cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41746502
I recently bought a Dell Latitude 7430 with an i7-1265u, 10 cores, 1.8Ghz, 16gb of (I think) DDR4 RAM, and a 256GB SSD for 250$. I still have time to return the machine. I was wondering whether I got a good deal here or not.
My purpose is mostly for general school stuff. Spreadsheets, docs, Zoom meetings, and the like. I might be getting into the world of CS, but I’m not at a point yet where I would need much power.
Still, the 256GB of storage worry me. And unfortunately it can’t be upgraded. Still, if I’m not doing much besides all of the basic tasks expected of a work laptop, do I really need more?
Should I consider returning it and try to get another deal? Keep it? Or something else altogether?
Yes.
The multithread Passmark score on that CPU is 13254.
That’s many times what you really need for the work you’re describing above. There are a lot of games it could play pretty easily and games are far more demanding than a Zoom call.
The 7000 series Latitudes are actually OK machines for the most part. Once in a while Dell will have a model with a problem, but not enough to really worry about. As far as storage goes, spreadsheets and the like do not take a lot of room. If you want to lug around a lot of media files, like movies and TV shows then you will run out pretty quickly. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry about it.
For my personal systems and those for my family I usually pick up older Dell laptops/towers and refurb them myself. I usually get several more years out of them. The system I’m typing this on is a Dell Precision 7550 that I rebuilt a year ago. Its predecessor was a Precision 7540 that my youngest uses to run games on and do his homework. My 7550 runs Battlefront II and BSG Deadlock easily.