Need Help Selecting a New Laptop for Work

[Zerosleep]

Hey Guys,

I am looking to buy a new laptop and have a budget of around $900

My current laptop is a Dell N5050 Celeron, 6 Gb Ram and 500 Gb HDD

My current work on the laptop mainly consist of - Photoshop (not too advanced), Outlook (loads of work on outlook), Multi window browsing on Chrome (have like 15-20 tabs open at a time)

I was wondering if I should buy an Ultrabook or a normal Laptop. Are there any major differences between an ultrabook and a regular laptop except for the weight/size.

A friend suggested me to buy a laptop for around $600 with specs like - 4th Gen i5, 4 GB ram, 1-2 Gb graphics, 500 HDD. Spend the rest of my budget on buying a 500 GB SSD ($300 for Samsung Evo 840). What do you guys think of this suggestion?

I loved the performance of a laptop with SSD, it's unbelievably fast.

Is SSD the right way to go? Please help me choose my new laptop

Thanks in advance
- Zerosleep

 

[orlbuckeye]

Well having a celeron processor you will be impressed by performance of i series processors. The biggest difference between the Ultrabooks and the regular laptops are the ultrabooks use the Intel processors with the U at the end of the number. What that means is some of the power is sacrificed for energy conservation which results in longer battery life. SSD's also conserve energy and the normal hard drives have spinning platters which use more power. Most ultrabooks won't don't come with optical drives. Most Ultrabooks are touch screen and don't have a numeric keypad. Ultrabooks won't have discrete graphics and won't play the most modern games at high settings.

I've been using SSD's for the past 4 or 5 years. My Acer Windows 7 machine I purchased in 2010 i believe. It came with a 750 gb HD but had a second bay. i ordered the laptop and the SSD at the same time. Back then SSD's were at leastr 1.50 per GB while HD were .75 per GB. Well i saw a 140 GB SSD with a Kit on sale so I purchased at around 1.00 per GB. The kit was cloning software and an USB external case. I ran the software and used my C drive as the source and put the SSD in the external as the target. All i had to do was put the SSD in the 1st bay and moved the HD to the 2nd bay as a data drive. I then did the same think going from the 140 GB SSD to a 256 GB SSD.

Last year I bought an Alienware that if I remove the optical drive can use 4 drives. Well I ordered with a MSATA 256 GB boot SSD. MSATA SSD's are about the size of a credit card. The laptop also came with a 1 TB HD. Last week I purchased the A Samsung Evo 840 MSATA SSD the same as the one you mentioned but 1 TB. I found a MSATA external case at Tiger Direct for 29.00 so i bought it. I cloned the drive and it took about 20 minutes. Saturday I removed the 256 GB SSD and added the Samsung and it worked flawlessly.

So if you chose to purchase that laptop and the SSD you have 2 options.

1. Clone the HD to the SSD
2. Do a Clean windows install.

I've done this 3 times going SSD to SSD and once HD to HD and everytime i cloned. The HD to HD was data drive to date drive and not Windows. So I know more about cloning a clean install of Windows. SO I'm no an expert on doing a clean install on a new drive. I'm not sure if the all partitians the manufacturer put on the disk have to be there for the system restore to work but I'm sure lots of other no more about this to help you decide how you want to get the OS on the SSD.

 

[Zerosleep]

Well having a celeron processor you will be impressed by performance of i series processors. The biggest difference between the Ultrabooks and the regular laptops are the ultrabooks use the Intel processors with the U at the end of the number. What that means is some of the power is sacrificed for energy conservation which results in longer battery life. SSD's also conserve energy and the normal hard drives have spinning platters which use more power. Most ultrabooks won't don't come with optical drives. Most Ultrabooks are touch screen and don't have a numeric keypad. Ultrabooks won't have discrete graphics and won't play the most modern games at high settings.

I've been using SSD's for the past 4 or 5 years. My Acer Windows 7 machine I purchased in 2010 i believe. It came with a 750 gb HD but had a second bay. i ordered the laptop and the SSD at the same time. Back then SSD's were at leastr 1.50 per GB while HD were .75 per GB. Well i saw a 140 GB SSD with a Kit on sale so I purchased at around 1.00 per GB. The kit was cloning software and an USB external case. I ran the software and used my C drive as the source and put the SSD in the external as the target. All i had to do was put the SSD in the 1st bay and moved the HD to the 2nd bay as a data drive. I then did the same think going from the 140 GB SSD to a 256 GB SSD.

Last year I bought an Alienware that if I remove the optical drive can use 4 drives. Well I ordered with a MSATA 256 GB boot SSD. MSATA SSD's are about the size of a credit card. The laptop also came with a 1 TB HD. Last week I purchased the A Samsung Evo 840 MSATA SSD the same as the one you mentioned but 1 TB. I found a MSATA external case at Tiger Direct for 29.00 so i bought it. I cloned the drive and it took about 20 minutes. Saturday I removed the 256 GB SSD and added the Samsung and it worked flawlessly.

So if you chose to purchase that laptop and the SSD you have 2 options.

1. Clone the HD to the SSD
2. Do a Clean windows install.

I've done this 3 times going SSD to SSD and once HD to HD and everytime i cloned. The HD to HD was data drive to date drive and not Windows. So I know more about cloning a clean install of Windows. SO I'm no an expert on doing a clean install on a new drive. I'm not sure if the all partitians the manufacturer put on the disk have to be there for the system restore to work but I'm sure lots of other no more about this to help you decide how you want to get the OS on the SSD.

Thanks for your reply buddy. I've found a Lenovo laptop with the following specs - Core i5 3rd gen, 8 GB ram, 24 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD. Now I'm planning to get this laptop, buy a 128 GB SSD and replace it with the 24 GB SSD that comes with the laptop. What are your thoughts on this? here is the link to the laptop I'm talking about - http/www.flipkart.com/lenovo-ideapad-u510-59-349348-ultrabook-3rd-gen-ci5-4gb-1tb-24gb-ssd-win8-1gb-graph/p/itmdfzqncsuzuth6