Best Laptops for Work/Play

Hey all,

I need a new laptop for working from home/gaming/porn. You know the usual. There are some really good black Friday sales so I'm going to pull the trigger this week.

What brands are reliable, or subbrands. I know the Dell subbrand I last got was shit.

What specs do I need? Is a SSD with 8GB of DDR4, with an 8th Gen i5 with 6 MB cache and an intel i5 going to cut it?

Ideally I'm looking for something around $1000(with the current sales around $500-$700). It has to have a built in number pad and be 15"-17"

This is one I'm currently looking a

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-l/ThinkPad-L580/p/20LW000MUS

31 Comments
 

Beware the Black Friday derivative discount product. Laptops and TVs are the worst!

If a SKU pops up before Black Friday to be sold at 1 retailer (a simple google search will confirm this), you've found the derivative. Avoid it like HIV.

 
Most Helpful
"C.R.E. Shervin" Hey all,

I need a new laptop for working from home/gaming/porn. You know the usual. There are some really good black Friday sales so I'm going to pull the trigger this week.

What brands are reliable, or subbrands. I know the Dell subbrand I last got was shit.

What specs do I need? Is a SSD with 8GB of DDR4, with an 8th Gen i5 with 6 MB cache and an intel i5 going to cut it?

Ideally I'm looking for something around $1000(with the current sales around $500-$700). It has to have a built in number pad and be 15"-17"

This is one I'm currently looking a

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-l/ThinkPad-L580/…</a">https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-l/ThinkPad-L580/…

If I may, I'd suggest an i7 and 16 gb of RAM. I have an i5 with 8 gb of RAM and it's ok for basic stuff. I could see it struggling if I were to try and play a game.

 

If you can afford it you buy a separate work laptop and then a gaming/general browsing laptop. You can find a decent AMD APU powered laptop for gaming at a pricer lower than an intel laptop that can be used for both work and play.

Lenovo is infamous for bloatware/spyware.

 

I strongly recommend a desktop if you work from home regularly. In my experience Bloomberg + FactSet + M* Direct + a dozen chrome tabs and excel iterations will bring any laptop to a crawl.

For mobility I've got the base Surface Pro 6 which is going for $800 with the needed type cover (The 7's better with a USB-C port now) 8GB of ram is enough if you actively manage your productivity programs (one Excel window and one data program at a time) and a half TB micro-SD card mitigates the puny 128GB of onboard storage.

The only difference between Asset Management and Investment Research is assets. I generally see somebody I know on TV on Bloomberg/CNBC etc. once or twice a week. This sounds cool, until I remind myself that I see somebody I know on ESPN five days a week.
 

it depends...I've got a second log-in profile in FactSet, and M* is just tied to my work email, plus Bloomberg just requires your B-Unit. I'll remote in for email and Excel, and the rest are already sandboxed, so I'm safe.

The only difference between Asset Management and Investment Research is assets. I generally see somebody I know on TV on Bloomberg/CNBC etc. once or twice a week. This sounds cool, until I remind myself that I see somebody I know on ESPN five days a week.
 

My bank does not give out laptops to its employees. Would I be ok getting a Dell XPS 15? Or would something from Lenovo be better? I don't want to pay ~$2K for a laptop that I have no idea how long I'm going to use for.

I'm mainly going to use it for work honestly as I already have a 2014 MacBook Air that works fine for recreational use, unless there really is a reason to get something better for work and play that is not ~$2K

 

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The only difference between Asset Management and Investment Research is assets. I generally see somebody I know on TV on Bloomberg/CNBC etc. once or twice a week. This sounds cool, until I remind myself that I see somebody I know on ESPN five days a week.

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