Buying A Laptop

[Guest tom2b]

I need a laptop as ive kicked the family computer out of my room as i need my privacy. I tend to use the comp late evening when everyones gone to bed so could really do with my own laptop in my room.

ive got about £400 to spend on one, all i use it for is watching dvds, using the internet, microsoft office etc. But i want a quiet laptop as my brothers is rather loud every now and again when the fan comes on in the middle of the film.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what to get?

[Guest stu205]

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products...;l=en&s=dhs

 

usual suspects for sprcial offers, p c world, dabs.com etc but look at Dell they seam to have good kit and at least use it to knock down pc world

[Guest graham dockerill]

Bought one last year from www.technoworld.com which do good deals, also today Tesco are advertising a Acer at £299 which is as cheap as you can get I think.

[Guest scottie686]

i have the dell inspiron 6000 and think it's the badgers nadgers! had to buy micro office separately, but still a good bye! i think they're now doing models with a gloss screen like a tv! i can feel an upgrade coming on!

[RedTrev]

I bought the ACER Travelmate 2414WMLi for £299.92 from Tesco's 2 days ago. It's a 15.4" widescreen and has built in wireless capability. DVD dual layer writer, whatever that means! Quite a nice machine at a great price. Only downfall I found is it needs more memory. Extra 512MB is £34 from Crucial delivered.

 

I took it home and 'er indoors went straight out and bought one for herself!

[Guest hypermick]

Trev,. The dual layer writer is a fairly standard item on most Pc's nowadays.

 

It basically means instead of using the standard DVD capacity at 4.7g maximum you can write a disc at roughly twice the capacity of storage (ie,. for longer films etc,. ). The down side is the cost of the blank discs. theyre still hideously expensive and not that available.

 

By the way, whats the hard drive size on that Tesco bargain ? sounds good and very cheap !

 

 

Mick

[RedTrev]

Thanks for the dvd info Mick, much appreciated.

The hard drive is 40GB.

 

Trev

[Guest macca]

I've got a Dell and me Brother just bought a Dell too, great lap tops, I'll be upgrading later this year, and going straigh back to dell. I had a Sony Vaio for a while great bit of kit, but stupidly expensive.

 

A few of the guys at work have Acer's they seem like good value for money too.

 

Macca

[Guest red7]

5 Toshiba Satellites in this house (bought one a year) and never missed a beat in 5 years. Excellent machines.

[Guest shane1664]

Privacy? using it late at night? watching dvds? sounds like the reason i bought a laptop!

 

the Toshiba satellites are good value, i have an A60, bought it off ebay for £300 with a case and its lasted me a year now. but the problem with the older ones are overheating, so you get a loud fan noise. the later ones are ok though.

good hunting!

 

Shane

[Guest tom2b]

You make it sound like l watch the sort of dvds people without a woman in there life watch lol!

Certainly food for thought, still dont know what to get though!

[Guest robin]

i,ve got hp pavillion. a little over budget but even the cheaper ones are brilliant machines. mines the 17" widescreen and i use it as my sole home computer/portable dvd player etc.. cracking machine!

[Grim]

You make it sound like l watch the sort of dvds people without a woman in there life watch lol!

 

 

But you still do!

[Guest salty_monk]

Dell Inspiron 9200 here... with 17" widescreen & built in "Subwoofer" (Oh yes... it really has!! )

 

Nice machine. Centrino processor is good too (lots of battery life). This one has a 128mb 3D ATI graphics card in it, I had Pro Engineer running on it a couple of months back, my firend was most upset he'd just spent 3 times as much on a "more powerful" (read heavier) machine with a smaller screen when he say what it could do...

 

The cheaper machines normally need more memory in them (no big deal) & have "shared memory" graphics cards without as much hardware, celeron processors etc. Also batteries are normally smaller etc etc ... you get what you pay for but one of the cheaper machines should be more than up for a bit of Word, Excel, Email & Internet & the odd porno on DVD Just don't try to do it all at once...

 

Girlfriend has £300 low grade Dell bought last Christmas, works fine, does all she asks of it etc...

 

Dan

[Guest Andy Badger]

have you considered an IBM thinkpad???

theyre titanium so they are stupidly light, they're compact, easy to upgrade (not so common on lappys) & can be had for not a lot of money....

Just worth considering. Ive got the T40 at work which is brilliant, but im running a very very expensive HP lappy for the house...basically a PC in a lappy shell (no bloody room with arrival of child!!!!)

 

just thought id add my 2 cents worth to the debate.

 

happy hunting