So. As you know, about a year and a half ago, my gaming rig committed Hari Kari. I was completely and utterly crushed. I sat in the car and cried for about half an hour. I was bereft.
Then a friend offered to loan me an old MacBook Pro from 2012. I was hesitant at first, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I gratefully accepted. It was a godsend, because I learned a lot about coding and that, ultimately, coding is not compatible with my mental state. I also learned that gamers are a bit snobby in their hatred of mac for gaming limitations, because a mac can actually run 80% of my Steam games and Minecraft with decent graphics settings. I was pretty pleased, overall. I liked the track pad gestures, I liked the file manager programs. It had its pros and cons.
Alas, it was not to be. Friend and I grew apart, but I was allowed to hold on to the laptop, which was great, until October 28, when the logic board blew. WTF. Two laptops in under two years? This is not cool. I handled this breakdown better than the loss of my gaming rig, because I was still riding high on having dyed my hair galaxy colours* the evening before. After many PMC and SMC resets, hardware diagnoses, and frantic phone calls, I managed to get it to function enough that I could scrape my data off the drives, before returning it to my friend, because he knew how to deal with it.
Remember the little, old laptop that I used for chatting when I was a streamer? I was allowed to borrow that as a band-aid until a solution occur.
Said solution manifested itself in Black Friday.
After extensive research (about 30 hrs). I had a list of nearly FORTY laptops to compare And score based on price VS 1)CPU, GPU, RAM, screen quality 2)HD/SSD size, brand, keyboard features
After spreadsheets and algorithms, after two weeks of agony and sleepless nights, after a lot of confusion and education, I had finally made a decision: Dell NEW Inspiron 15 7000 Series, i7-7700HQ, 16GB, GTX 1060, 1TB HDD & 128GB SSD.
Pros: GTX 1060 w/ 6gb GDDR5, 16gb RAM, IPS panel, OS on SSD means I don’t have to wait.
Cons: I wanted a rainbow keyboard or a red case…meh. Windows 10…ugh. Price…Ouch.
There was a Lenovo runner up at a significantly cheaper price point, but with much lower specs GTX1050, 8gb RAM, ??? screen, but a 2tb HDD & 256 SSD. There were also an MSI REX with a rainbow keyboard, and an ASUS Rog Strix in the running, but the GTX1060 was too good to pass up.
The price point and ostentatiousness (for my needs) had me hesitant at first. For a long time, I’ve had other people tell me that, because I’m not working (for medical reasons) I don’t deserve nice things, and I’ve started to feel that way myself. Spending that kind of money on myself was scary. Investing that much money, at once, into something I’ve obviously not had a great track record with was also terrifying. Ultimately I decided that I needed to confront my fears, and I needed to tell myself that the people who think I don’t deserve anything nice are ignorant. I needed to allow myself this one nice thing. So I bought it.
I thought I’d end up with instant remorse. I thought I’d end up with regret. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, or if have an anxiety attack, or I’d freak out. The opposite happened. I felt a bit of nervousness and nausea, but ultimately calm and happy. And excited. I cannot WAIT to get it!!!
Specs:
Chassis: Power board with Fingerprint for N17E graphics
Display: 15.6″ 1920×1080 IPS Anti-Glare LED-Backlit Display – LG Philips LGD053F (156WF6-4XK13) panel
Processor (CPU): i7-7700HQ 2.8-3.8GHz Quad Core, 8 threads, 6GB cache
Memory (RAM): 16GB Kingston DDR4-2400 (1×16)
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB GDDR5
Memory – HDD: Seagate 1TB HDD @5400 rpm
Memory – SSD: 128GB Toshiba M.2 PCIe NVMe (boot)
Ports:
1 x HDMI 2.0
3 x SuperSpeed USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A including one with PowerShare
1 x Thunderbolt™ 3 Port (USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C™ with support for 40 Gbps Thunderbolt and DisplayPort)
Slots:
1 x 2-in-1 SD (UHS50) / MMC
1 x RJ-45
Bluetooth: 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.2
Wireless: Dual Band 2.4&5 GHz, 2×2
Battery: 56 Whr, 4-Cell Battery (Integrated)
Power Lead & Adaptor: 180W AC Adapter & US Power Cord
Keyboard: Backlit, English
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit English (ick)