• We hope you have a fantastic holiday season to close out 2025! Thank you all so much for being part of the Tom's Guide community!

i5 8250U with SSD vs i7 8550U without SSD

Apr 9, 2019
1
0
10
Hello,

I am a blogger and planning to buy a new laptop. I use the laptop for heavy multitasking with 15-20 chrome tabs, 5-6 Mozilla tabs and few basic excel sheets open all the time. I won't be saving a lot on the disk and even the 256 GB that I am getting with the i5 will be half empty. Also, battery life would be a critical factor for me.

I am confused about what would be a better option for me given that I am getting an i5 8250U laptop at a price only slightly lower as compared to i7 8550U.

I feel SSD will help me switch quickly between the applications without much of a lag. Also, i5 with SSD might give me better battery life. But I am not very sure about it.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
 
SSDs are really cheap nowadays, would get the i7 and buy an extra SSD.
But the I5 will do fine for your workload as well.