Laptop for PHP Development

I need to replace my current laptop, an Asus K43U.

Because I’m on a budget, if I mostly use it for PHP coding (SublimeText with Laravel with MySQL and PostgreSQL using WAMP server & a little Photoshop CS3), is the type of processor really important? Do I have to use an Intel instead of AMD? And if I have to use Intel, is i3 processor enough at least for 4 years of using?

Thank you in advance.

Why do you need to replace your current laptop?

I assume your operating system is Windows.

Try downloading and running Linux from a thumb drive and you may be pleasantly surprised :slight_smile:

It’s 5 years old and the keyboard and screen needs to be replace. No I’m not using Windows, I’m using Linux Mint.

I assumed Windows because of PhotoShop. I need to do some investigating because I like PhotoShop.

This thread may me useful:

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If you only use it in your home or office, have you considered hooking it up to an external monitor, mouse and keyboard?

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No, I also make a presentation for my clients with it.

personally would go for an i5 over the i3. The cost will be pretty negligible. I bought an acer i5 6gb of ram for just under £400 a couple of years ago. I asked an advisor in PCworld and they said ‘all i5’s are quad core’. Looked it up myself and he was talking rubbish, only the desktop cpu’s are quad core the mobiles are hyperthreading dual cores. But they are still pretty fast.

I might be wrong but coding wise you don’t need much power. Processor comes into play when you start using things like animation programs and photoshop etc. I have an i3 for work which is about 5 years old and its fine with adobe cs5.5 suite, just had to add more ram so i think i now have 6gb. I could happily code websites on a pentium 3 with 512mb running XP if i needed to.

When i did some 3d animation using blender it would run the cpu at 100% for hours on end but there was always enough ram (8gb on my desktop).

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These days you could find i7 laptop around $600

That’s a great laptop all around. Still, if you have i3 then I’d stick w/ it but $600 isn’t so bad of a investment.

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My 2-year old Lenovo Yoga is perfectly capable of doing what you want with an i5, 8Gb of RAM, and 1Tb of storage (the latter two were an upgrade from original spec). Whilst the Yoga isn’t a budget option, the basic spec of i5 & the RAM should be possible to achieve on a budget with other makes/models. The storage, really depends on how much you want to store locally.

As for what it can do, well mine has CS5 Master Collection on it, an Ubuntu server running inside Hyper-V, I just updated it to Win10, most modern browsers, and all sorts of other utilities.

So for me, if you can run to a current version i5 based device, with the RAM, I’d think you were good to go for a long time.

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