Best general purpose laptop for $500?

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Whidon

Blackwing Lair Raider
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Man i really doubt it. All the computers save one, All Laptop and all save one desktop have only 8gb ram. it does not seem to make a big difference. Honestly it sounds like you want a Laptop in the close to 2k+ area with all those features. Like i said the one you bought is totally badass for a sub 1k laptop. It's basically a pretty nice portable desktop in terms of capabilities.

Thing is, you can easily always buy another 8gb ram in the future and install it or have someone else do it if you do eventually find yourself wanting more RAM. That's much more difficult, if not impossible for a Laptop CPU/GPU to be replaced/upgraded. RAM is really expensive right now for DDR4 but the price is almost sure to go down so you may very well be able to upgrade it to 16gb for 50 bucks in a year if you want.
 

Porkchop

Mr. Poopybutthole
<Bronze Donator>
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Sorry for the late reply, but yeah, that is a better laptop than the HP with the AMD that I linked. And yeah, you should be ok with 8 GB, but if you feel like you can't run as many programs at one time or if it feels slow when you you are alt-tabbing between games and apps, then just buy another 8GB stick, unscrew the plate at the bottom and install it.
 
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Crone

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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This thread has enlightened me to at least one thing. That if you want a general purpose laptop, that can also handle some games, it's not required to spend $1100+ for it. All my buddies bought MSI laptops in that price range and they work great and game great, but the ones linked in this thread seem nearly as good for hundreds less. Good shit!
 

Morrow

Trakanon Raider
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Man i really doubt it. All the computers save one, All Laptop and all save one desktop have only 8gb ram. it does not seem to make a big difference. Honestly it sounds like you want a Laptop in the close to 2k+ area with all those features. Like i said the one you bought is totally badass for a sub 1k laptop. It's basically a pretty nice portable desktop in terms of capabilities.

Thing is, you can easily always buy another 8gb ram in the future and install it or have someone else do it if you do eventually find yourself wanting more RAM. That's much more difficult, if not impossible for a Laptop CPU/GPU to be replaced/upgraded. RAM is really expensive right now for DDR4 but the price is almost sure to go down so you may very well be able to upgrade it to 16gb for 50 bucks in a year if you want.

Is there a way for me to move entire games or certain files from my SSD to my storage drive? Like say I have Star Wars the Old Republic, Hearthstone, Pokemon TCG Online, and Overwatch on my SSD. But then I realize I'm not going to play Overwatch for a few weeks. Can I easily move the entire install and keep it working over to the storage drive? And/or are there non essential files that I can split up? What's the best way to prioritize SSD space? And what's the best way to move them back and forth as needed? Thanks for the help, this is my first SSD.

Also, the laptop is running fantastic. High settings, very fast, and it's not even getting hot as some reviews said. I'm not playing top of the line games, but still. Love it so far.
 

Enzee

Trakanon Raider
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theoretically, you could just copy/paste the folder to move it, but it may not work right (or at all) until you move it back. Depends how its setup, maybe someone more knowledgeable can confirm.
Worst case scenario, you can keep the .exe on the storage drive and uninstall it from ssd. You'll still have to update/patch the game, but it'll be faster then doing it from scratch.
 

Nija

<Silver Donator>
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Morrow Morrow if you want to move folders around you can use junction points. From an admin command prompt, run mklink /?

Stop the blizzard client (I don't even know what it's called these days) - move the Overwatch folder or one of them to the storage drive (let's call it E: ) and then once it's done copying, you want to re-create the original folder location as a junction:

mklink /J "C:\blizzard games\Overwatch" "E:\coldstorage\Overwatch"

To revert, stop the service (or anything that would be watching/using the directory) and delete the junction point from explorer. The folder will have a little arrow on it similar to a shortcut link. Test it out ahead of time with some test folders. If the folders have spaces in them, be sure to put the entire path in double quotes.
 

Denamian

Night Janitor
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As far as I remember, the Blizzard launcher lets you decide where games are installed in the options.