Some big purchases are harder than others / bought a laptop

I remember when buying my condo, it was one of the hardest things to do, to sign a paper that committed one to a long-term debt.  If you hate your decision after the fact, it ends up being buyer's remorse, if you simply have anxieties over spending so much money, it's buyer's hesitation.  Oddly, when it came to buying my last vehicle, there was no hesitation, no doubts whatsoever, and that was a pretty big deal, with no trade-ins.

Tonight, I found what was extremely close to the perfect laptop (refurbished Dell) online, with a discount coupon for an additional 15% off.  The total was nearly $825, but it brought the same sort of fear and doubt as when I bought my condo.  The fear in this case, was whether or not I was buying the right device -- a laptop over a desktop, and whether or not I should be buying at a time like this.

You probably already know the drill: laptops never have the same price-to-feature and power ratio as a desktop.  But it gives one a lot of freedom to work in any office, coffee shop, or at a jobsite, and can do much more than a netbook...what I currently use because of its portability.

As for the timing, I guess one can't escape the economic anxiety of the recent month, with job markets going sideways, a possible default, etc.  If hell breaks loose, do I really want to be invested in a laptop when I've already got other devices?  Turns out, I'll probably let go of two of my other devices (a netbook and a 9 year old P4 backup in case my workstation died.)

In the end, I decided to place faith in the future, and reminded myself that this new laptop will actually be 3x faster than my current 4.3 year old Xeon workstation with two dual cores / 8 threads...I know this, because I've previously benchmarked it on the same test that I've checked against this incoming laptop's CPU.  By the way, my last 3 computers have all been Dell refurbs and I have yet to run into any problems, going back 10 years now.

So here's the specs:

• Core i7-2720QM (Sandy Bridge)
• 17.3" 1920x1080 LED-backlit screen
• 3GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 555 video card w/ Optimus switching
• 4GB (2 DIMMS) 1333 ECC SDRAM
• 500GB 7200rpm HD
• 8x DVD-RW
• Windows7 Home Premium 64bit
• 9-cell / 90-Whr battery
• Intel WiFi 6230 card
• Bluetooth 3.0
• USB 3.0 (2) and 2.0 (2) ports
• HDMI 1.4 port
• SPID/F optical audio output (via headphone port)
• Intel's Wireless Display
• Gigabit ethernet
• 9-way card reader

To get a similar setup, brand new from anywhere, would cost in the neighborhood of $1300~$1400.  A very close to matching spec (including exact same CPU) Apple Mac book costs $2499.  They don't even sell laptops running with an i7-2720QM at Costco; the highest they have is the i7-2630QM, which is respectable, but there is a 14% difference in performance (PassMark CPU Mark) that is important to me.  The next highest performance CPU scores only 5% higher (i7-2820QM), so the price-benefit ratio is not so good there.

Oh, and this particular model laptop from Dell has room for dual hard drives, so the plan is to buy an SSD and run off the SSD as primary, to further speed up the laptop and make it smoking fast.

I could have paid an extra $30 for 8GB RAM (Non-ECC) and BluRay, but honestly, I don't use BluRay because it costs too much to buy and rent, and I really want to use that money for an SSD...speed is my #1 concern.  If one has a solid SSD, one doesn't technically need to bother with a full load of RAM, you know what I mean?

So what do you think...bargain or waste of money?  Only thing is, now I need to go buy a 17" sleeve.