willing to give me toward one, or if Tom is right.

I believe Tom is right.

and -- i have to find the conversation with RUE for the things I want it to be able to do, hang on.

But gimme a list of what it is you want said laptop to do.

I saved it to a separate file, which I then immediately lost.

Because it was very wall of text-y and I didn't want to lose it before anyone was available.

o7

Which I will now cut and paste out of and <done> when I am. XD

Shannon Duffy
(i might be able to do it just for the $800 from you but i don't know what shit costs right now. I WANT. A HARD DRIVE. THAT CAN HAVE MORE THAN TWO GAMES INSTALLED AT THE SAME TIME. that can run -- i'll say fallout 4, which is already a couple of years old now, but more than this one can handle.

can run, like, GW2 or a Dragon Age without me having to have it sitting on a fan, with a table top fan jammed up to the exhaust, and if mom's not paying attention MAYBE the A/C turned down a few degrees in order to keep from overheating every few minutes. I would lIKE to be able to have Photoshop (or equivalent) and a browser with more than one tab,

POSSIBLY one other (if not visual resource intensive) program at the same time. The Steam interface to be the latest updated version, and functional, not half-inoperable. Webpages that all load in my browser instead of sometimes just being an unusable row of maybe-links down the side, with no formatting and no pictures.

A word processor with a built-in word count. Bluetooth! BLUETOOTH. So I can connect my good headphones or to the speaker in the bathroom (OR OTHER THINGS).

that.
that is my list.
of things i want a computer to be able to do.
(and i mean, browse and word process and m* but you can do those on a $400 netbook.)

(Also, if my hard drive (solid state? isn't that the new more stable PROBABLY MORE EXPENSIVE BUT I DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW thing) dreams aren't compatible with the current state of laptop specs, then REASONABLE IN SIZE IF I'M JUST SAVING FILES AND SOMETIMES DOING DIGITAL ART and see what that frees up in the budget, look into purchase of external HD.)

(that is actually bigger than the internal. watch for sales at frys!)

<DONE>

The only thing that I'd have to check in on is a laptop with a good enough onboard graphics processor for the games. Everything else will be pretty much standard on any new-ish laptop you could get.

That's really good to know, honestly.

Like, I haven't tried running graphics-heavy games on my Surface Pro 3, which isn't even a true laptop, but it does everything else on your list.

And it has like 140GB of hard drive space.

The last one I got new was when I was in MA, and it died and has been replaced by a series of hand-me-downs that were themselves ALREADY REPLACED for having gotten slow and frustrating, etc.

(I am currently on the Surface, as it's easier to be upstairs to help Saint with his biology learnings.)

Best Gaming Laptops Under $1,000 This may be relevant to your interests.

Most modern laptop laptops will have a 1 TB drive

Also my Surface is now 3 years old.

That's what I'm running right now & have been for about 4-5 years since bat replaced this one, and I gave up the original mercy computer offering.

Yeezus

Word processing, many new laptops will come with MS Office bundled, but if they do not, OpenOffice/LibreOffice will give you word counts just fine. Saint's been using LibreOffice to do all his schoolwork this past year and a bit, because he is a creature of inertia and comfort, and it's worked fine.

Which was a Mac I used starting in 2012 because it was usable & free, but after J & I broke up & bat upgraded-

I've been using Notepad for non email or Gdocs writing. Except briefly when I had a working tablet & used that.

I JUST WANT A BUILT IN WORD COUNT.

Get you any sort of newish laptop, and you'll be able to run OpenOffice on it no problem.

Sweet.

I would care less about making sure it can game & photo edit, but my desktop BEING in desperate need of upgrades is WHY I got the original laptop. It hasn't even been set up as a backup in this place because I didn't have a desk/table space for setup.

Plus I know I'm going to keep traveling back & forth places, so, heck with it. I'ma make sure I can manage as robust a system / hardy a laptop as I can, that does all the (not actually that much) I WANT, not just need, and maybe at some point I can sit down and do a new desktop build from scratch.

With a usable laptop in the meantime.

(As soon as I finish eating & wrestle Max off the dang keyboard again, I'm going to check out the link).

Happy hunting!

Even if you don't go for one of those specific models, you can get an idea for what sort of GPU to be looking for for a gaming laptop.

Also at one of those later, when I have somewhere for it to actually live, dates, I'm going to see if I can get the at least two of my own, four if you count mom's & Evie's, outdated desktops together. & see if I can build DOWN a rig that will MAYBE LET ME PLAY MASS EFFECT EVER.

... or not, because now there is no internet.

(I'm switching networks around to see- yep that worked.)

I think this is a definite good starting point for me though. The last time I was doing this, the offer from Rue was something like A Good Start just for a no frills machine that COULD do the things I was asking it to, but GOD WHY would you use a laptop for that are you kidding?

