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Any laptops below £400 (new) will be inferior to the GTX 1060 you have in this machine. You'll be lucky if you can find anything near that kind of price, that has a dedicated GPU, and most will have very low, if any VRAM, so gaming on them will be restricted to the very low end stuff.
My little Ryzen 3 i bought a few years ago in this price range, struggles with anything 2009 onwards. Dragon Age Origins was just about playable, but anything more "taxing" was a terrible experience. Skyrim SE was an absolute no go.
Smaller resolutions will mean smaller screens as well. No "good" laptop will be anything below 1920x1080 res. Any devices with lower are usually going to be a Chromebook or something similar, which will be completely useless to you (as a Steam user).
I don't know your budget, what games you play (or plan on playing) or how long you plan on keeping this machine for, so;
Are you planing on travelling a lot? (The main point of a laptop)
And, what are you using the PC for?
-> If it's only Steam Games, why not look at a Steam Deck? RoG Ally?, and the other handhelds? They'd be VASTLY better at games than any laptop in this price bracket, and easier to carry and look after. They can do more than just "Play games" too, so they're not locking you into that.
As to the desktop, replacing and re-installing the OS on a new SSD will be less than £50. You could do that and keep going since it's running Win 11 already.
If you wanted to upgrade, the card is old but fairly ok given it's the 6GB variant. The I5 is serviceable.
But first thing is to work out your max budget, what you want to use the machine for, and whether a smaller device like Steam Deck would serve your needs better.
My budget is £179 to £280-ish which includes upgrading afterwards. So for example, spending £179 on a laptop then £70 on bigger RAM and storage.
Fair enough.
OK, so no point looking new in this budget. Your I5 is better than much of the available PC's within that price range.
Even ones @ £260 are well below the performance of your I5. Sometimes up to 4 times slower.
Your best bet if you want a laptop is to check second hand dealers like Laptops Direct, but i'd imagine that even these will be poor, either performance wise, or condition wise. Maybe even both.
Upgrades on laptops in this budget will be difficult, if not impossible, since many of them won't have upgrade slots. You'll be replacing what they have, rather than adding to, especially in regards to storage.
What *I* would do, is buy a new SSD for your current PC (500GB Crucial SSD on Ebuyer for £30, for example) and then look at a bigger monitor in 1920x1080 res.
A second drive should be easily accomodated inside your desktop case, or if not, an external SSD would be perfectly fine for extra storage.
That should cost you considerably less but gain you more than swapping to a Laptop.
I should of given the reason why I want a laptop, and it's because I'm going to be moving house and need to leave bulky stuff behind such as my desktop. I'm going to be traveling light, so a laptop that gives me a similar work experience to the desktop was wanted, but I'll just focus on display size, CPU speed and upgrade the memory from 4GB to 16GB and get 500GB storage for Windows and work space.
100's of open tabs will eat Vram you no longer have on a lesser system.....that 1060 is doing more then you know....
the best you can get for this price is a second hand ryzen 7-5700u "or something similiar" with 16 gb ram and 500gb ssd -> 15,6-17,3 inch display...
if you insist on new parts good luck...
I thought I found one for £179 with above considerations but it had a 1280 x 720 display (Acer Aspire A315-35), and I've noticed that many use soldered RAM which is a no-no for me.
If you want new for warranty or whatever just having a look on Currys this is the cheapest I would possibly entertain at £270
https://www.currys.co.uk/products/lenovo-ideapad-1-15.6-laptop-amd-ryzen-3-128-gb-ssd-cloud-grey-10263753.html
At any rate, don't use Windows. If you use an OEM that offers no preinstalled OS, that'll save you the cost of a Windows licence, and get better performance if you use a lightweight distro.
https://laptopwithlinux.com/linux-laptops/
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-lightweight-linux-distro
You can run tekken 7 on very low, killing floor 2 very low, cant run tomb raider, making ai pic is 2 hours.
When I found the Acer Aspire A315-35 at the very beginning with no research done it seemed almost ideal but for its 1280 x 720 resolution, but that makes it a notebook right? It has a M.2. drive, space for a SATA drive and the ram isn't soldered so I can add ddr4 memory up to 32GB. The graphics are generic yes, being the Intel UHD, and the Celeron N4500 cpu is quite old, but the storage and memory 'connection points' are there.
Here's the kind of thing I think I'm looking for:
- 2 connection points for drives, maybe one as M.2. and other as SATA.
- Maybe only addable RAM, or as a last consideration addable + soldered, but would like to try avoid that.
- Maybe the Intel N100 processor OR above
- graphics not important but lets start from the Intel UHD.
wing0zero your suggestion is tempting but I've no idea if a second drive can be added, and if a stick can go next to its 8GB soldered memory.