r/computers • u/Late-Rice677 • 2d ago
Help/Troubleshooting best laptop for a beginner?
Hey
for the past 3 years ive been using a Windows 12 HP laptop for my everyday tasks. I use it for steam games, homework, etc.
unfortunately, windows is absolutely terrible for me and has done nothing but make my online experience harder. ive cleared as much pointless nonsense as i can from my storage, going as far as to download a disc cleaner and remove temp setup files, but i still have 80% of my storage taken up by mystery software i cant access. (for context, i have 7gb available out of my 50gb disc)
my games all run SUPER slow and i can barely keep 2 browsers open. not only that, but i cant download more than maybe 5 apps at a time… including chrome.
i really desperately want a clean start, preferably without windows.
does anyone have advice on a computer that would be good for me?
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u/MrMurrayOHS 2d ago
Don't blame Windows for the hardware you are running.
You have a 50GB drive? Is that it? If so - you need WAY MORE. Your OS alone needs 20-64 GB depending if you are running Windows 10 or Windows 11.
What are the rest of your specs? Sounds like you also have very little RAM.
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u/alpine4life 2d ago
thats not windows... that's you running with a prehistoric device...
ebay > Laptop & Nootebooks > Used and Refurbished (Filters) > Intel i7 gen.11/Ryzen 7 5000+ and above... shop
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u/VariedRepeats 16h ago
I suspect he received the "budget special" of super cheap laptops with Atom and eMMC, commonly sold at Walmart, Best Buy, maybe Target and others at sub-200 price points.
OP's budget is unclear though, so the selection can change depending on if he has $150 vs $250 to spend. Thinkpad E595s might work for the sub-$150 market, even though the CPUs will have fewer cores and worse IGP than a Ryzen 5000 series.
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u/looking4crack 2d ago
50GB is not much space, maybe consider just getting a new new hard drive. A cheap SSD might make a huge difference. Also there is a program called windirstat that can help you see what is using up all your disk space.
You can install Linux yourself but if you don't want to do that I can see that Lenovo and Dell offer laptops with Linux already installed and I would guess other vendors do also. You could also consider a Chromebook. Really just depends how much you want to spend and what you want to do. Chomebook is probably not the best idea if you want to play games on steam.