The Joy of Lighter Tech

So I am a huge proponent of gaming laptops over "engineering laptops" or "developer centric" laptops.  In my experience when a company say like Dell sells an engineering laptop to corporations (not to pick on Dell, swap out any other "enterprise" corporate brand) they are selling them an over priced dog that will tend to overheat.  I would rather have a gaming laptop any day of the week.

With that in mind for my personal laptops I've always had HP or more recently Asus gaming laptops as my dev machines.  I usually had them with at least 15'6 screens (I still do) and they tended to be bulky with short battery lives, both tradeoffs I could live with.

This last time around though I got an ASUS G15.  It isn't perfect, but I upgraded the ram to 40 gigs (8 built in, 32 added...so only the first 16 gigs is paired, kind of a bummer but I haven't noticed a big slow down.  I also added an extra 1 Terabyte mk 2 SSD.  I've been running it for a little over a year and so far so good.

One of the advantages of the G15 is that it is light.  I would have never bought the G15 for it being thin and light because that usually means gimped performance.  Not so with the G15.  But more to the point what I'm finding is that once you go thin and light it is going to be really hard to go back.  

I packed up my older Asus laptop the other day, one that I previously thought was fairly light, and it was like holding a lead brick.  That pound or two of weight (1/2 kg ish) actually makes a pretty big difference.  And although the extra battery life for me isn't critical there have been a few times where it has come in handy.

So the point of this blog post, is that if you are like how I was, where you scoff at thin and light laptops, unless you need that extra 5% of speed you are missing out.  With modern chips that tend to handle heat better, that gap in performance between a brick and a thin and light is closing too.  

Just something to ponder when you are in the market for a new box.