New PC or Laptop - experience and advice appreciated

(02-12-2018 10:19 AM)epo Wrote:  Hi all,

My Asus Republic of Gamers laptop has finally died and gone to laptop heaven. I was lucky to have had a Windows 7 laptop so haven't experienced problems with graphics and Sims until recently when I installed Assassin's Creed Origins. That did my entire system in.

Sooo, to cut a long story short, I would like to buy either a laptop or PC which will be reserved to exclusively play Sims 2 (all EPs, latest pack I bought was Mansion and Gardens).

I would really appreciate any sort of advice with what sort of machine I should buy and if I should stick with getting a machine that still has Windows 7. I am not planning to build the machine myself.

I'm also not that great with changing config files etc. I can follow advice but don't want to eff around too much because it got me into problems in the past. I like good graphics of course, because I'm a visual junkie, so a good graphics card that would enable fairly high res would be important.

I should also mention that I am not planing on using Origins. I still have discs of all games which I'd use to install (and then patch I guess).

Grateful for the community's trusted advice with this.
epo

@epo

Lenovo T440p. Has HD4600 graphics, a sweet spot for Sims 2. Add 8-16gb/RAM, and a 500gb SSD. Fantastic Simming machine. Ebay has them all day. I've rebuilt maybe 30 of these machines this year. You can get them ready to roll off Ebay for anywhere between $180-$250 USD. The i7 Quad Core (i7-4700), or the i7 Dual core (i7-4600), are good choices. I have three of them for my own personal use.

Make sure you're running Win8.1, with Classic Shell. That's the O/S most of these machines came with. Win7 also works well. These machines are WELL supported by Lenovo.