Thanks everybody for thoughts and comments.  Have gone for the HP as recommended by Dario from Amazon.com.  Still undecided about a 450(ish) GB  SSD upgrade but at less than 5000 THB why not?  SSD prices have dropped dramatically and I get the point about solid state memory.

 

Thanks again for your interest.

40 minutes ago, notrub said:

Thanks everybody for thoughts and comments.  Have gone for the HP as recommended by Dario from Amazon.com.  Still undecided about a 450(ish) GB  SSD upgrade but at less than 5000 THB why not?  SSD prices have dropped dramatically and I get the point about solid state memory.

 

Thanks again for your interest.

It's simple: If you can spare that 5,000B then get that SSD. You will like it. If you don't have the money then better never try another notebook with SSD, otherwise you might get frustrated with your new notebook.

 

I think it makes sense to think about the size of the SSD. I don't have the actual numbers but I guess now a 500GB SSD cost what a 250 used to cost a year ago. So if you need i.e. "only" 200GB for the next year then maybe you shouldn't buy anything bigger. Because in a year you can probably buy double the size for a lot less and it's very easy to change "disks".

I put a 60GB SSD in my old notebook a few years ago and it works with Windows 10 and basic staff. I save some things on One Drive in the cloud. I think you get 1TB cloud space if you buy Office officially. That may be something to consider.

 

Also looking:

 

https://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/1072011-notebook-computer-8gb-ram-240-ssd-for-less-than-20000-thb-where-brand/

 

On 5/4/2018 at 12:25 PM, Dario said:

Two months ago I also had to choose a new laptop. I didn't want to invest 35'000 Baht for an "underspecced" MacBook and I couldn't find anything in Thailand which would please me. I wanted at least 12 MB RAM and and an i7 7500 processor. I found what I wanted on Amazon, an HP brand new 2018 model 15.6". Cost me around 23'000 Baht, including 3 day shipping and 7% VAT. Great machine, good looking in silver, too.  I have replaced the 1TB HD with a 512GB SSD. Blazing fast now.

And what is the model number?

On 5/4/2018 at 8:36 PM, OneMoreFarang said:

Do you know what SSDs cost these days? Maybe 5,000B for 500GB. And if you are on a budget just buy the cheapest SSD, it's still faster than any HDD. And like I mentioned earlier they make a night and day difference.

Today I just installed the Windows 1803 update on a brand new Lenovo with 1TB HDD. It took over 3 hours - on a brand new notebook! On my 10 year old Lenovo ThinkPad X61s with SSD it took not even half that time. You can have the fastest CPU, lots or RAM and whatever. You will never make up the difference to any SSD in performance. And if you every used a PC with SSD you won't want to go back to any PC with HDD.

There are very few exceptions why people might chose a HDD.