Tech Wedding Woes - Budgeting for a teaching laptop and entry gaming desktop

NegativeEnergy · October 10, 2019

Hello! New to the forum and thought this would be the best place to ask. My fiance and I are tying the knot in less than a month. She's been wanting to jump into computer gaming (without any previous gaming experience) however she also needs a new daily driver laptop for teaching since her ye' old thinkbook is quite literally spazzing out . After the last video from Linus, it pretty much has shown me that while gaming laptops are super cool, most of the time they are not practical when you can build two different systems for around the same cost. So here are the requirements:

Laptop:

Really this thing isn't going to be doing anything powerful for it's life. It's going to be running an office suite (Microsoft office only... it was non negotiable) along with some smart board programs and web surfing. I also see her using it for some media consumption. I'd summarize that the requirements are as such:

Thin and light - Will be carrying it daily to school and back
long battery life - last a long time doing productivity tasks (office and web browsing)
decent keyboard (she's moving from a thinkbook after all)
decent build quality (not something to crack in half in her teacher bag
Windows 10

Desktop:

Entry level gaming, something that will be good for starting off in stardew valley and moving on from there. We already have a monitor for her as well as a keyboard and mouse, though we may upgrade those in the future :

1080p 60FPS, single monitor gaming
web browsing
smaller system - I'm thinking microATX
SSD boot drive/storage drive - (One of those 1tb SSDs actually look pretty nice right now...)
Windows 10

Unfortunately I don't have many titles in mind other that start dew valley and life is strange etc as she has no point of reference for games other than the SIMs, so I wanted to start her off slow. Budget wise I would like to keep around capped at $1000 USD as we have wedding costs to cover and need to re-cover. Looking for some ideas as I haven't spec'd out a system in quite a while, I'm still rocking my Haswell I7 and GTX 970 so I'm a bit out of the current.