Yeah, you shouldn't need more than $800 for a laptop that can run DA. My previous laptop ran Inquisition, if a bit sluggishly, and was $600 4 years ago.

Fallout might be a big ask, but only because Bethesda wouldn't know optimisation if it bit them in the ass, so it's a massive processing sink.

&when Tom are you kidding me'd NOW, it was his birthday & he was drinking & playing video games while waiting for me to catch up. So I wasn't sure whether I should believe it cause my knowledge is definitely outdated, or consider it inebriated hyperbole b/c in the spirit of giving me a little bit of grief for overthinking shit.

No, wait, 5 years ago. It was a 30th birthday present.

how the fuck am i 35

The laptop bat bought to replace this one can run it if a little grudgingly. I figured that's the worst I'd be asking from a machine, given EVERYTHING JUST STATED. I might not actually bother, but it was the first thing I could think of that bat's new (now five years old) laptop could run but mine absolutely couldn't

Because all of my favorite people I'm going to perpetually platonically non-date but mentioned to the rest of my friends are, quantumvelvet

Ugh, I am reminded that I'm joining you in 35-ishness in a little under 4 months.

&Rue is offering to buy me an $800 computer because she hadn't realized that not only was it kind of dismissively "oops, sorry about that" overed, that it wasn't even going to have been me getting the new computer. I was in line for the one that had replaced this one.

Rue is a good egg.

And you should definitely have a nice new laptop that will let you do what you want and need to do.

Which seems to be very doable for that price bracket.

It's definitely doable for that price bracket.

I will trade with either of you (probably easier with minor_ramblings because of birthday proximity) because I like 35 more than 34 just as far as the numbers themselves.

I admit that 35 is a nice half-decadal number.

Between the three of you who've weighed in, I'm feeling a lot more confident about the whole thing, ngl.

Only commentary I really have on specs is that I'd avoid the SSD unless you find something with a secondary drive that's on sale, just because it'd be pretty tiny for a main machine. It's more stable, but the stability:space ratio isn't a great trade-off right now, particularly if you do want to use it as a maybe-gaming rig.

It's the new shiny thing all the early adopters want, so it's going to be overpriced for a couple years yet.

I am 100% more concerned about space at this point.

Yeah -- SSD is nice, but pricey and small and not really what I'd call applicable to the mass market yet

I just knew SSDs were the Latest Thing the last time I was loosely paying attention, but unsure if they'd gone standard. I did remember they were smaller!

Not yet, at least for regular laptops.

Past just - being sick of having to uninstall PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING if I got interested in playing one of my other games which is a thing I am so past they are unearthing frescoes of it underneath Pompeii - I need to be able to save pictures on my computer, edit them, and not start running into unavailable space errors every five minutes.

They're relatively common in chromebook style machines and tablet hybrids, since the assumption there is you're saving everything to the cloud.

Yeah, I'd say go for a 1TB standard HD. It'll take a while to fill up that space.

Not just for fun (I MISS MAKING PRETTY LJ ICONS. NOT JUST CLEVER CROPPED FACES), but I have like six boxes of family photos I want to get archived digitally before Texas ruins them, and I'M TRYING TO START A BUSINESS THAT REQUIRES PICTURES OF THE MERCHANDISE etc, etc I don't need to yell.

Oof, yeah. That definitely needs space.

I have a 1TB Dropbox subscription, and thanks to a brief panic a few months ago when after nearly 13 years of the same inbox & drive, Gmail started telling me that I was getting close to the 15GB limit... 100GB of storage space there.

But with 440GB total & 43 of that free - even though I barely save stuff & move as much off as I can unless I need to use it actively - everything ends up being get it on the computer and move it to cloud storage a little at a time, and a lot of holding my breath & praying.

I haven't started really going through the list / using this info to actually comparison shop yet, but I'm about to. Are there any brands either of you recommend / definitely advise staying away from?

My original laptop was a Toshiba, this one's a HP (&for all my complaints, is a dedicated workhorse that hasn't quit yet, so I make sure it knows I know it's doing its best), and bat's replacement is a Lenovo (whose screen goes out at unpredictable intervals for no reason but I go money for being in a class action against them & I bet that's why)

That's the total of my laptop experience. Oh, except: Dells suck, and only get a Gateway if you just REALLY like cows. None of which is useful here.

Toshiba's good, and I've had good luck with Asus.

Now that I have a better idea of what I need to be looking for, the click ticky boxes on Best Buy's page are being SUPER HELPFUL. & super less overwhelming.

I'll probably be at this for a while, and in the morning there will be a New Thread full of links to the "shannon has now gone from having too LITTLE data to having too MUCH data, please advise" collection.

I look forward to ogling shiny new computer options.