Update On New Laptop

21 March 2017

Photo: Unsplash

Well, I finally got the time to order the new development laptop I first mentioned I was in need of here.

So what did I go for?

PC Specialist won again purely on the price vs spec front. I looked around at what laptop offers were out there and I could find nothing to compete with PC Specialist.

So what did I order you ask? Well:

• Cosmos Series case and screen (1920 x 1080)
• i5 Quad Core Processor 7300HQ 2.5GHz
• 32GB Kingston SODIMM DDR4 2133MHz
• 256GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe
• 500GB SERIAL ATA III 2.5” HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
• NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 940MX - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
• No OS

It came in at £25 more than my set budget of £1000 but I couldn’t help get the DDR4 RAM.

The case is plastic but sturdy. It will not win a beauty contest with a Mac but resembles more of an Alienware case. The screen is very clear and glare-free and I would never go back to anything but an FHD screen anyway. The keyboard is not as nasty as some but is not a Thinkpad keyboard. There is a decent amount of travel and the layout follows the standard UK design. As far as powering Visual Studio, I set it up with Visual Studio 2017. In first tests, I am loading our large solution in about 25 seconds which is a massive improvement.

All in all I am pleased with the laptop. One of our new developers also purchased a 14” model with similar specs and he is using it with 3 external monitors. He was also pleased to get such good spec components for such a good price.

Now time to focus on code rather than hardware.