Laptop or Tower?

[the snail]

I recently replaced my tower pc with a mini pc, basically a laptop system minus keyboard/monitor in a little box - about 4x4x2". Really happy with it - low power consumption, good performance with 16gb, ryzen processor, about £400 I think. If you are hapy with a lower spec you can pick them up cheaper or for peanuts second hand.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Takes about 5 minutes to get going, its making loud chuntering noises

That’ll mostly be the HDD. Replace with SSD and it’ll fly. The bottleneck on a PC is rarely the cpu these days. Worth cleaning dust out the fan and case air vents whilst there as well. You can get a replacement 1Tb SSD for about £50-70. If you get a Crucial one it comes with Acronis to clone the existing drive.

 

[mustang1]

I prefer a laptop but it has nothing to do with portability or whatever, but purely because it takes up less space and there are no cables to clutter things up.

 

[Gunk]

We’ve changed a 5 year old iMac and gone back to a windows PC, it’s for my wife’s business so we bought a 17” HP Envy laptop and it’s utterly brilliant, so much better than an Apple computer, it just all works seamlessly.

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[Time Waster]

I get laptops because I use them in various places in the house. I don't have a desk, my partner who WFH has a desk and study but I don't. If you have a place for a computer to live without being moved or put away then perhaps a desktop suits. Otherwise laptops guess.

 

[bonzobanana]

I use both a laptop and a desktop PC and there are lots of merits with both choices. I have a little Celeron N4120 HP PC which I bought from Cash Converters recently online for £50. It's one of the ultra portable low power PCs and has battery life up to 16hrs. The maximum AAA game I can play on it is Fallout 4 with all the low power mods used, reduced texture resolutions etc. I guess Skyrim would be the maximum AAA game without mods. It does all serious stuff very well and I find the small 11" screen easy to read no problem. It's using a 14Nm fabrication process and only has 4GB absolute maximum but I use 8GB of the built in 64GB of eMMC storage as virtual memory and that is pretty fast. I bought a 512GB micro SD card off Amazon Warehouse for £12 and that is working fine in the laptop as extra storage where I store games and other stuff. I can't remember if it writes or reads at 20MB/s but this is fast enough. The laptop weighs about 0.8kg and I'm often carrying it about to use elsewhere. I don't bother taking the power brick as runtime is so long it will always last a whole day or more.

Looking at android tablets you can buy new fairly powerful tablets with a load of accessories for around £50. Here is one that includes mouse, case and bluetooth keyboard for £55 and its got a reasonable chipset, memory and built in cameras. More importantly a high resolution IPS screen. The UNISOC processor I'd never heard of but seems fine in benchmarks.

View: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08XZ3B35S?tag=lates05-21&linkCode=ogi&th=1&m=A2YA3FS6EN8Y7P


So you can use it as a laptop pc or a tablet.

You don't have to spend much to get a usable solution. However I would definitely debloat Windows as much as possible. Modern Windows spends so much memory and cpu power just trying to watch what you do so it can sell your data, its a revenue stream for them but really slows down the computer. There is also a anti-malware process which is really awful. It's mainly there to stop you using unlicensed Microsoft apps like Office but needs so many resources as its watching the system all the time. You can get lite Windows installations that remove it but they then lose the ability to get updates.

 

[Alex321]

Looking at android tablets you can buy new fairly powerful tablets with a load of accessories for around £50. Here is one that includes mouse, case and bluetooth keyboard for £55 and its got a reasonable chipset, memory and built in cameras. More importantly a high resolution IPS screen. The UNISOC processor I'd never heard of but seems fine in benchmarks.

View: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08XZ3B35S?tag=lates05-21&linkCode=ogi&th=1&m=A2YA3FS6EN8Y7P

Not sure where you are getting £55 from, it is showing as £109 for me. And only has Android 10.

This one from the same manufacturere is better, Android 12 and cheaper at £79

View: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TOSCiDO-Tablet-Android-5000mAh-Silver/dp/B0BG9SJ2VS/ref=psdc_429892031_t2_B08XZ3B35S?th=1

 

[ClichéGuevara]

I didn't think they still sent people to the Tower, but in any event I don't think they'll punish you so harshly just for having a laptop. Maybe just a fine at most.

 

[bonzobanana]

Not sure where you are getting £55 from, it is showing as £109 for me. And only has Android 10.

