17 inch laptop for university idea. Need opinions

[mikee]

I am currently taking MBA in university and am working with a lot of spreadsheets. I pretty low vision and my current laptop is a 15.6 inch hp with touch screen. I don't really use the touch functionality and frankly it is a nucense because a professor will come over to show me something and touch the screen and end up messing everything up. I want to go 17 inch so that I can see more of the spreadsheet at once with the increased DPI scaling I have set to make it easier on my eyes also I am looking for one with a matte screen so it isn't really reflective. I may game on a rare occasion while on vacation home as I will not have my desktop rig with me. So Ideally I would have a lower end geforce or radeon discrete GPU to play games at acceptable framerates at 720p.

This is what I currently have my eye on for a replacement
Acer Laptop Aspire E5-774G-52W1 Intel Core i5 7200U (2.50 GHz) 8 GB DDR4 Memory 256 GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 17.3" Windows 10 Home 64-Bit - Newegg.com

Current laptop is a hp TS15 with an AMD A10 5745M, radeon 8610g+8670M dual graphics
8GB ram, 1TB 5400rpm HDD.

I am thinking of spending up to 700$ less if possible. And I have to buy a new backpack to carry it since my current backpack only holds up to 15 inch laptops so if you have any suggestions there too that would be helpful.
This is what I have my eye on for a backpack too
https://www.amazon.com/Targus-Drift...1&sr=8-9&keywords=backpack+for+17+inch+laptop

 

[BK_123]

The Acer laptop you linked looks very nice and packs Intel's latest CPU which is nice and for that price that's a real good deal and maybe swap the SSD over for a bigger one.

 

[mikee]

The beauty if that is apparently it is an m.2 ssd and there is an empty bay for another sata drive. I just hope it has a access panel to get to it on the bottom. I can't tell from photos and no one has answered that question anywhere

 

[Technician1]

I'd go with a 4k monitor attached to the laptop.

 

[mikee]

I'd go with a 4k monitor attached to the laptop.

I still want to be portable with it taking it to class and what not in a backpack.

In terms of 4k monitors though in general I don't even bother with them. Everything is so tiny on screen and I have to boost the scaling to see anything anyway. In a computer shop back in the summer I compared 1080p monitors to 4k and with my vision I can't tell the difference anyway. My current monitor setup is a 130$ acer 24 inch 1080p monitor and a 60$ Planar 19 inch widescreen 1600x900.

I do wonder since that laptop has both hdmi and vga can they be used at the same time to make a 3 monitor setup?

 

[adriana]

I am in Uni too. I have to write a lot of research work, so this thread was superuseful! Thank you for asking this question.

 

[mikee]

I bought the computer. I am on it now. I have only had it for a few hours but so far it is very fast and the screen is nice. The screen is very sharp and easy on the eyes Most of my steam games play just fine at at least 720p. I will probably add a 1tb hard drive to the empty drive bay on black friday so I will have 256GB of M.2 SSD storage and 1TB of hard drive file storage. The only very slight bummer is that there is no optical drive even though the photos online showed one.

So that is my initial 1st day review. I will follow up after a month and tell if I have any issues with it