Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Laptop Deal … wow …

I’m not on the market for a laptop right now, but if I were, I would have to give really serious consideration to this machine on sale right now (and for the next 2 days) at Future Shop:

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The reasons to like it are many. The price is really low for a nice 15” machine. It has plenty of RAM and since it carries two slots, you can toss the RAM and upgrade to 16MB for around 100 bucks. It comes with a 1TB drive, but again you can toss it and go with a fast SSD and you are still way ahead of the game.

Why do I say that? Because this thing sports the i7 3630QM, which is an incredibly fast chip:

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That table is from www.notebookcheck.net … and it includes most of the current mobile chips plus the top desktop chips. I deliberately included the fastest consumer chip available only 2 years ago, the 2600K. It is a real screamer … and this chip is not that far behind.

It amazes me how variable the designation “i7” can be … there are many i7 chips that are far less capable than many i5 chips … because they have each one all through the lineup. You need to be checking this list and www.tomshardware.com to be sure you are getting a processor that can compute. This one definitely can.

Just thought I would comment on this as I think it is quite a decent price for a lot of machine.

I just checked www.staples.ca and found this … a similarly spec’ed machine with less hard drive and the same RAM and chip …

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About 38% more … need more convincing?