Hey guys, a friend of mine wants to buy his kids a couple of laptops to play minecraft on & to get them used to using pc's (they play the demo on there 360's)
Obviously the cheaper the better, but what would you say the minimum is that he should be looking at?
Any help would be appreciated & even more if you could point me in the direction of something to point in his direction!
Ta. x
Would also be interested in this, mine are playing on the laptop and on my of when I'm not around...a couple of Laptops would be good.
Not sure why there's a kiss on the end of riz's post though.
The kiss is for you Benny.
My two are playing Minecraft on their tablets (Nexus 7 and Ipad). Seems to work well.
You need the full client really for the optimal experience.
As this is a JAVA game its primarily CPU restricted and run on its own Virtual machine so GPU is not as important as traditional games and the RAM limit will be based on if you are running x86 or x64 arch and in turn x86 or x64 JAVA installations and the amount of memory you allocate to the VM via a switch. Saying that its very un-optimised for whats its doing unfortunately and can make a meal out of some pretty simple instructions and have some poor memory management due to the garbage collector being a PITA in JAVA and the overhead of the VM allocating its memory virtually which is then mapped to the physical memory.
You should be fine with new-ish relatively low end lappy, the main thing it to get something with x64 arch and 4gig plus of dedicated RAM so there is room for the OS in memory and minecraft plus whatever else they have open. An I3 should be fine with 4 gig plus of dedicated RAM IMO.
If you want to go down the Uber cheap path then Linux might be an option as JAVA's weakness in the VM speed is a strength for cross platform compatibility so use something like openJDK-JRE and run Minecraft JAR as you would on Windows =).
This is the type of example spec which will be easily enough for Minecraft (http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-15-3521/pd?oc=n0035150&dgc=AF&cid=5212&lid=122756&acd=2397178997117280)and is at the £300 price point. If you go down the Linux route you can probably knock another £30 off possibly for something with the same spec. Keep an eye out of stuff on HUKD as I have seen some stuff on there for around £250 a while back which would be fine for minecraft.
Let me know if you need more info.
DZ.
Why laptops? If space or portability are essential, then fine, but a desktop is better and cheaper.
I bought a PC last week with dual core, 6GB RAM, 500GB HD, keyboard, mouse and 22" LED/LCD for £249 inc.
If he thinks that laptops are what he needs, then try this core i3 4GB 500GB HD, 14" Lenovo laptop (http://www.ebuyer.com/407075-lenovo-ideapad-s400-slimbook-may4guk). At £300 it is not as cheap as a desktop, but the hardware is sound. Obviously install ClassicShell over Win8 and you have a winner.
You could run MineCraft on a NetBook, and some are cheaper - but the lower clock speeds are not good enough, Alistair has an Acer Netbook (dual core) which runs MineCraft, but as William has used it for this purpose, he complains "it lags". Out of the mouth of babes...