Laptop help! To buy or not to buy?

[heidiwine]

I’m a freelance data analyst and (despite my job) I’m not very techy.
I need a new computer. My current laptop is slowing down, the battery life is minimal and it’s very big/heavy.
I often work with big data sets and need a computer that can handle that sort of thing.
In the past I’ve bought reconditioned laptops but my business is doing quite well and I think I could probably buy a new one.
DP and I have just been talking and he wondered if it might be worth leasing one.
So, I have two questions:

1. does anyone have any laptop advice/recommendations
2. what are your thoughts on leasing (I’m a sole trader). Thanks.

Why a laptop. If you are working with big datasets a desktop with a 4-core 8 thread processor 8 GBytes of RAM an SSD boot disk and a 4TB data disk will cost around a £1000.

Thanks for that.
A laptop because I regularly travel to clients offices and share work with them - either final reports or work in progress (which can mean answering their questions in real time). I also work from a clients office a couple of days a month..,

cant speak for the leasing aspect but as a business you can offset the cost of the laptop as a business expense?

When you say ‘slow’ , is it the number crunching for your analysis or when the laptop starts up/shuts down or something else?

Just trying to work out where you need the extra speed before I get into the specifications

Would you prioritise weight over speed? Weigh your own laptop so when looking at a replacement you’ve got a reference point.

I work in BI. We use high end Dell slim laptops

@tanstaafl it’s slow when I start it up (and I have noticed a big slowdown recently). When I’m doing any analysis the speed is ok (but often I do all the coding with a subset and then rerun it on the full set when I can leave it to run).
I’ll weigh my laptop - that’s a good idea. It’s very old and very big (I’m starting to feel a bit embarrassed when I get it out at clients because it looks so massive compared to anyone else’s!).

Ok startup slowness can be caused by too many apps needing to start and a Slowness in the hard drive - not much free space or fragmentation - programs and data are spread all over the place instead of being next too each other on the hard drive.

There's a couple of things you can do about that without spending any money, might improve the startup speed. You say the analysis speed is ok.

Can I ask you to press the windows logo key and the ‘R’ key together.
And type ‘cmd’ in the “open:” field on the pop up window, then hit return.
In the window that pops up (aka dos window) type as one word:
Systeminfo

That will run a program to gather information about the laptop.
Do you mind saying what the information says for:

OS Name
OS Version
System Model
Processor(s)
Bios Version
Total physical memory

That way we can see what your running now and work out the bits that need to be in the new laptop if you go down that route.

@tanstaafl thank you I’ve PMed you.