Programming laptop under £500

[Mr Robot]

So my friend is a computing student and needs help choosing a new laptop for school he will be running around 3 to 4 virtual machines and doing some software development i was thinking of the Lenovo Ideapad 300 but what do you think?

[Guest]

Running 3-4 VM's from a laptop like that? No experiance with VM's, but I doubt that...

[Emmien]

Do you know (Or does he know) what you are talking about?

 

 

I doubt these virtual machines will be run simultaneously and 24/7, as I can't think of any reason you would want to do this on your everyday (By everyday, I mean the one you use for general stuff) laptop. 

 

It doesn't take much to write code, but obviously it depends what it is. Most likely it won't require much.

 

What are these virtual machines?

Are they just for testing?

[Samsterstorm]

7 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

So my friend is a computing student and needs help choosing a new laptop for school he will be running around 3 to 4 virtual machines and doing some software development i was thinking of the Lenovo Ideapad 300 but what do you think?

VM's are very RAM intensive among a lot of other things........ anything at £500 would not cut it running more than one! U are gunna need some serious horsepower, high level i7 at least and Minimum 16GB of ram! Coding on its own can be done easily on any cheap bargin ass laptop, a nice i3 would be fine for just coding! 

[Emmien]

1 minute ago, Dutch-stoner said:

Running 3-4 VM's from a laptop like that? No experiance with VM's, but I doubt that...

Entirely possible, if they are lightweight. I doubt they will be ran (Is it run or ran) all the time as servers though.

[Mr Robot]

@Samsterstorm i know i have a macbook pro that i put 16gb ram in and it uses quite alot and what about something from pc specialist 

[ARikozuM]

7 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

So my friend is a computing student and needs help choosing a new laptop for school he will be running around 3 to 4 virtual machines and doing some software development i was thinking of the Lenovo Ideapad 300 but what do you think?

Just make a Mini ITX build. You're going to get much better performance with it as opposed to a laptop.

[Samsterstorm]

1 minute ago, Mr Robot said:

@Samsterstorm what about something from pc specialist

I have had a few laptops from them and I have had a lot of issues! So doe others I know that have owned them, I would not recommend them at all from my experiance! 

[Mr Robot]

ok thanks for the warning @Samsterstorm

[Samsterstorm]

Just now, Mr Robot said:

ok thanks for the warning @Samsterstorm

No problem mate

 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Emmien said:

I doubt they will be ran (Is it run or ran) all the time as servers though.

This would mean he would run just a VM, not worth mentioning 3-4. 1 at a time, with 4 different VM's isn't that interesting. Then it would be just "a" VM. According to this logic, mr robot thinks this laptop will run 3-4 VM's at the same time.

[Emmien]

1 minute ago, Dutch-stoner said:

This would mean he would run just a VM, not worth mentioning 3-4. 1 at a time, with 4 different VM's isn't that interesting. Then it would be just "a" VM. According to this logic, mr robot thinks this laptop will run 3-4 VM's at the same time.

The OP's friend probably didn't explain it properly.

 

I don't see a reason they would want to do such a thing. A laptop, running on battery, being used for word processing and internet browsing, and constantly in and out of internet connectivity would not make a good server.

 

For the price of a laptop that could run 4 average OSes and run programs in Windows, you could build a desktop PC capable of doing this OK and buy an OK laptop.