New laptop

[Doug Hoven]

I’ve had good luck with a Dell laptop I purchased a few years ago for college. Compared to a similarly priced HP that a friend of mine bought, the Dell seems to be of better quality. I don’t have much experience with windows 11, but windows 10 seems to run Racepak, Holley, and Innovate software very well.

[Jeff Niceswanger]

I also use Dells. Whatever you get, research how well they perform in bright daylight. Nothing is worse than a dull screen while working outside in the sun. I have Intel Core I5 on my laptops, but for the racecar stuff a I3 is plenty fast enough. My older one is a traditional hard drive and the newer one is a solid state drive. It boots up almost instantly and shuts down likewise. Plus the battery last tons longer. Good Luck in your search.

[Mike Jones]

I have had great service from Dell, but whatever you buy,
make sure the hard drive has plenty of disk space.
It can fill up quick and be a headache if you use your laptop for other things.
Its a problem with some of the smaller laptops.
Happy hunting.

[Cdncarnut]

As someone who rode the IT wave for work, all that I can tell you is that all new laptops are ****.
Don't expect to get 15 years out your new one.
The batteries are not replaceable anymore, unless you actually open up the laptop.
The worst part is that both Windows 10 and 11 take control away from you.
The laptop will almost stop as it randomly downloads whatever updates that Microsoft is mandating.
And worse, it will just install them and force you to reboot regardless of what you are doing and how limited you are for time to finish what you are doing.

Now, having said that, I am partial to HP laptops.
They have been good to me and last a long time.
I also prefer a 17" screen for the track, as I can get by without my glasses often.

All hard drives are solid state these days, which means that they are nothing more than a very large memory stick.

Buy the fastest CPU and the most amount of memory that you can afford.

I hope this helps.