I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right place or not; please move me if I'm not.

I need to buy a laptop, but I've never had one before and I don't much at all regarding "specs" for them. I found:

Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E540 Notebook - Intel Core i7 4702MQ 2.2GHz, 4GB Memory, 500GB HDD, 15.6" Notebook, Windows 7 Professional/Windows 8 Pro 64-bit for $600.

Is this a decent machine? A decent price?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mary

It depends on what you want to use it for. I have a high spec laptop supplied by my firm also two second-hand PCs I bought for around £75--$114 each. Personally I would never pay $600--£400 for a laptop, you can get a very good one S/H from eBay for half the price and probably use only a 10th what it is capable of handling. 4GB Memory and 500GB HDD is big, even half that is way over what an average home user would use.

Spend a proportion of what you save on some good quality software.

As I said it just depends what you need the laptop for.

Good Luck
Cari.

The question to ask is are you going to game with it? If you expect to be able to play even new adventure games, you will need a laptop with a very good stand-alone video card. The one you link to uses a video chip integrated into the Core i7 CPU. It's not a bad chip, but not made for gaming.

If you're not going to be gaming with it, then it's a fine laptop.

Well, I do want to use it for games, but only infrequently. I really can't justify spending as much for a laptop that I would for a desktop, so I'm going to have to think about this a bit.
Thanks for the input.

A bigger question is "what kind of games?"
A laptop with Intel graphics might work fine for most casual games, though likely not all.
Laptops with Intel graphics will play "Bejeweled" and "Solitaire" just fine.

But if you're going to want to play games like "Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments" or the "Grim Fandango Remastered," you're going to need a real video card.

Also I do NOT recommend getting a laptop with "Optimus graphics" because it frequently misdetects the needs of adventure games and shifts into low power mode.