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New laptop suggestions
My old Toshiba Satellite L650D is coming up to 3 years old, and I guess that's pretty ancient in technology standards these days.
I gave it a new lease of life about 12 months ago when I:
- Upgraded to win7 x64 instead of x32
- Upgraded to 8GB RAM instead of 4GB
- Installed a 128GB SSD as the primary C/D drive
- Removed the optical drive and put my old harddrive as a 2nd internal HDD
- Got a couple of 1TB external HDD's for more photo storage space
It was running out battery after an hour on the train, and that was my 2nd battery! So last week I bought a new longer life battery so at least I can get the whole train trip (and then some) without recharging (until it starts dying again).
I'm ok with it now, it works fine but am constantly running out of disk space (128GB SSD is never enough) and sick of transferring stuff to external HDD's.
Starting to think about a replacement laptop now. I'll have similar usage patterns - some astro software and the usual content creation/content browsing I do, and of course photo processing. I want LR and PS to run faster.
I want:
- 15" screen (as opposed to 17", too big for the train)
- SSD for the primary drive
- Another internal HDD for additional storage
- Min 8GB RAM
- Optical drive not needed
- Budget: $1500 give or take
I browsed through JB HIFI on the weekend and there's not much to choose from.
- There's lots of ultrabooks which aren't suitable - too light on the processor it seems.
- There's some horrible touch things I'm not interested in
- Then there's the usual laptops from Toshiba, Samsung, Acer, HP but they all have either small SSD's or no SSD.
- They all come with Win8, which I was thinking about avoiding.
Am I going to have to buy one with an internal HDD and then install a new SSD again?
Any suggestions?
I was planning on avoiding Win8 but if it's faster it might be worth installing it.
Thoughts?
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