Yes, I know we have a tech forum.

[Lorizael]

I'm in the market for a new laptop. My current one is a little over six years old and falling apart. Missing keys, cracked bezel--that kind of thing. Also not running as well as it used to.

Anyway, what I'm looking for is a non-crappy ultraportable. I take my laptop with me everywhere and use it for basically everything, so it needs long battery life and to be lightweight and small (~13" screen). It will mostly get used for word processing and web browsing, but also video (streaming or otherwise) and some coding and data analysis (Matlab, for example).

Recommendations? I'm currently looking at something like this. My budget is probably about $1000.

[Dinner]

My only recommendation is to get one with a real graphics card instead of intigrated graphics. You never kbow when you might want to install Civ or one of the Paradox games and then that graphics card will come in handy.

[Dinner]

For $1000 I would be looking for a 7th gen I7 cpu, at least 16GB of RAM (fastest speed possible), at least something like a GTX 1050 though the GTX 1060 is better, the latest standard SSD at least half a TB. After that it comes down to stuff like available ports, expandability, screen size, and which free software packages are included.

[Lorizael]

I don't have to spend that much. But again, the big thing for me is portability. It's been my experience that finding a lightweight laptop with long battery life and a non-****ty graphics card is hard.

[Jon Miller]

With the Ivy/etc intel chipsets I really think that a graphics card is unnecessary. Particularly if you care about portability.

I am using one of these https://www.apple.com/macbook/specs/ and it works for some Civ and paradox/etc. Yes, it struggles some places, but it is very portable and that is what I need.

Anything with a discrete graphics card is not going to be portable.

I would get

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air?product=MQD32LL/A&step=config#

or

http://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/ThinkPad-X270/p/20HNCTO1WWENUS1/customize?

JM

[Jon Miller]

I play Civ4 on my macbook m5.

JM

[pchang]

For coding and matlab, i would stay away from Macs. Too expensive and not enough RAM (16GB max goes way over your budget). I would go for a Lenovo X270 low end and then bump up the RAM to 16GB.

[Bereta_Eder]

I don't get it


either buy a desktop that's heavy duty. lots of computing power that a laptop can never match for a fraction of a price


and also get a very lightweight thin laptop for travelling or sitting in bed eating donuts

[Lorizael]

I hate having multiple devices that serve slightly different purposes. Would much rather one device that does everything. Convenience is very important for me.

[Jon Miller]

I found that there are tons of older games that I can really enjoy and that I don't need to play the latest. This also saves me money.

I play Civ4 on my macbook. Most likely my macbook is weaker than anything you would buy.

JM

[Elok]

In other I-know-there's-a-tech-forum news, my Firefox is hoarding RAM, and sometimes so is my wife's Chrome. We've both turned off prefetch, so that's not the problem. My only extension is Ghostery, which if anything appears to REDUCE RAM consumption. Yet (particularly if I've got it running for a while, perhaps minimized while I do something else) FF will occasionally start sucking down RAM like it's at the damn cyberspace buffet. I'm talking something like a single process can have over a million K allocated, even if it's not doing anything complicated. Just now I had to shut down FF when the only thing open was thesaurus.com (I was mostly writing, only pulling FF back up now and then to look for just the right word). Anything else you think I should look for? The Google seems to have failed me.

[Lorizael]

The most basic fix-my-web-browser solution is to clear your cache. Doing so will screw with logged in sites and passwords and all that, but can help.

[Aeson]

Does it happen with Chrome?

[Jon Miller]

Use lynx!

JM

[pchang]

If you want more than text, try Opera.