Well I've been looking around for a laptop dual monitor computer for visual studio espress c++ and vbasic. The two I narrowed it down to are a HP and an Acer model that is only sold by Walmart.com. It's an Acer Aspire E5-575-72L3.

These are the Acer's specs:

http://www.acer.com/datasheets/2016/4876/E5-575/NX.GE6AA.010.html

It has a VGA and a HDMI which I think is great. I couldn't find a SSD drive internal but the external SSD should work fine (a regular type.) I put Visual Studio Express on the SSD and that's where I do my builds too, faster.

I was wondering what you think, hopefully you've heard only good things about Acer?

The only problem is the primary display is small : 15.6 ". I'm thinking I could put the running game on the smaller display though and debug on the larger external VGA.

Also, I am assuming that the maximum processing speed is what I consider for processing with Visual Studio.

Thank you,

Joshua E.

Oh , the cost is $469 and it comes with some sort of office starter.

Asus and Acer are really great brands on the low cost side of laptops (meaning their cheap offerings don't suck).

What exactly will you do with this? Programming but programming what? If the answer is 3D games then maybe a laptop with no discrete gpu is probably not the best choice.

Otherwise for straight up coding it's too bad it doesn't have an SSD (but you've got that covered apparently) and it's probably overkill CPU Wise.

Acer makes pretty good stuff, I've found, for the money they charge.

The important question, is how easy it is to swap out components. If you can undo a handful of screws, pop a panel, and swap out the HDD and the RAM, then it is a pretty decent deal. If those components are soldered in, run away. Any CPU that's in a laptop these days is basically good for the foreseeable future, since Moore's Law has essentially ended. But the difference between an SSD and old-style spinning rust hard drives makes a huge difference, especially for disk-heavy operations, as compiling tends to be, and you really want to be able to max out your motherboard on fast, cheap RAM sticks, particularly if you are doing any development with VMs or containers.

By a discrete GPU do you mean something separate that can be added/removed? Well perhaps this model can have a graphics card added later? My ambition was to program 2D games and maybe some visual basic dialogues. I must admit though 3D is still appealing. Someone (if I remember correctly) told me in another thread that the graphics cards these days even though they are still built in they are capable for 3D programming just not super duper 3D programming. It would be nice though if a GPU could be added.

What is the overkill situation, please?

Thank you,

JoshuaE

I do not recommend Acer.

I bought a VN7 791G, and three months after use the beautiful 17" screen glitched and has this green shade now, becoming improper for artistic use.

I bought it in another country so the warranty can't be used.

I use an external monitor now and the notebook runs closed.

Unless you plan on moving your machine to different places every day, it makes no difference to buy a desktop, other than a desktop might be cheaper since the hardware doesn't have to be compact.

Josheir : by discreet GPU i mean a GPU separate from the CPU, doesn't mean at all it is changeable. So instead of just the one on the intel proc, have an nvidia card with it. But for your stated goal this doesn't matter at all (only matters for heavy / modern 3D programming, not for 2D or low end 3D, the intel one will manage that just fine).

Also note that for what you need Something much cheaper will do too like this : (somehow pasting doesn't seem to work on the forum for me, google up newegg Acer Laptop Aspire ES1-572-357C) . Same integrated graphic card, same screen size, less memory and less powerfull GPU (neither should be significant at all for your purposes, 4GB is massive for 2D games / programming and so is a core I3) Costs 345$

Kryzon : that's anecdotal evidence and the same can be said of any laptops for all brands, a few will fail and with a sample size of 1 it's not a good reason to recommand or disrecommand a brand. The lesson is more "don't buy from another country".

Also a desktop isn't really cheaper in the low end (400ish $ range) once you add the mouse/keyboard/screen. It's also not cheaper by design, components aren't really "smaller", it's usually their packaging that changes and smaller packaging doesn't necessarily mean more expensive (less components used up). Also costs less to ship (weight) doesn't use as much power (smaller psu) etc. The tradeoff isn't price, it's portability vs power/upgradability.

Asus and Acer are really great brands

that's anecdotal evidence and the same can be said of any laptops for all brands

The fact that I bought it from another country does not change the fact that the screen became broken after normal use.
I do not recommend Acer.

EDIT: Let me rephrase that. I wish that this bad thing that happened to me does not happen to you, I can only recommend that you do something different than I did so the outcome is more likely to be different. I hope you find a good machine, good luck.

Interesting, it doesn't look like there is a vga port so I guess I could use a $30 adapter with that computer. I just assumed i3 was to old and that the i7 would be much faster?

Really though if I am to use an i3 I might be able to find a larger screen for the primary display or is the Acer such great resolution that its just as good if not better?

I haven't seen the actual display being used so I am not sure if it would be suitable, I think it is though?

Thank you for your time,

Joshua Eirman

Josheir : I3 isn't any older than I7, it's just lower in price and perf. Intel has I3/I5/I7 as their "normal" processors pretty much as entry/mid/high power. For what you're doing it hardly makes a difference (it's not like visual studio is power heavy nor are most 2D games). There are very old I7 and very new I3, but in the same age group it always rank I3<I5<I7 with a mix of additional cores and frequency. I'm programming all day long on an I3 on windows 10 and also gaming on it (and not just 2D gaming). You don't need more than that, power has scaled crazy these past few years with the additional cores and not that much in frequency, so the difference between the low and high range in single threaded scenario is not as huge as it once was. If you are curious you can check the cpu benchmark site and compare the relevant processors, the I3 has a cpu mark of 3506 and the i7 of 4324. Also think of I3/5/7 as relative labels, they hold locally but not globally, both of those are portable I3/I7, to give you an idea the best I7 for desktop has a cpu mark score of nearly 15 000, yet it would barely be faster for the mostly single / dual threaded scenarios that seem to be your main use case.

Kryzon : You're mixing both of my points, buying from another country changes the warranty issue but has nothing to do with my statement that it was annecdotal evidence. What i stated was with a sample of 1 computer you can either get 100% or 0% fail rate, it's really irrelevant. Laptops fails, from all brands, ALL BRANDS, and you having one that failed is no reason to discard the brand. I had to return a NEW laptop to one of the biggest shop in paris, their answer was "you were lucky it immediately didn't work, else you'd have to send to the manufacturer for replacement and wait, since it didn't work at unpacking we'll switch it, it happens on nearly 10% of all laptops we sell". That's how commonly a new laptop fails, and while less common the same can be said of older ones, so my suggestions is, when someone asks for what to buy, suggest based on large scope research, not own experience, because with a small sample size it's likely to be harmful and not helpful.