Budget 51-70k Need a laptop for basic usage

Chr0noN

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  • What's your Budget? Not more than 70k
  • What will be your primary usage for the notebook? Office Apps, Web Surfing, College Work
  • What size and weight considerations do you have? 12" to 14"
  • Any brand that you prefer, or any brand that you detest? No particular brand preference. Just need the after-sale service to be good.
  • Any other considerations? Need the best performance at this price and decent battery life.
I am considering the HP Pavilion Aero, which seems to fit my needs but open to suggestions.
 
That actually seems like a pretty good choice. Ryzen 5600U will give you very good performance. Graphics performance is also really good. I would say go for it.
 
HP has poor aftersales service record and also their parts/body is flimsy cheap plastic quality.
I'd say go with Lenovo/Dell, any machine with 4c/8t CPU without a dedicated GPU and 16GB of RAM would serve you well.

Since you won't be gaming an iGPU can work. I'd suggest going for Intel instead of AMD if you can go that route as AMD's iGPU reserves quite a large chunk of system RAM to serve as vRAM for iGPU. This would result in loss of usable system memory for your apps. I'm not a 100% sure how much exactly it reserves when compared to intel but it's definitely more. Not sure on if it's configurable via BIOS as well or not.
 
HP has poor aftersales service record and also their parts/body is flimsy cheap plastic quality.
I'd say go with Lenovo/Dell, any machine with 4c/8t CPU without a dedicated GPU and 16GB of RAM would serve you well.

Since you won't be gaming an iGPU can work. I'd suggest going for Intel instead of AMD if you can go that route as AMD's iGPU reserves quite a large chunk of system RAM to serve as vRAM for iGPU. This would result in loss of usable system memory for your apps. I'm not a 100% sure how much exactly it reserves when compared to intel but it's definitely more. Not sure on if it's configurable via BIOS as well or not.
Based on your suggestion, the Dell Inspiron 14 5410 seems to be perfect for my needs. However, the HP Pavilion Aero seems to be more portable because of the 13.3" screen and has a better display. Do you think the aftersales service and build quality is bad enough that it's not worth it?
 
Not at all an issue if you have 16 GB RAM in your laptop.
For me 16GB is not enough. I usually always fill it 15+GB when doing development work on my work machine. Then there's a lot of swapping.
For my personal desktop I've moved to 32GB since about 2 years now, loving the experience.

But that's not the point, the point was why waste precious system RAM if you don't game when that could be used for your running apps? For a basic desktop usage you don't need anymore than 128/256MB of reserved RAM for iGPU that's when you do 4K. For 1080p 64MB is enough. If I'm not wrong Intel reserves around 64-128MB.
 
Isn't there a BIOS setting to change the allocated vRAM for AMD?
There most likely isn't these days. However, it's only an issue if you use a lot of apps simultaneously and/or VMs. From your usecase, it seems like even if the iGPU reserves 2 GB, 14 GB will be more than enough for you.

I had a Ryzen 3500U laptop with 8 GB RAM with ~1.5 GB reserved and never had any issue in day to day usage, which involved browsing, videos, and some coding in VS code with, at times, both Django dev server and npm dev server running simultaneously. Later I upgraded this laptop to 12 GB RAM just because my wife was also using it and at times, we both left our users logged in, resulting in lots of running apps in the background. Now we both use it without any memory issues whatsoever.

Also, if you're planning to use graphics designing kind of stuff like Photoshop, Blender, etc., then those apps, while RAM hungry, will benefit more from Ryzen's powerful iGPU than from an extra gig of RAM, especially after sacrificing some performance on an i5. In day to day use, Ryzen 5 is clearly faster than i5.

One advice though, if you're going to be travelling a lot with this laptop, maybe to college and back regularly, make sure it has a good build quality. Try to find a store nearby and take a look at the actual laptop before ordering it online.
 
There most likely isn't these days. However, it's only an issue if you use a lot of apps simultaneously and/or VMs. From your usecase, it seems like even if the iGPU reserves 2 GB, 14 GB will be more than enough for you.

I had a Ryzen 3500U laptop with 8 GB RAM with ~1.5 GB reserved and never had any issue in day to day usage, which involved browsing, videos, and some coding in VS code with, at times, both Django dev server and npm dev server running simultaneously. Later I upgraded this laptop to 12 GB RAM just because my wife was also using it and at times, we both left our users logged in, resulting in lots of running apps in the background. Now we both use it without any memory issues whatsoever.

Also, if you're planning to use graphics designing kind of stuff like Photoshop, Blender, etc., then those apps, while RAM hungry, will benefit more from Ryzen's powerful iGPU than from an extra gig of RAM, especially after sacrificing some performance on an i5. In day to day use, Ryzen 5 is clearly faster than i5.

One advice though, if you're going to be travelling a lot with this laptop, maybe to college and back regularly, make sure it has a good build quality. Try to find a store nearby and take a look at the actual laptop before ordering it online.
Dell Inspiron 5415 seems to be the one then. For the same budget, it has a better processor and build quality. Thank you @gourav and @enthusiast29 for helping me come to a conclusion.
 
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