I need a new laptop.

Sonorous

I currently have a Dell Laditude E6400 but it is starting to showits age after a few years of beer and mixed drinks being spilled on it while DJing local bars.

I am having an unusually hard time finding what I want due to the vast amount of selection available on the market now. I like the idea of an ultra book but I know that I will be disappointed if I ever try to game on it. I love OsX but I hate the steep price and lack of the ability to repair Apple hardware. I also think having a touch screen would be nice but as I said with the ultra book, I haven't been able to find a laptop with a thouch screen that I feel would handle moderate gaming on. Which leads me to full on desktop replacement, boss hog, balls to the gaming laptops, but their bulk and lack of battery life isn't appealing either.

So maybe you guys could tell me what you use for laptops or make a suggestion. Every time I try to look at laptops I get distracted by the choices and end up losing sight of what I want versus what is available.

shwaip

i've always been a fan of the lenovo thinkpad series. some people are pretty meh about them though.

MiracleManS

I've been pleasantly surprised so far with the 14" Dell Ultrabook I got from work. I thought 14" would end up being too big, but it's perfect for when I need to do non-trivial dev work. I will admit I haven't tried gaming on it yet though.

Annes

I adore my Lenovo Thinkpad, a T430s. It has a discreet graphics card so it's not the worst thing in the world for gaming.

MAGIC

I've had an HP Sleekbook with the AMD A10 for almost a year now. I really like it. Its very light and thin, good looking screen for the res, games well at medium settings, and has great battery life. The only thing that is lack luster is the keyboard, but its not terrible.

ardichoke

I'm not going to make any specific recommendations, but reading your post you don't seem to have a clear idea of what you want. Before you choose anything, I'd sit down with a sheet of paper and make a list of things you "must have" and things you'd "like to have" in your laptop. For instance, when I was shopping for my last laptop I had something along the following lines:

Must Have
Discrete graphics
Numpad
At least 1600x1200 resolution
At least 500G hard drive
under $1500
From a company that will actually support their products

Would like
Backlit keyboard
Decent (>4hrs real use) battery life

Once I had that list, I found that the number of options out there that met all my "must haves" was actually quite small. Made the whole shopping process much MUCH easier.

Oh, and http://laptopmag.com was pretty helpful as well. They have a lot of good information and reviews.

Sonorous

Using your must have and would like formula (which was really helpful and I don't know why I never thought of it) I have been leaning towards a Lenovo y500

I am still on the fence about this or maybe a refurb none retina Macbook Pro. Regardless I will have to wait until next week to order anything so I have some time to hash it out or convince myself to wait for Haswell.

Thrax

On a scale of 1-10, how important is playing games?

That one single decision will affect every other aspect of your notebook.

Sonorous

6. How ever I also do a fair amount of 3d modeling. Now rendering is mainly CPU intensive but having a decent graphics card helps with the actual modeling portion. Having a midrange GPU is a cheap way of getting around purchasing a laptop with a workstion card.

Thrax

To put it another way:

If you expect to play 1080p games on any setting but low, you'll need at least a Radeon HD 7850M or GeForce GTX 670M.

Anything less will be using a "mainstream" graphics chip, which would be a $50 graphics card were it bought for a desktop PC. We all know how much gaming you can't really do on a GPU like that.

Sonorous

Back to the drawing board then. See what I can find with either one of those two cards in them. If I am going to spend a decent amount of money on a laptop why not get one that will do what I like to do well at least.

fatcat

15.6" http://www.powernotebooks.com/15-inch-custom-gaming-laptops-cat-78.html

17.3" http://www.powernotebooks.com/17-inch-custom-gaming-laptops-cat-25.html

Sonorous

Okay so I have decided to forgo a gaming performance for a touch screen and a thinner design. Anyone have experience with Samsung laptops? I have been looking at this.

ardichoke

My work gave me a Samsung Series 9 for work purposes. I quite like it. Build quality seems solid, nice design, only complaint I have about it is that the clickpad is not great... way too sensitive and prone to being bumped while typing (which is super annoying when troubleshooting an issue at 4 in the morning after being woken up from a dead sleep). If this laptop is a representation of Samsung laptops as a whole, I'd say go for it.

CB

If you don't need gaming, just get a Chromebook. I love mine. It's wicked snappy, has crazy-good battery life, and gets everything done except gaming. Unless you need some kind of proprietary design software, like Ps or aCAD or something, Chromebook is best book.

Sonorous

Yeah, I have looked at a Chromebook but there some software I use that just doesn't run on them. Thanks for the suggestion though! I'm pretty sure I am going with that Samsung I linked. I had a chance to play with it at Best Buy yesterday and over all it seems to cover what I want. I'm going to wait a few weeks though and see what Haswell has to offer. Intel just released a statement saying that Haswell based laptops will gain a 50% battery boost. It's yet to be seen though, so who knows?