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Apr 22, 2013
I'm looking for a $500 laptop for college and light gaming (LoL, pretty much nothing intensive). I am a computer science major so I will need it to compile code and other developery things. It would be cool if I could take notes on it as well with a stylus to draw figures and graphs.

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Apr 22, 2013
Okay, new budget:

Moderate gaming on it (LoL, Civ V, moderately demanding FPS's), but mostly focused on ergonomics. I'll be doing developer work on it and would like a lot of utility. I would like the ability to draw things on it for note taking. Nice keyboard, battery life, speakers (optional) etc. Any suggestions? $700 is my budget.

Oh, and I might need to dual boot or run a virtual machine on it, so I'm hoping for some decent hard drive space (at least 500 gb to work with).

Thanks. I do not know much about laptops, but there appears to be all this hype about haswell and stuff. Suggestions are appreciated.

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Apr 22, 2013
Anyone have experience with the S431 Lenovo Ultrabook Thinkpad? http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/s-series/s431/

I'm looking at the $800 one, with the discrete graphics. Are the graphics worth the upgrade?

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Apr 22, 2013

QuarkJets posted:

e: My resolve is seriously wavering; I've been wanting to hold out for more HD5000 laptops so that I could enjoy better battery life will still being a mediocre gaming laptop, but the 410p is looking really nice. The $829 deal for the 1600x900 model goes on for another 7 days, so plenty of time to make up my mind I guess. Are we still looking at late September/October before we start seeing more HD 5000 laptops?


The Y410p from the previous page is $770, just outside of your budget but it would satisfy your needs. If you need to go cheaper, head over to techbargains and keep an eye out for a good deal and then ask about it here. "Moderately demanding FPS's" and "$700 is my budget" conflict with each other, as you'll need a dedicated GPU for moderately demanding FPS's but good dedicated GPUs tend to be on laptops that are more than $700. If you're willing to settle for a laptop that is inside of your budget but can still play a lot of interesting games except maybe FPS's, then you have a lot of options.

Yea... I'm just worried about the build quality, battery life, and weight. I heard that Think Pads are built much nicer, what do you think of the S431 I posted?

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Apr 22, 2013
The weight and battery life do seem pretty shoddy though, I will be using this for college. In retrospect ergonomics are more important to me.

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