As topic says. You guys talk/argue about these things all the time, so I thought I'd leave it to you. Needs to be able to run old games (Empires, Civ 4, Fallout 3, etc) flawlessly, but not necessarily with great graphics (I often play at 1280x720 res). So CPU matters more than GPU for the most part. I want a lot of c drive storage, but I don't need a ssd. I also don't want it to break, Willing to drop up to $800 on it, but I'd prefer to spend less. I'd also prefer windows 7 to 10, and no windows 8. Suggestions?
I'm a pretty big fan of what I got, but it might not be for you considering you want flawless gameplay on these games. It handles like 90% of them well on super low settings, but it's unsupported sometimes which causes all kinds of funky errors. Newer models have better igpus though, other models might have a gpu too. My main point about that is that it might be worth looking into finding some older laptop model that's pretty solid and just needs a new harddrive or more ram something. Be prepared to open it up though, I know mine needed new thermal paste so I assume other older models might need something like that too. I did hear decent things about lenovo's Y series, which basically crams decent specs into a not very good package(things like touch pad can suck or monitor doesn't look the best). My brother has had one for a while though, it's held up well through the years at least. That monitor though... colors were just so washed out. Oh wait, new models are like 1000$, this reminds me that if you did want new waiting for black friday or whatever might not be a bad idea, otherwise buying something used and proven to work decent seems to the only way.
I could play these games at acceptable level on my 6 year old laptop and that was worth like 600-700 dollar equivalent. 6 years ago. Not quite sure what are you saying about windows, OS is not really a function of hardware. Also with windows dont use C:/ for anything not terribly necessary, partition it and use D:/ instead.
Win 7 has been phased out of use for oems as far as I know, so you can't get a laptop with it. It's an important point because some people, like dragown, don't like win 8 for whatever reason. That said, it isn't hard to wipe and reinstall an os, or if you are fine with win 10 to just upgrade. There isn't anything preventing you from upgrading to win 10 from win 8 if that is what the laptop comes with.
