Re: Good new laptop for The Sims 4?
@leah2209 Expansion packs are much more demanding than game or stuff packs, especially the recent ones. So while not running all packs together will save a bit on overhead, you'll still want a strong graphics card to handle EPs like Seasons, Island Living, and whatever else is in the pipeline.
I don't know how many photos you have, but if it's a large collection, you might need a secondary drive anyway. Most of the laptops I'm seeing have a 512 GB SSD, which is ideal for performance and price (solid state drives are very fast, large ones are very expensive) but might not hold everything you want. However, you could also add a second internal drive to most of these models without much trouble; a 1 TB mechanical drive might be $50 or so. The performance gain of running Windows off an SSD is significant, and I personally would much prefer dealing with a second drive, internal or external, to having Windows on a slow mechanical drive, no matter how conveniently large it is.
Doing a more thorough search, I didn't find any laptops that were a better deal than the MSI I linked before. In fact, I saw that same model for $100 more on three other sites, so it's definitely a good deal. One other option worth considering though is this Asus, which has a somewhat weaker processor (still strong enough for TS4), but a correspondingly better graphics card. The 1650 is the newer version of the 1050 ti, and Sims 4 will likely benefit down the road from the upgrade. Still, it's a close call, especially since they're basically the same price.
(This Asus model is also $100 more on a couple other sites, so it's also a good offer here.)
The other options I saw with an Nvidia 1650 are all $1500 and up, although some do have better processors and 16 GB RAM. Here's the best one for the price, on two sites:
https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Notebooks/Gaming-Notebooks/77021-NH.Q59SA.010-C77
The processor in this Acer is much better than the others, but it doesn't sound like you plan on doing anything that would require all that extra power. The extra memory is great, but you could probably buy a second 8 GB RAM stick for $50, maybe less if prices are reasonable; installing RAM is quite simple and doesn't void the warranty.
And of course there are laptops with even better graphics cards, but they're increasingly expensive—$1600 and up. I have no idea about your budget, so here are a couple of examples. (An Nvidia 1060 is somewhat better than a 1650, and a 1660 ti is better than a 1060. Sims 4 will almost certainly never use more graphics power than a 1060 can provide, even with all packs installed.)
https://www.techbuy.com.au/p/446370/NOTEBOOKS_MSI_GAMING_NOTEBOOKS/ASUS/FX505DU-AL042T.asp
