Looking for a new Laptop

WeThereYet

I'm looking for a new laptop, something that I can use for university, and an MCSA.

Ideally, I would like it to have Windows 8 Professional installed. It's fine if it doesn't.

It should have a good amount of RAM for VMs, and finally it should be able to support virtualization.

The price I'm looking for is £300-500!


Thanks!

-Mike

tkerber

With that kind of budget I don't think you'll be able to get something that could handle more than one, maybe two VMs. You also want to consider processing power as a major factor for this as well. Each VM will be drawing from the CPU as well. Having a lot of RAM doesn't mean you will be able to run VMs smoothly.

If I were you I would buy a cheap laptop that you can do your school work on---browse the web, Microsoft Office, watching videos, etc. Then I would budget a little but more money for building a desktop yourself and using it solely as a lab machine / VM server / anything you want it to be. Then you could remote to your server from your laptop while you're in class with some sort of remote software and not have to worry about bogging down your school laptop.

I can definitely say I had a cheapo Windows laptop for school and a big robust desktop at home for labs and play. Plus if you build your own lab machine you get the added bonus of the experience building a computer and familiarizing yourself with its components.

WeThereYet

tkerber wrote: »

With that kind of budget I don't think you'll be able to get something that could handle more than one, maybe two VMs. You also want to consider processing power as a major factor for this as well. Each VM will be drawing from the CPU as well. Having a lot of RAM doesn't mean you will be able to run VMs smoothly.

If I were you I would buy a cheap laptop that you can do your school work on---browse the web, Microsoft Office, watching videos, etc. Then I would budget a little but more money for building a desktop yourself and using it solely as a lab machine / VM server / anything you want it to be. Then you could remote to your server from your laptop while you're in class with some sort of remote software and not have to worry about bogging down your school laptop.

I can definitely say I had a cheapo Windows laptop for school and a big robust desktop at home for labs and play. Plus if you build your own lab machine you get the added bonus of the experience building a computer and familiarizing yourself with its components.

Thanks!

How much would you recommend spending on a proper lab PC then?

tkerber

WeThereYet wrote: »

Thanks!

How much would you recommend spending on a proper lab PC then?

It really depends. I built a pretty fast PC for $800, which is a little under 500 British pounds.

I recommend at the very least 8GB of RAM, a quad core processor, most i5 series are great and at least a terabyte hard drive space.

I cannot remember my exact specifications and I am not into PC building as much as I once was but here is what I got-

16GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM
Intel i5 processor with 3 or more GHz a core
1TB SATA hard drive
Gigabyte wireless Micro ATX motherboard
Nvidia GTX650 GPU (I used to play PC games a lot)
600 Watt Corsair PSU
Cannot remember the case..

Either way you could go cheaper than I did and still have a decent lab computer. I think anything over $1,000 / 600 British pounds is getting to be a little excessive and not necessary unless you're a gamer.

Also my mistake earlier my eyes mistook the pound symbol for the euro symbol and I've been a bit off on my advice. You could get a decent laptop for that price. However, I would still think about building your own lab pc. It's great experience and can be a lot of fun.