Emasher Posted August 16, 2011 Share Posted August 16, 2011 I'm starting university full time (I took a single course over the summer) in a few weeks, and I'm getting to the point now where I need to think about purchasing a laptop. I'm living at home so I still have access to my desktop, therefore I don't need something incredibly powerful. In addition I plan on majoring in Computer Science if that means anything to anyone. Mainly I need something that's extremely portable, durable and has a good battery life, but also has decent enough specs that it will last me a few years. At the moment I've mainly been considering the Lenovo Thinkpad x220 (the higher end one). Mainly I'm just wondering if anyone has experience with the x220 or can offer other advice related to this. I'm open to other brands, but I'm not going to buy complete garbage like Acer. A MacBook Air is also out of the question due to the difficulty of installing an OS on it that isn't OS X or Windows (The CS department at my university is apparently very pro GNU/Linux). I'm also trying to figure out if I should pay a little bit more for a better CPU, I don't think I need to go up to the i7, but I haven't ruled out a slightly higher end i5. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supergrunch Posted August 16, 2011 Share Posted August 16, 2011 Bear in mind that the British and US laptops markets are fairly different especially in terms of value for money, and Canada's probably more similar to the US. So I'm not sure what specific model you'd be inerested in, but a nice quad core i5 should be more than fine - I'm running the i5-2500k in my desktop and I'm very happy with it. Of course it depends what you want to do with it, which in turn depends on what kind of code you're going to be writing. But if you're like me and do academic work with 30ish windows open at once, I'd look more at RAM than the processor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emasher Posted August 16, 2011 Author Share Posted August 16, 2011 I'm somewhat more familiar with desktop hardware than laptop hardware, but if the laptop versions of the i5s are that similar in terms of power, I imagine I'll probably be fine with the i5 (although I can't remember if how many cores the particular CPUs in the x220 have) (I have a 760 in my desktop and it works fine for everything I do). I'm probably going to go for 4GB of RAM, I can't see myself doing anything that will use more than that on this machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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