New lap top recommendations

[Raeray]

Looking to upgrade my well loved and used laptop which is now on the go slow and battery lasts about 20 mins. I have a budget of upto £450 but the better the deal the more happy I'll be!!

I use my laptop as main computer for my home - mainly for browsing internet, connecting my iPhone and occasional essays and presentations for work.

What do I need to look for GB and MB and ghz?! I have a vague idea what these mean but some further education and laptop recommendation would be much appreciated!

I think that something like this will probably fit your needs. It has an intel Core processor rather than one of their other chips, 4GB RAM (which is plenty for day-to-day use) and a 500GB hard drive which should cover you although I don't know how much stuff you have. Do you have an awful lot of music, apps etc? Toshiba are a reasonably reliable make. The one I linked to is in white, but I understand they offer several colours.

The laptop flatpack linked is a decent sort of spec, but you could get it a fair bit cheaper than at John Lewis. For example, this is very similar (few minor differences like larger HD) but that's more like the price I'd expect to be paying for it.

For a bit more you could have a similar model but with a faster processor like this one, or more memory and larger HD, or, if we go all the way to the top of your budget, the faster processor AND the extra RAM. I've only just had a cursorary check on dabs.com, there's probably other deals out there (ebuyer.co.uk is another good place to check).

You can get a nice machine for £450, so have a good look around :) You don't need any sort of fancy graphics processing, so no need to watch graphics card specs much; you'll want to be paying attention mostly to processor speed, amount of RAM, and HD size and to a lesser extent speed. (If you hate waiting, you could always get an SSD, they're getting affordable now. not that I've been eyeing them up at all or anything ) Keep in mind when you pick something within budget that most of these will come only with a starter version of Office, not a full one - if you want that you'll either have to pay out for a full license key, or use OpenOffice or a similar free alternative. Also a lot of those laptops seem to have only 2 USB ports, personally that would drive me bananas although I suppose it wouldn't bother everyone - keep an eye on details like that too.

Wow thank you that's brilliant! Knew if I came on mumsnet you would sort me out.

During my search I found a couple I liked the look of- can I run them past your expert eyes?

m.tesco.com/mt/www.tesco.com/direct/hp-pavilion-g6-1154sa-laptop-intel-core-i3-3gb-320gb-156-display/212-8865.prd?skuId=212-8865&pageLevel= (hoping the link works!)

m.tesco.com/mt/www.tesco.com/direct/hp-pavilion-g6-1112-laptop-amd-phenom-ii-4gb-640gb-156-display-red/212-0561.prd?skuId=212-0561&pageLevel=

Thank you in advance.

The first one is just generally quite low powered. It's not bad, but I think you could get better value for money. I quite like the second one, that's a decent little machine :)

The second hp you linked to,I have had two hp pavillion laptops,both been great,dd has the first one now,its 4 years old and the only thing we have done to it ,is to replace the battery and it has even survived having a full glass of lemonade tipped over the keyboard.

Thank you again for your advice - its so hard isnt it....the more you look the more you find and the more confusing it gets!!

It's great to hear sassy that the hp pavillion ones last well - thank you.

I now know however, I want one with a multi card reader, web cam, able to play dvds (dont think i'll ever want to copy them!) and also as quick as possible as I get impatient waiting for things to load/download!

Naoko with the second tesco one I listed would it be slower running with the 1.8ghz than say one with 2.3 or 2.5ghz? Or because its quad core would that mean its 4x 1.8ghz?!! Also does the ram effect running speed and if not what does it do?

Sorry for all the questions i'm a bit bamboozled with all the numbers and terms!

Thanks again for all your help

It depends a bit on what you're doing with the PC. It's not as simple as just quadrupling the speed to get a big number and assume it'd be really fast. The big advantage of multi-core processors (and it's probably worth pointing out that the i3 and i5 as shown in some of the laptops linked aren't single core either, it just doesn't say so in the name - clear as mud, I know! Google the model no. to find out how many cores it has if it doesn't specify) comes when you a. often do a lot of things at the same time (because it can load balance with each core handling a task, rather than core no. 1 trying to do it all and the other three sitting idle) or b. use software specifically written with multi-threading support so it can be handled by multiple cores at once (not as common as you'd hope).

Basically, a 1.8ghz quad core is obviously slower than a 2.5ghz quad core. If, however, you're comparing it to a processor with a higher clockspeed but fewer cores, there isn't really an unequivocal answer.

RAM is the working memory, and again will aid multitasking. I would flat out refuse to buy anything with less than 4GB ram these days. Both processor and RAM affect how fast a pc is, so you want to try and balance the machine you buy - there's no point buying a massively expensive top of the line processor if you're only going to put 2GB RAM in the pc. It's like putting a ferrari engine in a mini.

Wow thank you! I have def learnt something from this thread. Hopefully to make what I have just bought a good buy- What do you think?! Hopeless at links from my phone - but it's the toshiba satellite pro c660-2DN which I got for £299 apparently reduced from £599?! A lot less than my original budget but seemed a good deal - I hope it's ok anyway
Thanks again everyone for your help.

That looks like a decent machine for the money, I'm glad you didn't pay 599 for it though because that'd have been daylight robbery! Enjoy your new laptop when it arrives :)