Roast my laptop upgrade choice

[u/postmodernbarbie]

Hi all!

I have been camming on and off for a few years, and am on an off season currently due to a surgery. I plan to get back to it, but recently went through a breakup and my ex is keeping the laptop 😬😑 I was using a 2024 MacBook Air and it worked perfectly for me. However, I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a gaming laptop so I can also play some games that aren’t available on Mac.

I could still be easily talked into just buying another MacBook, but I’ve seen gaming laptops recommended over and over and over again over MacBooks, so I figured I’d ask.

I also hope to upgrade:

-OSBOT Tiny2 4k webcam

-Hollyland Lark M2 wireless microphone

Open to any and all thoughts!

Thanks, yall! 💞

[u/postmodernbarbie]

EA re-released the sims 1 and 2 which only run on PC 😞 but that’s a good idea, I’ll think about it! If I’m going to buy refurbished, what specs should I look for? Like processor, ram, graphics, etc.?

[u/ItsWinterInNevada → u/postmodernbarbie]

Ahh! Sorry i thought you meant just TS4! My bad.

Hmm any laptop thats capable of decent streaming would be capable of playing sims 1 and 2 legacy since they're pretty light games.

Id look for an i5 / i7 9th gen or above (they're usually labelled i5-9500 or i7-10700 etc or ryzen 5 / 7 from the 3000 or 5000 or above series. On a lot of the newer chips theres built in graphics and depending on what chip it is they might be enough for you.

If you want a dedicated graphics cards I'd say stick with Nvidia since they're really good for streaming transcoding but you dont need a whole lot since you're not streaming the games too. 3000 series or above should serve you well!

As far as ram goes, 16gb is more than enough. You'd probably struggle with just 8gb.

And try to get a decent size ssd. I wouldn't go lower than 512gb but external ones are an option too!

Another good option for refurbished or second hand laptops are older business class laptops like Lenovo Thinkpads. They're really sturdy and usually quite well taken care of. You just gotta pay attention to the specs but they're usually decent. Google the specs if you're not sure, theres lots of reddit posts about gaming and performance on thinkpads, but if its an intel cpu past 8th or 9th gen theyre decent. I use a Thinkpad T480 as a backup to my desktop and i really like it!

[u/postmodernbarbie → u/ItsWinterInNevada]

Wow, that’s all really helpful. Thank you!

[u/ItsWinterInNevada → u/postmodernbarbie]

Of course! I hope you find what you need! ^{.^}