I'm starting to shop for a new laptop for the wife's xmas present this year.
I'm sure I'll get more opinions than I can handle.
1) When to start looking?

My parameters:
15~17"
NEW - not refurbished
500GB~1TB HD
>4GB ram
NO CHROMEBOOKS!
3...2...1... GO

My philosophy on computers is they are like cell phones. Replace them every 2-4 years. You can get what you want for as low as $350 now a days. Should be some good BF deals online. (F*** going to stores on BF)

BF seems logical.
$350 also falls right in line.

I was looking at the Surface Laptop 2 for my mom. It’s really nice. Might be a little smaller than you’re looking for, though.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surfa ... verviewtab


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I've had great luck with New Egg. I picked up an Asus with SSD drive for a great deal. No need to spend over $400 unless you need a giant screen and a lit up keyboard. Black Friday is coming and there will be tons of deals.

When I bought my last Laptop I went to the Microsoft Store and bought one of their Dell's that had no bloatware installed. Just a Windows 10 Home edition OS.
Inspiron 7559
Core i7 with NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX

2.6 ghz with 8 gig SSD
8 gig Ram
1 TB HD

Paid right about $700 for it.

I believe the model I got was a re-dressed Alienware Laptop. Built solid, long battery life, and a FULL keyboard with numeric keypad instead of "mapped keypad" embedded in keyboard.

Has a great "radio" on board so Wifi works anywhere on my property, even inside my Travel Trailer that's parked in the back yard. (now if I only had the half dozen passwords for all the neighbors wifi's I pick up. )
Battery life is excellent with never less than 5 hours on a charge, even when using relatively heavy.

Get something with a dedicated graphics card, even if you don't game.

Being able to offload graphics onto another proc will extend the usable life of a computer... Even as the main H/W ages and becomes obsolete, the discrete graphics chip will offload a bunch of processing requirements to itself...

There are 2 schools of thought.... buy cheap and replace often, or buy expensive and replace less often.

Also, pay attention to procs, as even a single generation older processor could lose you 30% in performance...

My current i5 in my toughbook is about on par with the i7 I have in my Sony S series laptop, because the Sony's i7 is a generation older...

Best Buy is already pimping their Early Black Friday sale..

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/promo/blac ... er-deals-1

Gotta be careful... A lot of them are stripped down rigs with lesser specs...

Microsoft Surface Laptop or MacBook, can’t go wrong with either choice and they’ll easily last double the life span of a cheap Asus or something

Don't care.
This is for the wife who will only use it for family, etc. No gaming, no graphics, etc.

Something brand new like this will absolutely make her day.
8am... $199

I know you say no refurbs, but i have got some pretty nice ones via newegg. The ones i got had never been used.

I'll have a relook.
Most of the refurbs, that I've seen, were built five or seven years ago.

Watch out for the super cheap ones and I hate to say it the AMD cpu's. I have always been an AMD fan, but the last laptop (Lenovo) I bought with an AMD chip has been a dog. Family internet usage or not, it is slow and gets frustrating fast waiting for things to load, I only use the laptop for when I travel to get on the net for email and forums like here...

Plus some of the keyboards are not very solid/robust. to the point if you get typing too fast you get double strikes, and mis-strikes. As bad as my typing is, on my laptop it becomes almost unreadable due to the keyboard.

Well they have them in stock and should be on display so I can check it out first.
I've always like AMD????????