Opinion and ideas for a new laptop for my son

[JayZJay]

I would greatly appreciate opinions and ideas about buying a laptop for my son.

 

Budget is not rigid.  I would say $1,200 - 1,300 would be ideal on the high side, but I/we could do a bit more if what seemed to clearly be the best option required it.  Spending only $1,000 or so would be great if I could find what we wanted and it was on sale, there was a discount promo code, etc.

 

Perhaps as much as anything, I would like feedback about manufacturers.  Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc.  

 

Has one of these been particularly good about driver updates and utilities?

 

Do any of these offer a utility now to control battery charging, like the ability to set the max charge at 80% (for example), rather than charge to 100%?  This is important if the laptop is left plugged in to power.

 

My son is 17 and doing some dual-enrollment classes for high school and college credit.  He needs and/or wants a laptop that can handle some gaming, but not necessarily AAA games or games at high resolution and high frame rates.  If he could do some gaming at 1080p and decent frame rates, that would be great.  All of that said, he needs the laptop to be versatile since it is primarily for school.
 

I’m thinking a 15”/15.6” laptop with an Intel i7, 16 GB of RAM, and a decent ATI or NVIDIA GPU.  Of course, the new Tiger Lake CPU would be nice or possibly one of the new ATI CPUs.

 

I was leaning towards a Dell or Lenova laptop, but I’m open to an HP, Acer, etc.  My son and I don’t really care about “thin and light”.  He would rather have features, ports, well-made, and reliable, even if it is a bit bulky or heavy.

 

Does anyone have any recent experience with MSI laptops?
 

If anyone has any specific make & model recommendations to check out, then I welcome that.  However, feedback as to what people have seen in the last couple of years with manufacturers is perhaps more important.

Thank you in advance for any help or feedback.

 

Edited November 4, 2020 by JayZJay

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Budget?  

[JayZJay]

Oops.  Thanks, @Jim K.  I edited the post.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

My current laptop is a Dell Inspiron 7558 that I picked up from from a supervisor a few years back. It's reasonably small, light, and it works for Internet and general productivity tasks. The 2-in-1 setup is nice as well for watching a film on the plane or train. However, it doesn't have a major graphics card so it's not great for gaming - anything past 2005 is probably pushing it.

 

Before then I've stuck with Lenovo laptops. As I didn't buy them from other people I was able to change the graphics card option to something a bit more beefy (for the time) and found that they did great for both productivity and gaming. As you can imagine though, they were also chunkier than my current machine.

 

For the question of the battery software, I know that my Lenovo laptop came with something pre-installed that would allow me to set it so that it only charged to about 60% (I think). That was useful considering most of the time I had it plugged in. I'm not sure, but I would imagine that these days you can probably find a piece of software that would do the same job if the computer doesn't come with it already.

 

As Jim mentioned, if you provide us with a budget then we could maybe offer some ideas that are more specific, but overall I would say that you can't go wrong with a Dell or a Lenovo. I would personally avoid HP laptops, but that is only because I've had a friend that went through 2 or 3 of them in quite a short space of time.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

He edited his post to include a budget...

 

" I would say $1,200 - 1,300 would be ideal on the high side, but I/we could do a bit more if what seemed to clearly be the best option required it. Spending only $1,000 or so would be great if I could find what we wanted and it was on sale, there was a discount promo code, etc."

 

I've only had experience with the Dell XPS line.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

27 minutes ago, Jim K said:

He edited his post to include a budget...

Yeah, I must have missed the edit while I was writing.

 

I'm just taking a look at laptops now...although I'm slightly worried I'm going to find one and think, "hmm, I could do with a new laptop myself..."

 

EDIT: Looking around within the price range, I'd be looking at the Dell G3 or the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i I think.

[JayZJay]

Thanks, @Nick H..

 

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

Maybe a laptop from Lenovo's Legion gaming series?  One thing about them is that while they do have gaming features like enhanced cooling systems and RGB lighting, they also do not look out-of-place in an office or classroom environment.  I'm not sure they fall in your budget envelope, though.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[MS Bob 11]

Tiger Lake laptops with discrete GPUs and gaming CPUs will probably take time to arrive (Q1 2021) so in the meantime you have to settle for Comet Lake or Coffee Lake. Currently I have Lenovo Legion Y740 17 which is just AWESOME for me. There's also a Legion 7i that came after this (10th gen, Comet Lake) but they removed the touchpad buttons in it so it was a deal breaker for me.

Lenovo does have a "Conservation Mode" setting in their Vantage app for always plugged in laptops to never charge battery beyond 55%-60% so it lasts for 5 years or more. Also the Legion's look is unlike other gaming laptops - if you turn off the RGB, it almost looks like a business laptop. Other OEMs also have this I think e.g. HP has HP Battery Health Manager, Dell has Dell Power Manager to set a limit on battery charge (as long as you have a fairly recent laptop bought in the last 3 years). I don't know if ASUS, Acer, Razer, MSI also have it.

Legion Y740's lower end model is for $1369: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/legion-laptops/legion-y-series/Lenovo-Legion-Y740-17/p/88GMY701062 and the cooling system of this laptop and its successor is probably the best in the all laptops currently.