which laptop to buy?

[osianbw]

need a little help fine tuning my decision on new laptop

Hi all,

I've been offered a couple of laptop deals and was wondering if you might give them the once over and offer you pearls of wisdom.

Ok so first is this option

Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520

i7-3632QM,
8gb RAM,
1TB hard drive plus 32gb MSATA SSD,
15.6"
Full HD 1920*1080 anti-glare screen,
DVDRW,
2 GB AMD Radeon HD 7730M graphics,
Skull Candy speakers,
Waves Maxx Audio,
Intel 2230 wifi &
Bluetooth,
webcam,
Windows 8 64 bit
£580

The other system is the same but has 3630 no ssd and win7

Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520

i7-3630QM,
8gb RAM,
1TB hard drive
15.6"
Full HD 1920*1080 anti-glare screen,
DVDRW,
2 GB AMD Radeon HD 7730M graphics,
Skull Candy speakers,
Waves Maxx Audio,
Intel 2230 wifi &
Bluetooth,
webcam,
Windows 7
£530


what i want to know is, is it worth an extra £50 quid for the win8 laptop?

thanks

 

[Rhavi Marques]

it really really depends on what your preference is.
personally i hated w8 untill i installed start8 (which brings back the start menu and boot to desktop)
my girlfriend however works with some older programs which simply wouldnt run on 8, so we got her a w7 laptop.

if you like w7, go with w7, if you dont mind change, go with w8, its a better system and better hard drive on that model.

 

[Jaxem]

The Win 8 has an SSD as well, probably setup as a cache drive, that will make that laptop feel a bit snappier. But i agree with Rhavi, i don't care for Win 8, and it's only tolerable to me when made to work like the previous windows versions. I'd probably do the Win 7 machine, but that's just me

 

[jaguarskx]

I personally do not like Win 8. I went to BestBuy to just check out some current laptops and I found Win 8 to be frustrating to use. Therefore, I would choose the 2nd laptop.

Other things to know:

1. The i7-3630QM (Win 7) runs at 3.4GHz, the i7-3632QM (Win 8) runs at 3.2GHz.

2. If you get laptop #2 (Win 7), then chances are you will not be able to install a mSATA drive yourself because it will likely not have a mSATA port available on the daughter board.

While a mSATA SSD cache can help speed up loading of program / data (as long as that data is on the SSD), it is not enough of a performance boost to even consider using Win 8. I think Microsoft will need to pay me $1,000 to use Win 8; and that's annually!!!

For further info regarding the mSATA SSD refer to the below link to Dell's forum:

http/en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19475074.aspx