Buying tips

[DrewEugene17]

Hi, I'm new here.

I need for academic purpose a very light and all-around ultrabook.

Now the "dilemma". I was offered from a near shop a Surface Pro 4 (new) i5 4gb 128GB with a keyboard and office365 (4years) all included for a special price of 1000 euros.

Online I read that a very large amount of people suggest the version with 8gb of ram and 256gb of HD. With the student promotion this model have a price of 1567 euros on the official online microsoftstore (if I include the keyboard and office.

The extra HD is not so important for me, I have many external 2 TB HD and usb key. Mainly the files that I need are documents. Film, and other similar things stay in my external drives.
So is about 600 euros for only 4GB of ram.

What you suggest? The 567 euros difference is remarkable for me. Is so much important the differences?

I use my personal notebook (hp touchsmart 2 i3 and 4gb) for web surfing, office, latex, R and SPSS statistical analysis and a very little lightroom postproduction of photos.

For the battery life how is it? Fo example, without wifi, for "onenote only use" can I cover 4h in the morning and 2h in the afternoon?

Sorry for the bad english, I wrote this in a sort of "urgency mode", the special offer will expire in two days and online I read people with opposite suggestion: a basic m3 and instead other people saying that 8gb is the minimum...

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[leeshor]

If the place selling that SP4 is a reliable vendor I would jump all over that deal. The i5 4/128 would walk all over that HP and I feel you could easily get that battery life you're looking for.

 

[hughlle]

The general user has no need for 8gb of ram. Ubless your academic work uses graphics or CAD software etc, then 8gb is just money wasted imo.

 

[DrewEugene17]

If the place selling that SP4 is a reliable vendor I would jump all over that deal. The i5 4/128 would walk all over that HP and I feel you could easily get that battery life you're looking for.

The place selling the SP4 is a shop from a chain of stores of my country. Is a time limited offer for students and for who have the store's card. I have check the keyboard, it's the new model. There is anythings I can control? Like a serial number for check if the promo is on a "bad series" or something similar?

The general user has no need for 8gb of ram. Ubless your academic work uses graphics or CAD software etc, then 8gb is just money wasted imo.

The only "strange" software are SPSS and R for statistical purpose (research in biology) and some little postproduction with Lightroom.
With my old notebook I once used other software from the Adobe creative suite, but without any problem, maybe I'm used with a certain slowness...

Ah, I need to use qGIS too (for map and geographical editing), but also this software run on mine old laptop...

 

[jnjroach]

The place selling the SP4 is a shop from a chain of stores of my country. Is a time limited offer for students and for who have the store's card. I have check the keyboard, it's the new model. There is anythings I can control? Like a serial number for check if the promo is on a "bad series" or something similar?



The only "strange" software are SPSS and R for statistical purpose (research in biology) and some little postproduction with Lightroom.
With my old notebook I once used other software from the Adobe creative suite, but without any problem, maybe I'm used with a certain slowness...

Ah, I need to use qGIS too (for map and geographical editing), but also this software run on mine old laptop...

Are you running the R queries locally or remotely? If locally, I would spring for 8GB RAM as Statistical Analysis as well as GIS can consume quite a bit of resources.

 

[DrewEugene17]

Are you running the R queries locally or remotely? If locally, I would spring for 8GB RAM as Statistical Analysis as well as GIS can consume quite a bit of resources.

For 70% of the cases: locally. In general with my notebook all is working, slow (maybe) but at the end of the day it gets the job done. For GIS is the same. The PC at the university can done the same work very quickly, for both R and GIS.

Onestly I never used another notebook, so I haven't much to compare...

The only real slow point is with lightroom (I've used this with my desktop at home), when I import the photo the are all blurry, and everytime I switch from 100% zoom to "fit-to-screen" I need to wait 15 (or more) sec. to let the software loads and show the image without the blurry effect.

Tomorrow I'm going to the store to see if there are any similar promo for the 8GB model