MagiStream

My laptop is old and dying, so I'm going to get a new one soon. I was wondering what kind of laptop is best for gold mining. I would prefer it not to be a Mac (just personal preference), and I don't have the knowledge or skill to build my own. I also can't afford a desktop, so that's out of the question. What kinds of laptops do you guys use? Which is the best for gold mining?

May I ask what your budget is? A decent laptop can run almost as much as a basic desktop. I had my desktop custom built for me for $500 back in 2010, though I've upgraded parts of it several times since then. In comparison, my Dell laptop I bought for college in 2012 was $300 and worked great for about 3 years before it started having problems (way slower speed, battery only lasting 1 hour, etc.).

Problems aside, if you really want a laptop over a desktop, I do recommend Dell. Avoid Acer. I had both an Acer laptop and a desktop years back and both had the same problem of shutting off randomly every time the hard-drive got a bit warm.

Lenovo is also a good brand of laptop. I love mine, had one for almost 10 years before it stopped doing what I wanted it to do, and it could mine, I just didn't b/c my desktop was faster, and I could mine more. That said, you're going to want a laptop with a fast processor, and a lot of memory. Just asked my husband, who is a computer guy. He says you'd want an i7 processor, either quad or 6 core, and at least 32gb of RAM, and that's to get close to my mining machine, which is my desktop. You'd also want a solid state hard drive (ssd), instead of a spin drive. RAM and ssd's are typically easy to add to a laptop nowadays, it's the processor that'll get you. You won't be able to get it cheaply either. He quotes at least $1000-$1500.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys! My budget is anything under $2000. I didn't realize you can buy a desktop for that, but I still think I should have a laptop instead because I use it at work sometimes.

A bit late but I've had a great experience with my surface pro. The surface book 2 has pretty high reviews too and is more of a standard laptop.