Help me choose a laptop

[canofhumdingers]

I’m finally upgrading to a new laptop after using the same machine for well over a decade. I’ve narrowed it down to three and I’m having a hard time choosing between them. I’ve read and watched all the reviews I can find on each. They have near identical performance so it’s really down to overall design and features.

1.

My gut tells me I like this one best. It’s such a sleek and appealing design. It’s also apparently the sturdiest and most well-built, which is important because I travel a LOT and it will go wherever I go. It has a great mousepad and a highly ranked keyboard quality. It has the most storage by a large margin and I WILL use it with all the film restoration projects I keep up with. The screen is high quality but some people have reported some light leak issues. However it does not have a number pad on the keyboard (not sure if that’s a feature I care about or not, honestly), some people complain it gets too hot, and it has the fewest ports with no SD card reader. It’s also the most expensive.

2.

This one has a full keypad with number pad. It is consistently highly reviewed and a bit more reasonably priced. It also has the most ports including a full SD card reader. The screen apparently has no light leak issues. The build quality seems rather cheap in some ways and it is quite flexy and thin which concerns me a bit. It also has a consistently poorly reviewed mouse pad. Ultimately this one is more “bang for the buck” with the most features, but it possibly comes at the expense of durability.

3.

This one has been the hardest to find information about. Apparently it is exclusive to Best Buy. The handful of videos I found indicate it has a pretty solid build quality. It has a full keypad with number pad. It also (to the best of my research b/c it’s not specified on the actual Best Buy page) has a 120hz screen as opposed to the 60hz screens on the two laptops above. It is the least expensive but also has the least internal storage capacity. It has one more USB port than the Razer but no SD card reader. Excluding the storage, it seems like it might be a solid balance of the pros of the two above laptops but ultimately it’s just been hard to find much info about this one.


Sooo.... which one should I get? Anything but the Razer will certainly result in me carrying around a portable external drive to augment storage space. Not sure if I actually need an SD card reader or a number pad. Slightly concerned about the light leak possibility as I’m a bit obsessive about image quality.

[jellydonut25]

I have an Asus and I hate its guts. It's slow and I wind up using my older computer, which his literally physically falling apart much more often.


I don't know what model or anything, but take that as you will.

[canofhumdingers]

Well, I went a little crazy. My friend found what appears to be a reputable eBay seller blowing out for basically the same price as the Razer I was leaning towards.

Jelly, you’ll be disappointed to hear that it’s an Asus, but I did look up a bunch of reviews and it seems to be well received. The only two issues for me are it has less internal storage than I wanted (but what’s there is way better quality than the laptops I was looking at) and the battery life is quite short. But since I was planning on augmenting any machine (even the razer’s 2TB Drive) with external drives I decided that wasn’t a big deal. And when I really think about it, I can’t remember the last time I used my laptop without plugging it in so battery life shouldn’t be an issue for me.

Really excited to be getting such a powerful machine for such a low price! Just hope I don’t wind up getting a box full of rocks!