I do not like to travel, but my job requires me to travel too much, I only have desktops and an old laptop, the laptop is now just a piece of crap that has just 2GB ram and win7 32bit. I am planning to buy a new laptop to continue my work all over the world, but I am not too good in choosing laptops (that’s why I choosed the crap in 2016).
The following would be my work, I need a laptop according to it:-
MS Office
Blender (Low poly work, but still can freeze up if I get less than 12GB ram)
Video Editing (2k and 4k)
S**t (You are enough smart to understand, if you have ever worked with a boring boss) office files discussion with my boss.
Playing some games (like fortnite on medium) while office meetings. (With camera and audio turned off, plus volume to 0% when the boss talks about s**ts of important works and annoying types of hardworking workers)
I would recommend purchasing only what you can fully pay off right now. Don’t take out a loan, since you will soon be unemployed for playing Fortnite at work, and won’t have income to pay it off.
That aside, what is your plan for storage? Keep all video files on the internal hard drive, or keep them on an external drive or NAS or cloud or something else? Also, do you intend to use proxy workflow or edit on the originals? That makes a big difference in CPU requirements. Lastly, do you require high-quality hardware acceleration for exporting, or are you happy with CPU-only exporting?
I totally sympathize that not every job is tons of fun all the time. However, I found an opportunity at my current job where training videos could answer a lot of repetitive questions people asked of the support team. So I got to use Shotcut to make training videos. The job instantly became more fun. You might find such an opportunity, too.
I run a side business to backup my work, I know all secrets about my boss as we studied in the same school, his wife lived in my neighborhood, I know every secret about him, I could get my job again if I tell about his school life to his wife. Lots of secrets are there about him🙄.
Including who was his first girlfriend, I hope his wife is enough kind to leave him.
That’s a fascinating work dynamic you’ve got there.
Back to the issue of the laptop…
In terms of raw gigahertz produced by four to eight cores, there hasn’t been a huge advancement in laptops since 2016. Do you have the option of upgrading the RAM to 16 GB, then install Linux? That would be the fast and cheap method to get you on a 64-bit OS. LibreOffice can substitute for most MS Office functions, unless PowerPoint presentations are going to be a major part of your job.
Shotcut tends to heavily utilize 4-12 cores and doesn’t usually scale far beyond that. I’d hate to see you spend $4,000 for a high-end laptop with 24 cores, only to be disappointed that it barely performed faster than your 2016 laptop. Likewise, most games don’t scale to 24 cores either. DaVinci Resolve will shift most load onto GPU, not CPU. Granted, if you do software encoding, those extra cores are helpful, but that’s a lot of money to shave off a few minutes of export time. Your call, though.
EDIT: I meant dual-boot Linux so you could keep the Windows gaming side. Or, if you’ve saved enough money by not buying new hardware, just buy Windows 10 to put on it and be done.
I have around 3.2 grands, thought it might be something around a good laptop, And if more cores are there than it might help to render fast in blender, 4000$ would be perfect for a new laptop (High-end) , talking about linux, the laptop doesn’t support 64bit. 800$ would be saved in 15-30 days from the side business. I think I should invest more of my money for my marriage rather than buying new pieces of hardware, what’s your thought?
What processor is in the laptop? I find it exceptionally hard to believe that a processor manufactured in 2016 does not support 64-bit. x64 has been standard spec since before 2010.
Regarding Blender… how fast do you reeeeally need an export to be? Like, are you making major income from doing commercial Blender work, and you have very impatient clients you need to appease while traveling? If that’s the case, then spending $3,000 on a laptop could be a sensible business expense (because this assumes your desktop can’t be used for rendering). But if your usage is more hobbyist level, it’s tougher to justify the expense. If you do buy a new laptop, just verify whether Blender is trying to render with GPU or CPU, and get a laptop that specializes appropriately. I think the GPU-vs-CPU ratio might vary with the rendering engine you use (Cycles vs Eevee for instance), but I’ve spent virtually no time studying them to know the details.
Marriage makes for an interesting twist. One possible view is to buy the most expensive thing you can find right now, because you may not have money or a happy wife if you try to buy it later. However, I would argue this is short-sighted. Computers get “old” within three months, and chasing the latest specs is futile. Getting a faster computer usually just means the idle CPU time goes from 92% to 94%, which is meaningless. Unless your business requires that faster speed (and generates appropriate revenue to pay for it), it doesn’t make sense in my mind to upgrade if the current hardware will do the job good enough. Unless, of course, you’re an avid hobbyist who simply enjoys such things and has the disposable income to pay for it.
Also, I can say that one of the best things my wife and I did for our marriage was to intentionally keep the wedding small and simple so that we could completely pay it off immediately with cash. The ceremony was not worthy of Pinterest, but we entered marriage with zero wedding debt. I cannot overemphasize how much stress a marriage can suffer due to financial strain. The more you can eliminate financial strain, the happier and more successful you will be.
Only you can know how that translates to your specific circumstances. Good luck, my man.
This laptop was manufactured in the year when win7 was released, I bought it in 2016, I was not a super technical guy at that time. I think a Mac would be better than spending a lot on windows. If you don’t know, an average Indian family minimum to minimum spends 20,000-35,000$ in a marriage, the last marriage I remember was of my cousin, his family spent a total of 150,000$ in the marriage, and my family gave some 13,000$ for the marriage, our whole family is very friendly. I already have budget of 250,000$, which I have not saved yet, almost just 10Grands is available in my savings account. My marriage is decided at my age of 29, which is 2025. According to my job it’s the half of my earning of five years. Hope that I could collect that much. My financial state is very nice, I am one of the richest in my city right now. I am also not good in cameras, that’s why I use a old Sony W-something, Oh! I need to buy a nice camera for her now, huh!.
