Superfast notebooks...talk to me

Morning all I need two pretty quick (my brother has no patience) notebooks for the office, nothing too big and heavy and needs a good battery life (brother moans a lot)......whats out there? Whats good ? and whats kack?

Cheers

Kit

Apple MacBook (13" Pro or 11" Air) would be a very quick choice.

I use a 13" MacBookPro i7 dual core - I'm a self-emplyed photographer and never get frustrated with it when I'm out on sites.

Al.

ps. 0% Finance available at the mo - or Education discount (University is best) is available if you can find someone to go with you.

How much money do you have?

Quick and decent battery life means an ultrabook which will be more costly.

It doesnt really matter the cost as long as it not stupid money and as long as it does what it says on the tin!

Anything with an i5 will be pretty quick, doubly so if it comes with an SSD.

alienware via the Dell outlet might be an option but you've not stated budget. Fast and cheap are mutually exclusive in IT.

Definitely a Macbook.

Ultrabook for me, but will require a £800+ budget.

You pays your money, you takes your choice

Have a look at the samsung series 3 range.

They're a lot cheaper than apples, come in varying weights, depending on what your needs are and pretty quick too.

Another option would be to replace the existing hard disk, with an SSD and add some more RAM to the existing PC.

Crucial (and others) sell kits with everything in to do it.

http://www.crucial.com/uk/

For a bit more money these are good too:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/11/review_samsung_series9_np900x4c/page2.html

Anything with an SSD

Always get a budget sorted first then start shopping around, otherwise no point really...

SSD is a must these days. Hybrid drives are on the market, which could be very useful for space constrained laptops. More than 16 GB or RAM doesn't make any sense and I'd say stay with 8GB unless you are a pro graphics content creator of crunch some massive numbers. CPU, Screen Size, Sound system (if not using headphones, which has to be noise cancelling ones of course ) - the best you get for the budget.

Doesn't matter the cost? Alienware M18x with all the goodies for a meager £ 3,879.41 - a bargain! !

My son has a Samsung Series 7 NP700G7C 17.3 inch - its the fasted thing I have seen. Full i7

^ Really good spec for the money. Add SSD and you have a winner

Any ultrabook BUT alienware ones. If your using it in an office you want a nice sturdy build quality and reliability. Alienware provide such low quality that the chinese wont touch them, then the drivers they include are full of bugs but then they carry on, windows driver update is over-ridden so it sources driver updates through dell. You can get the right drivers direct from the chipset manufacturers but chances are (no offense intended of course) if you know how to do that then you aren't buying alienware. They are over-priced.

Apple is also over-priced but unlike alienware you are getting good quality hardware, high reliability and frankly amazing customer support. If your willing to pay the extra money for the hardware you are getting amazing customer support an. a nice OS. Just bare in mind you may have to reconsider what software you use as windows software does not run on OSX, you will have to check for dedicated OSX versions, MS office is probably most important and is available). Any problems and you can usually just walk into an apple store and have everything sorted there and then.

If its internet performance your after though, no amount of new hardware will help you and you might be looking for the wrong solution entirely.

Don't forget you can install Windows onto a Mac.

For some reason I thought you had to pay for in-store Apple support - or am I miles of the mark here?

I've got an 3rd gen i7 Dell with a 64GB SDD and a seperate HDD and it flies - boots from cold in about 8 seconds. Decent (ish) graphics and only around £700 as it was 'clearance'.

<br />MacBooks are pretty but overpriced & frankly rubbish for running windows. <br /><br />The boot camp drivers provided by Apple to run windows are crap & dont give you the full performance of the hardware eg CPU throttling is limited which hampers battery life under windows vs OSX, the Nic card drivers don't give you the full gigabit throughput. It simply isn't in Apples interest to provide performance parity for Windows on their own hardware.<br /><br />So my advice would be if your primary requirement is for MS windows then save yourself the money & hassle of apple hardware & buy a premium laptop from someone else. <br /><br />HP, Samsung, Sony Lenovo & others all have some attractive designs now which are equally as good if not better than apples & you'd get more for your money than you would from apple. <br /><br />Obviously if you want OSX & are prepared to pay a premium then go for a MacBook, the new 13" Mbp with retina display is very nice.<br /><br />Fwiw I have a late 2011 MacBook & several pcs. Once you get used to it, windows 8 is much nicer to use than osX & if you have any concerns around apps then wander into your local apple store & see how spartan the OS X App Store still is today, so I'm sure the windows 8 App Store will have no difficulty in surpassing it.<br />

Edited 18 December, 201213 yr by sp1ke

Isn't bootcamp just virtualising windows within OSx, you can actually install windows natively replacing OSx.

No boot camp is a full install of windows in another partition allowing you to dual boot between windows or OSX.

Virtualisation is an option but you'd need 3rd party tools. Parallels seems to be the most common choice for virtualising a windows installation on OSX but you'd need to pay extra for this & your windows license as well.

I run Windows on my Macbook, virtualised with VMWare fusion. its great to switch between OSX and Windows by swiping three fingers across the trackpad. I can have multiple copies of Windows open at the same time, and frequently have Win 7 and Win 8 running concurrently on the same laptop. My Macbook is 2 1/2 years old, and the battery is still in tip top condition. Its been running on battery since 5.30 this evening, and with several gaming sessions and web browsing its now sitting at 57% after 3 hours.

Bootcamp has improved recently, but I dont have a need to use it and purely use virtualised installs. After all Vmware fusion supports hardware acceleration of the graphics GPU etc. and Windows 7 benchmarks run remarkably well scoring higher than my old quad core desktop PC.

Battery life and performance don't usually go together, there has to be a trade off somewhere. For example, the battery would need to be bigger/heavier on a performance laptop to get decent battery life.