I bought my last one about two years ago - Samsung i5, 4Gb RAM and 500 Gb Hard Drive and cost in the mid to high 20,000 Baht range. I did research after discussing with my brother, who was the nearest to an expert I had at the time. I have barely looked at any laptops in the past couple of years.

My wife has finally decided to replace her antique desktop of 7 years plus with a laptop. I've done the rounds of the shops and tried Google but it seems that most of them are still using the same specs but much cheaper. I couldn't see anything with more up to date specs, which I'm really surprised about. When I bought mine the general range was i3, i5 and i7. I always thought that specs moved on more quickly than it appears or is there something different about intel's business and marketing?

I guess most of the efforts has been done on the tablet and ultrabook side.

I hope the screen resolution will come better on the future laptops. Currently most of the laptops have pretty poor resolution.

When buying a new laptop, get it with SSD. The speed difference is huge compared to the HDD's.

To the OP; you're spot on. Your 20 k samsung is now available for.15k THB. We've seen lots of new processors for phones and tablets last year. As well as some nice new GPU's emerged. There is quite a bit of re-branding going on, focused on power consumption.

Actually the chip architecture of the i5 and i7 for example has come a long way in 2 years, performance of current generation i5 and i7 quad cores and power management / Thermals is way better than the 2 year old version..

Just be wary of which version of i5/7 you are buying.

The wiki for Intel (processor maker) tracks the 'evolution' of processors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock .

Basically, the next big thing (Haswell, superseding ivy bridge) won't be out until June.

No doubt the rate of improvement in spec.s is tied up with commercial arrangements between, say, Microsoft, Intel, and computer manufacturers.

With MS releasing w'doze 8, there were some pretty good deals going ( a few months ago) on high-end comps unable to do the 8/touch-screen thing.

RAM getting more affordable - a couple of months ago, 4Gb ddr3 could be had for 600B in Penang IT shops.

Anyway, if money is burning a hole in your pocket, get a machine with an i7 quadcore and 4+Gb RAM.

As oilinki suggests above, SSD will practically run twice as fast as standard HD. If the comp you want doesn't come with ssd, can add to the system later... AA

On the surface I would agree, but if you look at the 3rd generation i3, i5 and i7 processors currently available, compared to the first generation ones on offer 2 or 3 years ago there is a big difference and similarly the graphics chips have improved. performance boost, and in addition items such as USB3 and HDMI are more common as are larger hard drives . However most of us do not need the extra performance these features offer and so are better off lookng at discounted older models

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SSD will practically run twice as fast as standard HD. If the comp you want doesn't come with ssd, can add to the system later... AA

Only disk activity is faster, e.g. starting up, shutting down and loading programs. Once everything is in memory there's very little difference, just the occasional faster disk reads and writes.

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SSD will practically run twice as fast as standard HD. If the comp you want doesn't come with ssd, can add to the system later... AA

Only disk activity is faster, e.g. starting up, shutting down and loading programs. Once everything is in memory there's very little difference, just the occasional faster disk reads and writes.

I guess this depends how we work. I bought a new laptop, ThinkPad EDGE with i5 processor and enough memory to go with (never, ever buy one, it's not the ThinkPad quality!). The hinges got broken and I tried to get it fixed with warranty. Meanwhile I took my old laptop, old ThinkPad X61s and put an SSD inside. The speed difference with about everything was huge.

Now I'm using the old X61s as I don't really need the new laptop (would cost me quite a lot to fix as well, so it can be an server instead).

The SSD speed difference, at least on my case, is starting up the programs, loading data to those. Writing data when I import new images to the computer.. the speed difference is huge.

For normal browsing, cache and website indexing is faster. This laptop is working as an server for some applications.

Not to mention that it took just couple minutes to install kubuntu to the computer instead of normal 10-15 minutes

I would never wish to go back to old HDD. For me the benefit of SSD is equal to have enough memory, so that the laptop does not need to use swap.

Only disk activity is faster, e.g. starting up, shutting down and loading programs. Once everything is in memory there's very little difference, just the occasional faster disk reads and writes.

Not many applications today load completely into memory. SSD is the single biggest performance upgrade you can make to any machine.

Yes, most of the changes in recent years have been internal. I bought a new laptop last year, had to learn about the new multi-core CPUs mentioned above. You probably won't be able to salvage your old DRAM as it is now DDR3 as opposed to DDR2. Do make sure the new machine has at least one USB3 port.

My own opinion, for my own case, is that SSD is too expensive for it's size at this point, but when situations change they do so rapidly. Eg, in 2006 I bought a 1Gb pendrive for the bargain price of US$40. 2 years later it would have been a fair question to ask "is it made of gold?"