Is buying a gaming laptop a waste of money?

Thinking of buying a laptop as a complement to my desktop, since I work online and power fails at times. It's better to have that backup in case things go south. I've been considering getting a gaming one, so I can still play in the event the power goes out and I can't use my desktop. Is it a waste of money though? Just to be able to play at rare moments? I've been debating over it in my head, and I wanted to hear what you guys think.

 

Why not get a tablet? Very good battery power, and even more portable than a laptop. Personally, I would suggest just going for a walk, or a cycle ride if the power fails!

 

You can always get a UPS (Universal Power Supply) for your desktop instead if you wanted to. Any laptop with adequate specs can be a 'gaming' laptop or beyond. The term gaming doesn't mean anything. It's just a phrase used to describe a system that has powerful enough specs to run their games at the frames per second they want (long after Counterstrike lol) and has enough ram and cpu power not to choke on the bloatware and demands of the games they run these days. If your laptop (or your desktop) has enough ram, a fast enough system bus, enough hard drive space, and a graphics card that is at or above the requirements for the programs you plan to run, then literally any choice could be a 'gaming' laptop. Some may run the games more smoothly than others with the overkill of hardware power to negate the software bloatware, and thus make it more suitable for those than programs like your browser to check email, Office 2013, or anything like that. If you need a laptop for mobility or as a second desktop, then it's ideal to get one. If you just spend most of your time at home and don't require mobility, then you could just as easily get a backup desktop with comparable specs for a lot less, and throw the UPS on the one you want to power (or both).

Tablets are mostly underpowered net appliances that are RISC-based or using subpar cpus and hardware that are just geared toward touchscreen interaction, voice recognition, and miniature programs called 'apps'. They would struggle to run your computer's regular office programs and not be able to run most of the games people would want to play unless they are really old and don't require many resources. So using them for mobile programs is fine, and emulating office programs on them is too, but for games, if it isn't on the Google Play Store for the device or a program that fits with the requirements of your tablet or phone...it shouldn't be expected to run at all.

 

Get a gaming one, if you already have a PC for back up, I don't see why this wouldn't be a good idea Go for it. Plus you can use a gaming laptop for everything else, not only gaming So why not?

 

You have to take into account that some of the laptops made "for gaming" sacrifice battery life for the built in GPU, some of the budget ones like the Acer Aspire E have a NVIDIA GeForce 940M card yet the battery life is absurd, check out the Youtube video of Austin Evans for that laptop, you basically get about 45 minutes of continuous game play out of the small battery. So, if your idea is to use a laptop if the power goes out you are out of luck, you will need a model with more battery but the performance will suffer unless you go high end.

 

Exactly, gaming laptops aren't only limited to gaming. They will also run other programs with out a problem. Laptops can't compete with desktops in full out performance, but you still can play most games on them.