Help with picking new laptop

[arjan wolthuis]

Next year I am going To college to work with computers. They advised to get a pretty powerful PC with an I5 or I7. Because It needs to run 5 or more VM (windows servers) at the same Time. programming comes in place too. What laptop do I need? And does It make a lot difference between an I5 or I7. Also it needs to have a pretty powerful GPU too.


Thank you

 

[orlbuckeye]

I have an Alienware 18 and I run VM's but not more than 1 at a time. The thing is on my Alienware I have 3 drives a 1 TB SSD, a 1 TB HD and a 750 GB HD. I would recommend you get a machine with as much ram as you can. Their are some new gaming machines with 64 GB of ram. When your running VM's you have to share RAM. When you running multiple it requires eeven more RAM. I have 16GB and the more I allocate to the VM the faster if runs. I ran the WIndows 10 Technical preview in it and I used 8 GB of ram.

Here is the only one at Newegg with 64 GB. Lenovo also has a new laptop with 64 GB of ram. OOps it won't be released unti 12/31/2015.

Computer Systems, Laptops / Notebooks, Gaming Laptops, 64 GB - Newegg.com

 

[arjan wolthuis]

I'll check it out. Thanks

 

[Geodude074]

If you want a laptop to run 5 or more virtual machines, your only choice is to get a laptop with an i7 HQ processor, which is a quad core with hyperthreading that gives you 8 logical cores. No other configuration will give you more than 4 cores besides an i7 with an HQ processor. Good luck.

 

[winplusR]

If you intend to use your computer for a lot of multitasking or to use a program that requires a lot of processing power such as running 5 or more VM; you will need internal hardware that is powerful enough to accommodate your tasks. And yes i7 is better, no doubt. Try checking further online. The Laptop Runner website could probably help you understand which is better and give you options based on your needs as well as your budget. (I like this website since it has very detailed info about laptops) You can try on CNET too. I personally use the Acer Aspire V17 since I do a lot of programming and need to open multiple programs at the same time. So based on experience, I would say this is one of the best.