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Laptop for Hero Lab

F

Fletchi18

Member
I have a desktop at home with Hero Lab installed and an iPad I bring to gaming night. Both are working well. However, with Starfinder coming up (with Hero Lab has confirmed support for it) I might need something a bit more portable and powerful for gaming night than an iPad - I might be GMing the Starfinder sessions.
With that said, I'm wondering if anyone has any cheap laptop recommendations for a device that will run Hero Lab decently well, but not break the bank to buy. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance for your recommendations.
 
I GM Pathfinder on a 4 year old Acer laptop with a 1.5GH Core i3 and originally 4GB of RAM (I upgraded to 8 eventually but it didn't make a lot of difference) and built-in Intel graphics. During games I've got Hero Lab, MapTool, a PDF reader, a browser, and various notes open at once and it works fine; my biggest complaint is that the low-end 1366x768 screen is not a lot of real estate, but it's adequate.

So you don't need a lot of laptop power to GM, though I'd probably skip the Atom-based machines and others with 32 or 64 GB of main storage.
 
Yeah, it really doesn't take much to run the software. Pretty much anything that can run Windows XP will run it. Linux will work too as long as you don't mind running Wine.`
 
Some tips:

Screen: Go big! 1080p is great and no less than 13.3' if your not using external screen. I am partial to 15'.

RAM: 4GB is all you need, 8GB if you can find it in budget, as you likely run x64 OS.

CPU: Less cores and more Mhz. Nothing here is multi-threaded, so look for no more than 4 cores and higher Mhz.

Weight: This is not an issue, as it will be less weight then books! But keep your back in mind.

GPU: Frankly any will do here, even Intel crap. Nothing is graphically intensive. However if you also run mapping software, look for 8GB as you will lose RAM to GPU Cache.

Any Intel or AMD CPU is a fine choice, AMD APUs offer better GPU for the money, Intel slightly faster thread to clock (Pre Risen).

Surface Pro is awesome but costly and high res screen is small and HL isn't a great scaling app. ACER is a good mainstream choice, as is Dell, or HP. Asus or MSI are also great choices.

End of day budget is key. My system for PnP gaming is a Surface Pro 3 (i5, 4GB, 128GB) and runs it all but screen is small.
 
As others have said, avoid atom processors and shoot don't go with less than 128gb of disk space.

Personally I also wouldn't go over 15" screen, I use 14" and it works nice. I have a few players that have 17" screens and it's a wall of huge screens at the table. I have since picked up a ipad for when I play just to avoid this wall.
 
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