Page 1 of Desktop Or Laptop?

Roaming around a few retailer sites recently, I was struck by the way the PC market seems to have completely changed in the last few years. At Dabs.com, Laptop configurations outnumber desktops 298 to 141, and there seems to be a similar story at other sites.

At the risk of starting a real debate in this forum, are laptops now taking over from desktops and are there still any advantages in buying a desktop? For the purposes of this thread, the purpose for the hypothetical machine in question is for use primarily as an internet machine, and for basic office operations rather than running muscle applications like 3D Gaming.

J Mark Oates

It depends on how much you want to spend, portability etc.

for a budget of say £500, a desktop would be a better spec machine, bigger screen, you`d have the opportunity to upgrade bits and bobs if you do decide to play games etc, or if when bits go wrong, you can buy replacements yourself, and replace them easily.

laptop obviosly has teh advantage of you can move it from room to room, take it on holiday, take it to friends/family to show them photos etc. Sometimes it`s nice to just sit on the sofa surfing the internet on laptop while in front of tv.

if you`re asking if a cheap laptop will be ok for internet and word processing, the answer is yes.

if then in a few years time, you want to chuck it in the bin and buy a new one, that`s fine, get a laptop, if you`d rather improve it over time get a desktop.


At work I have a laptop. it spends most of it`s time plugged into a monitor, with keyboard and mouse attached to it, so it may as well be desktop, but it is handy if I do go to other sites.

At home I have a desktop PC, which the missus and i share for games internet etc. If she is playing games and I want to go on the internet, then I happily use the work laptop.

if your not a gamer/cad/design user & internet is the the most taxing thing your gonna do, then provided you can live with the reletively low screen res, then personally i would go with a laptop, when i had mine i`d plonk it on the desk plugged into a normal mouse & a usb numeric keypad. but the flexability of being able to just walk away with it was very usefull, but i play the odd game, & convert the occasional video, so a desktop is what i mainly need to use.

I keep my desktop on for weeks and months on end as it has all the multimedia goodies stuffs on it - I`d get very nervy about doing that with a laptop, I think I`d end up killing it prematurely.

When the desktop appears to be on its last legs (or when I have some money) though I`ll just get a network hard drive (and some way to print wirelessly) to achieve the same thing, rather than ever get another desktop.




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Thanks for the feedback. I`m curious about running a laptop on the mains. How - if at all - does it affect battery life? I know Li-ion batteries don`t have the same issues as earlier battery configurations. You could kill a NiMH or NiCad battery by not doing full charge/ discharge cycles. Does running on the mains shorten or lengthen the battery life?

J Mark Oates

I run my laptop off the mains a lot. I still get excellent battery life (it is about 18 months old now and i get 3.5 hours of word processing and even a small amount of statistical computing). Mine`s a Macbook, and according to a programme i have that monitors such things, the battery still has about 95% of it`s capacity available.

I second a laptop. It is really handy being able to just grab it and sit down on the sofa and watch tv. Okay, you have to plug in the mains adapter everytime, but that`s not so bad. Given the choice of one or the other i`d have to go for the laptop.

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I`ve had my Dell laptop a couple of years, as I said earlier it`s used as a desktop, i.e. it is nearly always plugged in with battery in, last time I unplugged it and wandered of with it on, it still said I had 2hrs life in it, which I think is more or less what it said when new,

i used to let my lappy get a full charge, then remove the battery, as i`d run it like a desktop for days on end (i never ever switch off) i figured that way the battery was allways charged, & wasn`t being affected by the power going to it 24/7 i never had any issue with it. but i dunno if it benefited it either..

If your going to do that, its much better to fully discharge it then take it out.