Please recommend a laptop......

[cahu]

I got custody of my dell laptop 4 years ago and it is dieing a little more every day.... Can anyone who has knowledge of this stuff reccommed one for up to £400 please. I just need it for home stuff, Internet, the odd document. It seems to be so subjective....The one I have at present has lasted years (apart from the battery). Thank you.

What with the new iPad, a 16gb iPad 2 can be had for £326. Buy a keyword with the change :)

Would love an iPad but really need a PC for word etc. Can't justify expense as I have an iPhone....

The two most reliable makes on the market, IIRC are Toshiba and Asus, both of whom have a failure rate of 15% over a 3-year period.

If you don't mind going in to PC World, this looks about right for your budget:

www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/toshiba-satellite-c660-1ld-15-6-laptop-11884708-pdt.html

It's got the Intel Core processor range in it, plenty of RAM and plenty of disk space.

Don't let them bamboozle you in to buying their extended warranty or their crappy antivirus packages.

Recently bought an 'almost as new' (18 months old) HP laptop for 140 on Ebay and have seen at least 6 Win 7 laptops at CashGenerator / CashConverters / CEX in last 2/3 weeks at 150 to 200 GBP.

Use OpenOffice now known as LibreOffice for free, unless you can find a laptop sold off in Tesco Outlet on Ebay, or reduced to clear stock at, say, Asda Living (I paid 247 in March 2010 for a Compaq running Win 7... gave it to my BiL as his need to work from home was more important when he was getting over cancer, and I was not too impressed by latest Windows).

Recently bought an 'almost as new' (18 months old) HP laptop for 140 on Ebay and have seen at least 6 Win 7 laptops at CashGenerator / CashConverters / CEX in last 2/3 weeks at 150 to 200 GBP.

Use OpenOffice now known as LibreOffice for free, unless you can find a laptop sold off in Tesco Outlet on Ebay, or reduced to clear stock at, say, Asda Living (I paid 247 in March 2010 for a Compaq running Win 7... gave it to my BiL as his need to work from home was more important when he was getting over cancer, and I was not too impressed by latest Windows).

Sorry if double posted - using mobile.

Thanks everyone, i was considering Toshiba. How is Dell compared to Toshiba?

What do you think of this one, its only £309.00......Dell Inspiron 15 Intel Celeron Laptop - 15.6ins - 3GB RAM - 500GB Hard Drive.

Or this one.............Dell Inspiron M5030 Laptop (3GB, 320GB, 15.6" Display) Black.....
Its heavily reduced in Tesco to £329.00 from £420.00. I cant see intel core processor though.... sorry Im clueless....

I would skip the one with the Celeron processor.

The Dell Inspiron M5030 has a Turion processor. I'm not sure how good the Turion is, so I'll leave it to someone else to comment on that.

Ebuyer have a Toshiba with a Core i3 processor, 6GB RAM and 640GB HDD for £400 right now. I reckon that?s good value.

and there's a £75 trade in on your old laptop, which makes it even better.

Sorry - didn't get online yesterday. Dell is just as good, in my view, though I know Toshiba has a long history (I remember using an orange screen Tosh "luggable" in 1989, but the modern day kit is probably all being made in one of half a dozen Asian factories, whichever make you buy, and they all strive for lowest numbers of 'returns' so unless someone comes up with a major objection [and now and again something may be described as having poor build quality] you should be safe with Dell or Tosh or Compaq etc).

Have just seen some bargains on Ebay so worth a look there, too.

I took delivery of my new laptop yesterday!

I have the Samsung RV520 and so far I'm really pleased with it. Quick and easy to set up, seems fast and does exactly what I want it to.

It's this one

Thanks everyone..... should I be concerned about which processor it has?

for run-of-the-mill WP, web browsing, MS Paint, etc, I'd say that so long as there is a reasonable amount of RAM (say 2GB for Windows 7, 1 GB for Win XP) and a CPU speed of 1.8 GHz or greater, you need not worry too much.

If using a laptop away from power is a big part of your need, then some processors might be advantageous over others, because they may have been designed to consume a bit less power, but I have not spent a lot of time looking at this aspect, personally, so cannot add much to that discussion.

Cahu - Yes, the processor does matter. Processor speeds are largely irrelevant since what actually matters is not the speed of the processor but its cache and the number of cores it has.

Intel rebranded their Celeron range to Pentium when they brought out the Core. The Celeron/Pentium range are uniformly awful. If you can scrape together the extra money for an Intel Core processor you'll gain not only more speed now but greater longevity. There are three types of Core, the i3, i5 and i7. The i3 is the cheapest and is fine for day-to-day use. You'll find the i7 in top-end machines. A core i5 laptop will set you back between £450 and £550, as a rule.

re: i5, i7 give more speed, but for doing what exactly (apart from the cost) ?

If you are "number crunching" for a research project, using a machine to edit video clips, etc, then perhaps that extra speed is worth paying for, but for day-to-day use much of the time a machine will have the 'Idle process' absorbing the spare power while the laptop waits for you to type the next key on the keyboard, move the mouse and click it, or read a page of text... like we are doing here!

Intel rebranded their Celeron range to Pentium when they brought out the Core

have you a web link reference to that being reported anywhere, please ?

NetworkGuy

Most of the computer's time is spent working on itself. Look at the 'process' list when you're next on your machine. Your A/V is a resource hog and you've got at least a dozen programs poncing around in the background, printer software, Adobe reader, updaters from Google, etc etc.

The computer might be fine now with a Celeron processor but in 2 years' time, when SP2 for Windows 7 comes out, it'll be a miserable experience to use. When you have to add Office 2012 to your machine it'll be miserable. And so on, ad infinitum.