end equipment can get, but my numbers should indicate what you can gain by the tweaks/upgrades I mentioned.

 

[Admin]

Lots of good comment here guys. Thanks Skinner. I've no time for messing about, I wont upgrade for that reason and because i dont trust the machine now. I want to buy a machine thats ready to go, reliable and fast. I'll spend £1k or £1.5k. I think thats enough.

 

[Skinner]

I would look at http://www.MySN.co.uk or http://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/laptop, they are almost all custom build laptops. Being custom built means you can buy within your budget and leave room for future upgrades. Asus, Acer etc are not upgradable and are not meant to be.

Get more bang for you money

 

[Edwin]

There are almost no laptops sold with SSD drives as standard, and those that do come with SSDs tend to come with small, no-name (i.e. slow) SSD drives in them. Given that this is the single biggest improvement you can make to a PC, it's really worth thinking about putting an aftermarket one in.

It is usually pretty easy to replace the existing HDD with an SSD, assuming that your computer is compatible and the SSD drive fits (the spec of your particular model should give the accurate dimensions of the hard drive)

1. Buy the SSD. For example a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB drive, as recommended by Tom's Hardware and others - it's available for under £120 direct from Amazon.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html

2. Buy a USB-to-SATA cable, for example this one.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00HJZJI84/?tag=acorn06-21

3. Plug your new drive into one of the laptop's USB ports, and format it (just like you would for any new HDD)

4. Use disk cloning software to copy your entire system HDD to the SSD

5. Take out the HDD and plug the SSD in its place

6. Reboot

That should be about it. I've done it for 5 machines so far with no hiccups.

Of course, if your laptop has 2 drive bays you don't need the cable because you can just stick the SSD in the empty one.

 

[PoshTiger]

Go for a Dell XPS 15 - I've had one for 6 months and loved it, just swapped it for a Surface Book though..

 

[Admin]

Mmm I would struggle big time to get my head Around a Dell.

 

[PoshTiger]

Why?

They have a similar build quality to a mac but are 100% pc.

Check them out - http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd

 

[Admin]

Dell was cheap crap last time I bought it... 15 years ago. Best laptop brand I've had... More then once... Is Sony. Working well after 5 years with no effort or trouble. 10 years some of them