Business Laptop requirements

[Corriewatcher]

Wonder if some techi person could help please.
I run a small one-woman business from home and wish to buy a new laptop as I'm worried my current one is on its last legs. I've been looking around but feeling completely overwhelmed by the choices on offer. I don't do anything particularly fancy on the laptop - emailing, internet, the odd spreadsheet, word docs, updating my website. No gaming (unless you count DD on Moshi Monsters!) and just watch the occasional DVD on it. However, it is vital for my business, so reliability is key. I think I want at least 4gb of memory and a hard drive of 500gb, but I'm completely phased by the processors on offer. I'd really welcome some advice on the most reliable makes, plus any thoughts on particular models that might fit the bill. Willing to go up to about £900 for a really reliable machine, although more comfortable paying a bit less.
Thanks in advance

Well what I would say is that build quality of the main manufacturers don't really vary very much anymore. I'm sure some people will say HP are a bag of nails. Others will swear Dell are satan's spawn. Millions of others don't care and just continue to work away on their laptops.

Since you want it for business and you've emphasised that reliability is key. Then what I would suggest is that you purchase something like a Dell laptop with their premium next day on site repair and premium tech support. 3 years is £180 so it's not cheap but it's peace of mind.

What I'd also strongly advise is that you purchase a removable hard disk such as Buffalo 500GB Portable Hard Drive and copy stuff across manually as a backup. This will protect you if/when your laptop disk dies which is one of the most common faults in all computers.

If you also want belt & braces, also consider using a cloud storage account such as Dropbox or Box.net which will allow you to store your critical files on the Internet securely. All have free options with limited storage so you can play and try.

Lastly the Dell laptops come with Microsoft Office 2010 starter for free which you can use to do your letters & odd spreadsheet without having to shell out £234 for a full copy.

Hope that helps

Hi niceguy, excellent idea about purchasing the 3 years support. Really helpful.

I agree with Niceguy. FWIW I buy Dell laptops for my customers (well, my operations guy does) and barring drops and drinks incidents, we have very few problems (we buy 400 or so a year). All of ours go out with the 3 year warranty and Dell are very responsive to the customers who need it.

Backup is key, as is a good antivirus/protection software

I got my last mini pc from www.pcspecialist.co.uk

You can design the laptop you want and get some help making sure the specs suit you and make sense on the forum before you place the final order.

And you can get them to pre-install any software you want including anything which is not bog standard.

I cannot recommend the service enough.

I have never used the after sales support but I did get some guarantee on it, I just can't remember how long...

Many thanks for your help. Just about to order a Dell Vostro laptop with 3 years pro-support. Nice to know you've had few problems with them. Have also discovered I'll get 10% cashback by using topcashback.co.uk!

Don't worry - I already use an external hard disk and Dropbox for backup after an awful experience with a failed hard disc over the summer.

Thanks a million!