Mrs. Devil occasionally works on a 2009 HP Pavilion with a Core2 Duo and Intel 4500MHD graphics. Those are the only two specs I think I care about, because other than universal basics (e.g. 15" or + screen, WiFi, Ethernet port), I can add RAM, all saves are to an NAS, etc.
It works very well for what she does—layout and design of 200-300 page non-fiction books (chart- and image-heavy), using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and some Word and Excel. No 3D graphics and no gaming at all. She does stream Netflix and Hulu, but those are minimally taxing. All of these run perfectly fine on the 2009 laptop.
We’re looking to move her from a circa 2007 OSX Macbook to something that will run Win 7. Rationale is better suited for a different thread, but bottom line is NO Apple products and NO Windows 10.
So RAM and HDD aside, will any modern, major-brand (e.g. Dell, HP, etc.) laptop with an i3 or above CPU and any graphics (integrated or separate) outperform/benchmark higher than the Core2 Duo/Intel 4500MHD? We want to take advantage of Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Ludicrous Tuesday/etc., so research time might be limited. It would make things much easier if our choices were based on things like weight, screen size, touchscreen, etc.
Some of the very-low-power chips (Haswell-Y and Core M) may not match Core 2 Duo. The rest should be fine. Core i3 chips branded as Pentium are a great deal, but watch out for Pentium-branded Atoms, which are garbage. You do not need to worry about graphics.
SSD. You can start with a computer that is 5-10 years old and make it act faster than a new one in most situations if it has an SSD instead of a hard drive. Unfortunately, the laptops that come with SSDs inside are very expensive, generally. However, you can trivially upgrade any laptop your purchase to one with a large SSD. Also, 500 gig samsung ssds happen to be on sale right now…
Oh, right. Storage and RAM are totally irrelevant to this. I’ll be sure to check the max RAM the machine can take and how accessible the HDD is. For her old Mac, I swapped HDD for an SSD and increased the RAM. Getting to the HDD was a bitch, but doable. RAM was obnoxiously expensive through Apple, but relatively dirt cheap doing it myself. It was a while ago, but I think I used Crucial’s higher end line.
For this machine, a smaller SSD will do fine. We keep all our data files on an NAS (backed up to and accessible on the cloud), so there’s absolutely no need for anything larger than 256GB—and even that will have a ton of extra space. I’ll look at what’s bundled on the off chance that it’s cheaper than going to Newegg separately.
And RAM is a no-brainer. A few Black Fridays ago I ended up with 18GB for my desktop, and I routinely have a hundred or so Firefox tabs on one monitor, two or three Office applications running with several documents each, a virtual machine (with it’s own absurd number of browser tabs), and something like Arkham City running without breaking a sweat. Yeah, RAM is good.
So it sounds like (after upgrading on my own), as long as it has an i-series (how i-ronic is it that this is her first move away from Apple?) CPU and any modern graphics chipset I can’t really go wrong. It’ll outperform the 2009 laptop, so she’ll be very happy—and we’ll be able to easily keep it in the $500–$700 range.