This one from the same manufacturere is better, Android 12 and cheaper at £79

View: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TOSCiDO-Tablet-Android-5000mAh-Silver/dp/B0BG9SJ2VS/ref=psdc_429892031_t2_B08XZ3B35S?th=1

There was a 50% voucher you could apply but looks like that has been cancelled now. Yes its only Android 10 but don't see that as an issue for a cheap tablet like this but the offer is gone now anyway. I wouldn't pay £110 for it when as you say a better £79 option is available.

https://www.latestdeals.co.uk/deals/toscido-tablet-10-inch-octa-core-android-tablet-black-amazon

 

[gzoom]

Multi-screens has been a standard Software Development setup for a long time.

Multi screen is now the default setup for nearly everyone surely, these are my ‘office’ setups, with USB-C its now so easy to have the CPU bit movable (laptop) and everything else attach at various office sites

The real killer in mobility these days is the power of mobile devices, my iPad Pro runs everything quicker than my laptop. For enterprise function is more secure and if Apple did some more tweaks to iOS I recon it can replace the EliteBook 90% of the time. I suspect in a few more years the larger tablets are going to kill laptops in the same way laptops have pretty much killed desktops.

The other really mad bit is Samsung DEX on the phone. The GPU power isn’t’ quite there yet I don’t think it can properly extend over 2-3 large displays with such a tiny processor, but its not far off as it can 100% multitask multiple apps with no issues.

I’m not sure the last time I used a proper ‘desktop’ let alone a ‘tower’, and as you can probably tell I have A LOT of IT equipment

 

[gzoom]

The maximum AAA game I can play on it is Fallout 4 with all the low power mods used, .

GeForceNow….You can play the Witcher on a phone, WRC rally on a 55inch OLED via a USB stick, or F1 manager on an iPad whilst cooking, all on MAX setting…… I love tech .

 

[bonzobanana]

GeForceNow….You can play the Witcher on a phone, WRC rally on a 55inch OLED via a USB stick, or F1 manager on an iPad whilst cooking, all on MAX setting…… I love tech .


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I have tried and used such services and they work well but I don't want to pay for them and if I'm away from home and just want to use my laptop while on a walk at a picnic table or something just for the change of scene. I have to play games natively. I'm not too bothered about texture quality or resolution as long as the game has good frame rates and responsiveness I'm happy and most of the games I like are older games anyway which play on weaker laptops plus of course it will play modern new games which are less demanding. I'm certainly not expecting to play Starfield on the laptop though. I dread to think how much it would have to be cut back to work, I'd probably be on wire frame graphics. The point is it has a battery something like 42Wh but a very low power chipset so the 16hrs is achievable for web surfing and office stuff and maybe 4-6hrs for gaming.

 

[Dadam]

You take a laptop on a walk so you can play games on a picnic table?? 🤯

 

[bonzobanana]

You take a laptop on a walk so you can play games on a picnic table?? 🤯

Yeah I might do, that is the whole point of an ultra compact laptop you can take it where you want. Just to have a change of scene and also a rest from walking if I'm walking a long way. I might do a walk that in total is around 4 miles or more and just stop somewhere for a while. It could be a cycle ride too. The ultra compact laptop I have is only about 800g with a 11.3" screen and the battery lasts up to about 16 hours. I can only stop where there is shade though as the screen is difficult to see on a very bright day. I might also read a pdf magazine on the laptop or watch a video etc. I'm one of those people that actually use the portability aspect of a laptop computer. I do also have a 15.6" Ryzen laptop but that is probably 3 or 4 times as heavy and only lasts a couple of hours on battery gaming etc at best. It's not really very portable. I certainly wouldn't want to go on a long walk with it. The laptop I use is about the same size as a 10" tablet, just a little thicker.

 

[Electric_Andy]

OP - after reading all of this it's really all about how much you want to spend i.e. do you spend more and future proof, or spend on only the spec you need to carry out your day to day tasks. I can only say that I have a work laptop with a 15.4" screen (I think) and it feels tiny and not nice to work on, but it is very quick (core i5 8th gen processor and was about £750 a couple years ago). I used to have a 17" laptop which was much better, but still doesn't compare with a 24"+ monitor. Upgrading your PC is worth a shot, and with my limited knowledge I was able to install more RAM into my Dad's PC some years ago, but without the knowledge you may find that upgrading one component may then mean that you have to upgrade others to keep up. So off the shelf might be a more expensive but less hassle solution