I want it to handle ~10 year old games ok, do otherwise basic stuff, have a largish hard drive (pref 500+ gig) and last for 5+ years.
What should I be thinking about?
My wife thinks a surface is worth it, but they seem expensive for what they are.
I bought a super cheap laptop a few years ago, but it can’t really handle even old games, and the hard drive can’t really be used for storage.
You can just replace the parts as they age.
Framework is overpriced. And framework isn’t promising how long they will support the GPU. You would be better off with a more affordable laptop.
You a Costco member or know someone who is? Sometimes they have a good price on a good-for-the-price laptop.
I am also in the market for a laptop.
After shopping and shopping, I find that the best laptop to buy is one that is on sale at Costco. They have name brands and a variety of prices/specs. The sale prices seems to me to be better than comparably spec’ed laptops available anywhere else. Plus you get a good return policy. And, if you don’t like the sales this month, just wait 3 weeks and the stock that’s on sale will rotate.
I am thinking that I am going to pull the trigger on a Lenovo on sale there this month. It’s got an Intel I9 for processing power and a decent tier GPU for games and or video editing.
I’d have to look up specs, we recently got a Lenovo at Costco and it seems really nice so far. My work machine is also a Lenovo and I’ve been really happy with it for three years. The ‘Costco warranty’ (aka their epic returns policy) is really nice for electronics. We returned a Roomba once that was like $600 and died before the three year mark.
Thanks all. I am a Costco member, so that sounds like a good plan. Between 1,000 and 1,500 seems like a sweet spot to get something good, without paying for power I likely won’t use.
I think this is a heck of a deal for $1100 at Costco right now:
The “only” weakness to me seems to be that the screen is 1080P (not higher), but if you want to play 10 year old games, that should not be a deterrent. But for $200 more you can opt for a Lenovo with a higher res screen and faster processor. Both are still on the noice side of your stated budget.
And if anybody knows of better deals elsewhere, please share…
I have seen better deals for 4060s.
Costco looked like they had slightly better than best buy for me, although rare to find exact same models so maybe I’m off.
Could be. I will say my gaming laptop is seven years old and has a 1050ti and can play most games even new ones at 1080p with FSR/DLSS turned on.
So any laptop you buy with discrete graphics will be able to play ten year old games. The only question is how future proof do you want it to be.
I would also add that once you play new games it’s hard to go back to old games. After playing Spiderman I couldn’t go back to Arkham games.
Myself I would get a cheaper laptop, probably less than 500, and add on extra storage with an external drive. It shouldn’t take that much to run 10 years old games
Shouldn’t, perhaps, but the cheap laptop I bought 3 years ago can’t really cope, so I’m cautious going cheap again…
…in which case the two things you’re looking for are a discrete video card (rather than integrated graphics), and a decent amount of RAM.
Annoyingly, laptops with discrete video cards are harder to find, increase cost, and usually sacrifice battery life.
If I were looking for something off-the-shelf for running 10-year old graphics-intensive games, the Costco laptop probably isn’t a bad option, although looking around might turn up better. I like that that particular model comes with 32GB of RAM, but the 8GB of RAM for the video card will preclude you from having a pleasant experience with more graphic-intensive (newer) games. The screen resolution is probably tolerable in portable use, but I’d want to plug it into a better external monitor when working at home. It looks a little larger, L×W×H dimension wise than I’d like to carry around. I didn’t catch the laptops actual weight.
A couple of years ago, I got a gaming laptop from a company that specializes in building heavily-customized tower PCs, targeting the gaming + streaming market. They also do custom gaming laptops, and I got one.
It’s great for entertaining myself in the living room while my wife is reading / surfing / watching TV, and I was able to max out its RAM capacity, consistent with my preferences. However the beast is heavy, and the battery life is laughingly short…both factors leading me to not move it from the living room.
Think I’m narrowing down on this, would like an i7, but an i5 with a real video card will probably do better for what I need,
Why that one?
This one is cheaper, with a better processor, and a better GPU…
https://www.costco.com/msi-katana-15.6"-laptop---12th-gen-intel-core-i7-12650h---geforce-rtx-4060---fhd-1920-x-1080---144hz---windows-11.product.4000120802.html
Canada v US pricing, mine is 999 CAD
That looks like 900 USD, so ~1200 CAD, also not sure if available in Canadian Costco
ETA, the Katana is 1,300 at Costco Canada
ETA, actually that’s not in the Canada store at all now
I see. Maybe you can pay in terms of hockey pucks or Tim Horton’s gift cards?