Thread: Tower or laptop ?

A tower is easier to repair (well, replace parts anyway) if something fails. You can get better performance for the same price. You can also more easily add some features to a tower than a laptop. OTOH, a laptop is easier to carry around. Personally I always go for a tower, because I don't need portability, and I like to be able to upgrade or replace a part at will if necessary.

Peter

If you don't need portability, go the tower.

If you want to save pennies, visit a computer fair, as you'll save about 30% on items like hard drive and CPU and graphics card - and even more on stuff like the case and keyboard.

My thoughts re a laptop type pc centre around the smaller keyboard and mouse pad thingy being too small for me.
That's a personal preference issue!

Not Bragging but I am lucky to have a couple of both and By far the best type to have is a tower (Desktop) for several reasons

1 Cheaper ! you can get a far better desktop PC for a reasonable price.
2 with a better PC you can use some of the better programs for web or photos
3 Bigger hard drives and cheaper

I find most places have what they call computer markets and you can pick up a great PC for way less than 1K
Try doing that with a laptop yes you can get a reasonable one but not as good as the desktop style.

Thats my 2 bobs anyway

Cheers Ian

I don't think you can compare the two computers, both have a purpose in life. The laptop is really only designed for portability and fits that bill very well, however, the tower is a much cheaper item to purchase and so easy to repair or upgrade with the use of genuine or generic parts. Parts for a laptop are usually very dedicated parts and hence very costly. Some computer repairers wont even touch a laptop when it comes to repairing them, too fiddly and have to order special dedicated parts for them.

I build my own computers usually and I guess so do many others on here but not so easy to build a laptop.

Also a point to take into consideration is the size of the monitor screen you can use with a tower computer. The choice is very varied and even reasonably priced these days. if your monitor goes bung, you just buy another one. Not so easy with a laptop.


The laptop computer of course offers a great service to those that need portability and this is undisputed fact and some guys need that portability so a laptop is their only choice in reality but given the choice myself, if I needed another computer and portability was not an issue, then i would not hesitate, the tower wins hands down for me for all the reasons mentioned in the above posts and the much cheaper option of the two and in my opinion the better option.

I agree with all the points above and am grate full for the reassurance.
It is as I suspected so a tower it will be. Unfortunately there is no computer market in this area that I know of.
Thank you all for your prompt and help full replies.

If you were a bit closer I'd offer to build one for you - but its really nothing you couldn't handle yourself.

There are plenty of online outlets selling the essential parts (motherboard, CPU, memory, HDD, etc). I buy all the parts I use this way. Some offer a build service for only a few $$$ extra - worth looking into.

The benefit is that you can tailor a machine to your exact requirements by building it yourself. For example, if you want a simple machine for internet browsing and other standard applications, then the new Intel Core i3/i5 CPUs with built-in graphics would do the job very cost-effectively. If you don't need the processing grunt, there are even cheaper basic AMD CPUs out there.

I just updated my desktop machine to a Core i5/750, and am just about to re-use many of the old bits (with the addition of a TV tuner card) to make a Home Theatre PC.

Towers are much better imo. Cheaper, easier to maintain and upgrade and better hardware available. I believe the Tower quoted will give better performance than the Laptop. For power, I would go with a tower. I think in more or less every way towers are still better, unless you travel very regularly. Not just for future upgrades, but you were saying you don't like the small keyboard, neither do I. Plus you'll get a bigger monitor.