Basic laptop advice

[shirt]

Having been served notice of redundancy I need to buy a laptop sharpish. Purpose is essentially to look and apply for a new role, but beyond that would be nice to be able to have something that can handle basic 3D modeling (fusion 360) for home projects.

I’m used to a fairly high end CAD station but the budget is as low as I can get away with. However it seems sensible to go with a spec that wouldn’t really perform for the sake of a hundred quid. Won’t be heavily tasked but then I have no idea what is ‘basic’ spec these days? 8 or 16gb ram? HDD storage volume not really an issue.

I am not really an ‘electronics’ person so guess I’m looking for validation before ordering. With that in mind, which of the following would you go for?

https://www.amazon.ae/Lenovo-IdeaPad-3i-i5-1235U-B...

https://uae.sharafdg.com/product/hp-laptop-amd-ryz...

https://www.amazon.ae/Lenovo-i5-1235U-IdeaPad-Anti...

[mikef]

Are you planning to stay out there or return to the UK? Maybe get the lowest spec that lets you job hunt (maybe even a tablet?) and save the CAD system for later. I’ve had to unload laptops with Singapore and Latin American keyboards and nobody wants them in the UK…

[shirt]

Not sure as yet. Looking at either gcc or eu to begin with, not uk.

It’s just home cad, basic stuff for the cars and bikes, no mega assemblies or textures. Keyboard layout will be English. It’s just that I’ve been provided with IT for the last decade or so, so no idea what ‘budget’ is these days, I prefer performance over gimmicks and apps, I’ll likely be subscribing to office 365+ and fusion360 only. I guess video conferencing for interviews is also a must.

Erring towards the one with 16gb ram. As I say just looking for validation as I really have no idea.

[mikef]

There are multiple versions of English keyboards, UK, US, Singapore, probably others. It depends whether you want to easily type a £ symbol, which is only on the UK English keyboard afaik (there are workarounds…)

My CAD engineers (SolidWorks and AutoCAD) used laptops with Quadro video cards, which were fairly costly and damn heavy

Edited by mikef on Tuesday 31st October 23:17

[Buttery Ken]

Not sure how practical Ebay is over there, but I'd be looking at a refurbished P series Thinkpad. It'll be a few years old but will likely still fly through the CAD tasks you are looking at. Check the requirements of Fusion 360 though to be sure. And be mindful of screen resolution as some of these older machines might 'only' be 1080p.

Something like this maybe - Link

[Monsterlime]

From those links, you would likely be better off getting a used business laptop. Not sure what the market is like where you are, but for example, last year I picked up an HP Elitebook 845 G8 (better known as the HP Dev One) for £400 (brand new at over £1000). It is a previous gen in CPU (although not at the time I bought it) etc, but still very capable and better constructed than the standard consumer units and it still has HP onsite warranty left until 2025.

I've just looked up my current work laptop, which is an HP ZBook Fury G8 (with dedicated GPU) which are £2k laptops and can be had for £700ish on ebay.

Dell, Lenovo etc will be similar.

[Somebody]

Agree that the best way to go is a refurbished business laptop - e.g. HP Elitebooks/Lenovo Thinkpads which are bulletproof compared to the run of the mill consumer fare.

I am posting this on a Thinkpad X61 that is still for me very useable, having had RAM and a SSD upgraded from standard.

[bloomen]

I've bought a few business laptops and I found the most of the screens to be... unspeakable.

Yellow, milky and vague.

If you're doing something a bit graphics it may not be tolerable. Worth a punt if there's an easy refund option but I'd never go there again no matter what the budget.