What laptop should I buy?

C

Ceris45

New Member
Hi, I'm searching for a new laptop. My current one is a five year old HP Pavilion dv6700. I am getting into music mixing and production and I know that field tends to favor the macbook pro but it seems way more expensive than other laptops and I do favor the Windows layout over Apple. I also enjoy playing some computer games, mainly strategy games (i.e. Total War series, StarCraft, Sins of a Solar Empire) so I would like a laptop that is able to play these games as my current one could barely run Empire:Total War and I wouldn't dare trying to run newer games like Shogun 2: Total War or StarCraft II on it. So I'm looking for a pc of reasonable price that will run these games well but I'm not looking for a strictly gaming laptop like an Alienware. I'd rather have a general, multi-functional laptop. I don't know much about computers so I'm hoping some of you could give me some good recommendations. Just looking at the requirements for the upcoming Rome 2: Total War it recommends running it on a quad core CPU like an AMD FX-4100 and a strong GPU like a Nvidia GTX 560 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7870. I don't know what any of that means but those seem to be the minimum recommendations for running it with no issues. Do those processors only come on "gaming laptops"? Is there a way to purchase a less expensive or multi-function laptop and upgrade those particular aspects? I would really appreciate any recommendations, keeping price in mind. I would prefer to stay away from another HP Pavilion as I had issues with a battery recall and fan overheating. Thanks in advance for your help!
 
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I also see the macs alot in that feild, and I don't understand why, unless that is why, it looks cool for them to have the little glowing apple, but either way it is a waste to buy a mac.

I understand what you mean when you say you want to stay away from HP, I have 2 dead 2009 dv6000 laptops and a dead 2004 dv6000 model, and a 2002 pavilion desktop with bad onboard graphics and one bad ram slot. but my primary is a 2006 dv6102, granted almost eveything in it is new/upgraded (processor, screen, ram, SSD, wifi)

anyway as far as reliability, My parents have had a toshiba for 3 years and it sees no maintenance, and still runs great. I also worked on a 4 year old toshiba that had seen a bit of abuse (running at low resolution for no apparent reason, no updates, ever, and a desktop full of icons, and a thousand startup programs), and I ran startup repair on a disc, and everything was fine. But on that particular model they had a bios update that was never done, (it said it was to improve charging performance) and the battery had 55% wear in 4 years, before the update the battery got extremely hot, and after the update it didn't even get warm...

So toshiba might be a good one, they were mid to low range though, I don't know what toshiba has to offer for higher range. (just make sure to do any bios updates...)

My school has a ton of dell desktops (old and new), and it's pretty rare I have seen one have hardware issues (other than people not knowing what they're doing) I don't really like Dell, but the optiplexs and latitudes they use at school seem pretty reliable.

Another thought, You could just buy a desktop for you gaming and music mixing and production, assuming you don't need to actually do it on the laptop, and use your current laptop for everything else.
 
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