Please advise me on buying a laptop!

[wellthatsdoneit]

I can't pay more than £400. I'd like it to be fast. I'll be using it primarily for browsing/iplayer but will also need to do some word and excel documents on it. I don't know anything about computers! What's a netbook? What's i3 and i7 and AMD?....

Please help!

A Netbook is a very small laptop (7-10 inch screen) with no CD/DVD drive.

Core i3, i5 and i7 are just brand names for processors. A £400 PC should come with a Core i3 processor.

At that budget you should get at least 4GB RAM and a 5GB hard disk.

Ok that's it I need glasses, I though your title said leopard! That's why I clicked......madness....

i3,i5 and i7 are processors made by intel,Amd are processors made by Amd,an i3 whilst being the lowest speed processor would be perfectly adequate for your stated needs, just make sure it has 4GB ram as a minimum,the ram and the processor go hand in hand,a fast processor wont run fast unless it has adequate ram.

Thanks for your advice. I bought an acer aspire, i3 processor, 8gb ram with 1TB hardrive for £350. The processor isn't as high as I'd like, but for the price it seemed the best I could buy. Until I can afford a mac probook I'll resign myself to a slow mircrosoft os!

Ooh I'm looking for a laptop can you tell me where you got that from please?

It's from pc world - think its the E1-570. I'm really pleased with it so far, other than windows 8, but it's hard to get a laptop without windows 8 now.

www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-netbooks/laptops/laptops/acer-aspire-e1-570-15-6-laptop-21743676-pdt.html

Link above - I'm not sure it's normally £470 though - think I've just seen an acre with the same spec for £399 in tesco.