Toshiba laptop i5 vs i7

[davef22]

Hi,

I am trying to decide between 2 laptops and it is on sale at Costco.

Toshiba L55-B5294 $579 + $99 (3 year warranty) = $679 with 3 year warranty

15.6 LED HD, 8GB DDR3 Memory, i5, 750 GB with DVD RW.


Toshiba S55-B5233 - $899
15.6 ,16GB,1 TB,i7 and no DVD.


Based on making comparisons the i5 laptop seems to be beat the buck for $679 and for 3 year warranty from Costco.

But just for an , 8GB ram extra 250 GB and an i7 the prices goes up $899.
An 8GB ram upgrade on the L55 is $91 at Kingston.

My question is the i7 really better than the i5 to pay the extra $$ and I already have a portable 1TB hard disk. I noticed that many of the laptops atleast at Costco are all sealed at the back, so we will have to be very careful when changing the RAM. Is this really a big issue when upgrading? I have upgraded RAM's on a desktop and an older DELL where we could just open the panel at the back and replace the RAM.

I will be mainly using this laptop for the following:

1. Download photos/videos from my SLR camera,
2. Checking email, facebook etc
3. Watch youtube and maybe play Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Is the i5 good enough for this? I am leaning towards the i5 because I feel it is a good buy with 3 year warranty.


Please advise.

Thank you,

 

[SilverSeal]

First of all 8GB will be plenty of RAM to do what you described. The RAM does not seem to be easily replaceable and Toshiba even say on their webpage: "8GB DDR3L 1600MHz (Memory is not user replaceable)"

http/www.toshiba.com/us/computers/laptops/satellite/L50/L55-B5294

Judging by what you intend to use it for, you will not be bottlenecking anything from having the i5 (and you get a DVD and a nice warranty on top of it).

I would say this is a simple decision for you!

By the way if I am allowed to come with a little extra advice:

if it's not vital for you to have a large hard drive, I would recommend you consider a laptop with a SSD drive (Solid State Drive) hard drive. They are usually only 128 or 256GB in the laptops in the budget range you describe, but you are likely to notice a significant boost in general quickness.