I was using the Macbook Air M1 for the past 2 years and loved it for its build, battery, speed and ease of use being almost like an iPad with keyboard. It was amazing value for money but I encountered couple of issues – I was not able to play my favorite game “Age of Empires” which got a definitive edition upgrade and had to borrow my wife’s windows laptop to try it. Also whenever we worked together and shared MS Word files, the alignment would be off.
Thankfully my good friends Joe and Sushma showed interest in the Macbook and that gave me an opportunity to move back to Windows without much loss in the process. I had always wanted to try my hands on Gaming laptops and started looking at one of the bests – Alienware which was like 1.75 Lakhs meaning I would have to shell out another lakh on top of the exchange price. Eventually I ended up with a Dell G15 5520 laptop which brings in the much famed 12th Gen processor (Even i5 of this generation is superior to the i9 of last gen) along with RTX 3050 graphics card which is more than enough for someone just dabbing in games, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, 512 GB of SSD in a 15.6″ screen size. It also has 3 USB 3.2 ports, 1 USB C port along with HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi 6 and BT 5.2. All this for 87k, meaning an additional 12k for me after the exchange.
The changeover though is as stark as possible – From a shiny golden metallic < 1 kg beauty I am moving to a boxy, gray, heavy 2.5 kgs beast. While my Macbook would give an all day battery plus some more, I will probably get an hour or two max on this. But then I will get to game again, if nothing else, on highest graphics settings the “Age of Empires II Definitive Edition” and looking forward to the Hogwarts Legacy that will launch next year on Steam. I have also managed to try RetroArch and RPCS3 and had good success. Also I had an old Logitech USB wired gamepad which is doing a decent job as well on these emulators. Windows 11 looks neat and clean. My only gripe is the 512 GB SSD. I wanted a 1 TB one but Dell had weird combinations where you can’t just upgrade SSD alone. This laptop has only one SSD slot as well meaning not easy to upgrade but overall happy with the lateral shift.