Jtrizzy

you seem like the monorail guy from the simpsons. Certs are useless. Get the job first then get the employer to pay for the certs they need. I find many employers looking for entry level 1 staff are looking for customer service/retail experience, not qualifications. I got my foot in the door by working as a security guard/door man to a commercial property. I have no certs, only an unrelated science degree.

The thing about exams and certs is that, well, what they really teach you is how to answer those exams: there are a whole fuckton of people around with a bag full of certificates, but when they come across a problem they didn't specifically learn about, they'll have trouble applying their knowledge. I've met a lot of such people myself.
 
Me, I probably wouldn't pass any exam right-off-the-bat, but I've definitely learned ways of using some creativity and intuition in order to fix stuff or improve things. Never gotten any official education in IT, but I am always experimenting with stuff at home, like e.g. I just threw myself up a HA Kubernetes-cluster with a distributed filesystem on a separate backhaul from my regular LAN at home, spread over the two buildings -- a great learning experience and some great new skills in my pocket. Not to mention it was fun, as well!

I am an IT manager, and I have only 1 cert, the most basic of basic A+. Experience outweighs any certs IMHO, and I have 20 years of it. I guess every company is different and some require certs and some don't. Are they necessary? No, are they great sure, do they build knowledge? sure, but breaking shit and fixing it yourself, creating a lab at home is the best way to learn and be creative. I am not a book person, and never did great on tests. I do have a computer science degree, but I can pretty much wipe my ass with it because its useless. I learned the most when someone gave me a used server (windows server 2000). I setup a lab at home, and went to town creating my own environment. With all the youtube training these days, you can learn to build and troubleshoot a server environment rather easily. Learning virtualization, AWS, Microsoft Azure & 365 is what will rocket you to the top. That is the way of the future when it comes to medium business and enterprise.

I am an IT manager, and I have only 1 cert, the most basic of basic A+. Experience outweighs any certs IMHO, and I have 20 years of it. I guess every company is different and some require certs and some don't. Are they necessary? No, are they great sure, do they build knowledge? sure, but breaking shit and fixing it yourself, creating a lab at home is the best way to learn and be creative. I am not a book person, and never did great on tests. I do have a computer science degree, but I can pretty much wipe my ass with it because its useless. I learned the most when someone gave me a used server (windows server 2000). I setup a lab at home, and went to town creating my own environment. With all the youtube training these days, you can learn to build and troubleshoot a server environment rather easily. Learning virtualization, AWS, Microsoft Azure & 365 is what will rocket you to the top. That is the way of the future when it comes to medium business and enterprise.

There are a lot of pros out there without those certs as well.

If anything, it would motivate future IT-pros not to bother with those shit, useless exams. I mean, these guys already have successful careers, they'd just be wasting time and effort on exams where they could instead spend that time far more productively!

wdym? if you have 7nm, then you use less power in the first place, so you get less heat. thats the whole point of shrinking the node... less power required to reach higher speeds. if you have less power, you get less heat. 

Can you tell us what games you want to play, the choice of the right graphics card is really important. Have you considered other brands of laptops as well. Macbooks are notoriously overpriced and somewhat unreliable when travelling. I had several in the office years ago because they were on sale at the time, 1 still lives the other 3 broke on daily commutes from moisture in the air and one even lost some screws in the bottom for some reason.

Obviously a typo, Superbrain.
 
And MacBooks are overpriced Junk. Designed to fail.

HP usually has a decent amount of bloatware so will prob do a fresh install of win10

So I bit the bullet and bought a Aorus 15g from newegg, I7 8 core 10875h, RTX 2070 super max Q, 16gb (8x2) 3200 RAM and 512GB, NVME SSD (added an extra 1TB samsung EVO NVME).. However, it came with a stuck pixel right out of the box so that immediately went back to newegg for RMA and got my refund from newegg (I love newegg). Everyone was sold out of this laptop during this covid time so I hopped onto amazon and ordered one. It took two friggin weeks to finally show up, but man oh man am I in love with this laptop. This keyboard is a dream, full mechanical very clicky, nice feed back, probably one of the best keyboards I have ever used for a laptop (if you like mechanical). I have never owned a gaming laptop before always built my own gaming rigs but since I had no more room for a gaming rig I decided to switch to a gaming laptop. This thing runs everything on high that I can throw at it including all my VR games with the rift s. The 244hz screen is absolutely breath taking, such crisp images. Did a little modest over clocking to the 2070 super, 85 on the core and 500 on the ram. Getting really nice frames with COD with Ray tracing on and everything maxed out, avg around 103 FPS, maxing our at 140 FPS.. If anyone is looking for a gaming laptop I highly recommend this thing, it is completely bad ass, well done Aorus.