Laptop Recommendation for a graduate student..I will appreciate your help.

I am a graduate student in computer science and my budget is around $1000 to $1200. I am looking for an efficient LENOVO laptop for my school and job. Most days I am working simultaneously in dreamviewer, eclips (with android sdk ! i hate to wait to run the android emulator for minutes) , wamp , word, excel, pdfs, have a database open, lots of tabs in my web browser, some video streaming or listening music and maybe editing an image in photoshop.

Basically i want a GOOD performance! I want a fast one..that is why i don't care if it is a quad core or dual core. I guess the clockspeed is much more important.

Does anybody have a good reccomendation ? cuz i really need it..

Thank u so much I will appreciate it if you can help me.

 

Depending on your portability needs, a Thinkpad T540 could be a good option. For a more portable package, the Thinkpad T440s should run those tasks well (though obviously not as quickly as the T540).

 

Yup. Be sure to get at least 8GB of ram if you do a lot of multi tasking

 

X240 with FHD display, it's at the top of your budget though, with 8GB RAM it will come to 1300$.

 

If you want quad core CPU, take a look at T440p.

 

You didn't make any mention of how portable this machine needs to be. That will narrow down which models to look at.

 

That's never been true the entire time computing has been in existence. I remember the days back in late 90's and early 2000's when Intel and AMD were making 1 GHz CPUs and everyone was talking about the GHz barrier being broken by these super fast CPU's.... meanwhile multi-core 300MHz Sun UltraSpark cpu's were destroying them in terms of overall performance on professional workstation computers, largely due to the superior architecture in which they were operating.. true 64 bit, RISC and Unix based computers vs 32/16 bit CISC & Windows XP.... Sorta like when Apple first went to the PowerPC chip that also out performed the X86 chips of the day..

Now the same is true... There are 2.4Ghz CPU's that are SIGNIFICANTLY faster and more powerful than 3.0GHz+ models..

Apples to Oranges..

 

True, but over the past years we've seen time and time that a lot of software only deals with one or two cores; making anything above that virtually useless.

That's why an E8400 destroys an Q6600 in anything that only uses 1-2 cores.

If you're in a situation like that it might make more sense to get the fastest i5 instead of the slowest i7.

 

very true, software has to be written, multi-threaded, compiled and optimized to take full advantage of the OS and hardware advances out there.... It's been my experience at least with pro-apps.... Adobe, Autodesk, etc... tend to be able to take full advantage of these architectural advantages.