Suggestion for Work Laptop (Heavy Excel Use)

[bin82]

Hello,

We have MS Surface Pro 3s for work, but we are finding that these machines are not very good at running large (500k rows of data) Excel calculations (v-lookups, sorting, pivots, etc). We are looking into getting a laptop to assist with the number crunching, do you have any suggestions? We are not too concerned about the size since it will stay in the office for the most part.

Looking for options in the $1000 to $1500 range.

Thank you!

B.

 

[jaguarskx]

You definitely need a laptop with a quad core CPU if you are manipulating such a large set of raw data. The problem is that I cannot really find a good quad core business laptop. With the exception of a Dell Latitude E6540 quad core variants basically all of the business laptops I have come across have dual core CPUs. A quad core E6540 starts at $1,650. Unless you go to Dell's Outlet site which has a single "scratch and dent" model selling for $1,400; cannot provide a direct link since it will not work. You need to go Dell's Outlet site and search for it.

http/www.dell.com/us/business/p/latitude-e6540-laptop/fs?ST=+dell%20+e6540&dgc=ST&cid=263765&lid=4804546&acd=12309152537461010&ven1=sPI24cnjR&ven2=b

http/outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=us&cs=28&l=en&s=dfb&brandid=2801&fid=9333


Otherwise, you are kinda limited to a consumer level laptop with a quad core i7 CPU. Like the new Dell Inspiron 15 7000 series with a 6th generation Core i7-6700HQ CPU with a starting price of $950. You also have to deal with the fact that it has a nVidia GTX 960 graphics chip which for some people is not a bad thing...

http/www.dell.com/us/business/p/inspiron-15-7559-laptop/pd?oc=cai157w10ph5716&model_id=inspiron-15-7559-laptop