could someone please explain a gaming laptop to me?

[olesia84]

i am in the process of starting up a new business and equipping it with technology, i have already sorted out the practical furnishings of the office and it is now the technology that remains to be done, i have obviously left the hardest bit til last. great approach.
now i have been told that i should opt for gaming laptops for the staff instead of regular laptops btu i dont know why, this website ive found here gives the smallest summary of a gaming laptop and makes it sound like a fancy nintendo ds... and from what i can see from that site and from a little general shopping around they look exactly like laptops but maybe with fun coloured buttons etc, they look like kids laptops!
so could someone please explain what exactly these gaming laptops do and why they would be useful to a business in place of ordinary laptops? i dont mind spending more money on equipment if it is the right equipment but i just want to make sure it is the right equipment... thanks for any help

[Drumm]

Who recommended "Gaming Laptops" for your staff? A Gaming Laptop is a Laptop with powerful processors and other features making them better than normal laptops for gaming (Which isn't the best experience ever anyway) For most companies, normal laptops are more than fine for general Word Processing and Web Browsing, which is the most common use of Work Laptops.

What would these Laptops be used for?

[olesia84]

Who recommended "Gaming Laptops" for your staff? A Gaming Laptop is a Laptop with powerful processors and other features making them better than normal laptops for gaming (Which isn't the best experience ever anyway) For most companies, normal laptops are more than fine for general Word Processing and Web Browsing, which is the most common use of Work Laptops.

What would these Laptops be used for?

we run a number of websites which is why i thought they might be good for graphics etc... but do you think that would be a little excessive? i have to say i was baffled as i dont see what these 'enhanced' laptops bring to the office, thats why i thought i was maybe missing something and wanted a clearer picture of the modifications...

[latch]

A normal user doesn't need a powerhouse computer(several core processor, excessive ram>4gigs, Solid state drives, a name brand gpu like nvidea or ati) all you will be paying for is to give your employees more power to goof off. The minimums you need are 160gig hard drive and 2 gigs of ram- don't buy any thing less than that and avoid the budget cpu lines such as celeron and the laptops will still be useful for several years.

[Drumm]

Web design isn't as Graphics Orientated as you may think, depending on the way you develop your websites. Also, you would need too consider whether they need to develop from home.

If you're doing a lot of image manipulation and possibly even work with flash, perhaps a 3GB of RAM and 2.2GHz Dual Core? Somebody, such as Latch or BigSharn would need to confirm this as I've always used something of this calliber which has always produced decent effects for me.

[bigsharn]

If the entire firm are doing graphic design I'd be more inclined to look into getting your employees desktops rather than laptops. In complete honesty you'll never need more than an i5 750 (desktop) for image processing.

Minimum I'd get for photoshop is a 2GHz dual core and 4Gb RAM. Make sure you ALWAYS have at least 40Gb spare on the hard drive and ALWAYS have backups, preferably on a seperate machine to the ones your people are working on

[Drumm]

Another point too make about the desktop is that most of your firm will probably already own a Desktop if they do Graphics.

[olesia84]

thanks for the advice, il be looking into it all today. really appreciate the specifics here. youve quite clearly stopped me from making a very silly mistake so thanks