Choosing New Laptop

[securespark]

Mrs Secure is desperate for a replacement computer now. Instead of a tower, she wants laptop.

I have searched here for advice, but most will be out of date now.

What do you recommend in the £3/400 range?

She won't be doing gaming or handling large quantities of photo files.

Built-in wireless and long battery life would be good and I guess it would also be good to have an up-to-date chipset?

What about this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/341125-fujitsu-lifebook-ah530-laptop-vfy-ah530mp505gb

Thanks in advance for advice.

 

[joinerjohn]

Avoid Asus laptops like the plague. Customer support is useless and any faults with manufacturing are played down.

 

[securespark]

Yeah, I got that from an anonymous comment on ebuyer:

This laptop is good value of money in terms of specs, but I was astonished by how much cr*pware comes pre loaded on it. I'm an IT professional and I'm having trouble believing that soo much pointless bloatware could possibly be on a brand new laptop. I'm uninsalling them one by one but there literally must be over 100 bits of nonsense on here. That's no hyperbole, I reckon if I sat and counted I would get to over 100, it's going to take ages to get it all off.
It's like a trouble user's laptop after 2-3 year of installing junk - and this is brand new straight out of the box.

It's making me reconsider buying Asus in the future if this is the way they are heading.

I would give it five stars without all the cr*p but with 2-3 hours of uninstalling 3 is the most I can give it.

 

[EddieM]

At that price point you could get a reasonable, if unspectacular DELL, they're ok, for most things.

 

[Alarm]

Toshiba

 

[securespark]

Toshiba?:

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?page=1...filtermfr=26&filterpricebands=[200+TO+499.99]

Dell? I went on their site and idly picked one. Discovered the PSU/charger was extra. £70 extra.........

 

[gregers]

go to comet and have a look,get the manager and say HOW much for cash.
go for an i5 but im thinking might be a bit more on your budget.

 

[Astra99]

In my capacity as an IT Systems Engineer, I have found the HP/Compaq laptops (and desktops) to be reliable. However, as has been mentioned earlier, they do come with some "freebies" and "bloatware" which very often takes longer to remove than to set up the rest of the machine!

 

[securespark]

Yeah, want to steer clear of unwanted carp.

I'd rather have a laptop with nothing installed at all and buy my own OS than wade through reams of useless software uninstalling it.

 

[securespark]

go to comet and have a look,get the manager and say HOW much for cash.
go for an i5 but im thinking might be a bit more on your budget.

They are a bit seperate, aren't they?

Thanks.

 

[lee2009]

forget about brand names, its all to do wiith whats inside.

this will do you

processor i3**** make sure yo get one with 4 digits, avoid the ones with only 3 *** as they are older processors.

3 to 4 gig of ram (the more the better)

intel hd graphics

500 gig of hard drive (the more the better)

windows 7.

thats you sorted for your price range, i wouldnt give a hoot about the manufacture, as none of the manufactures make anything thats inside the laptops (key conpoments, ie processor ram) some may make hard drives etc.

dont get one of those litte notebook things.

 

[Monkeh]

thats you sorted for your price range, i wouldnt give a hoot about the manufacture, as none of the manufactures make anything thats inside the laptops (key conpoments, ie processor ram) some may make hard drives etc.

Really? Samsung make RAM. They make LCD panels too. Actually they're one of the larger semiconductor companies out there. Just an example.

Best advice I can give is stay far away from anything with a glossy screen. They're unusable.

 

[lee2009]

cpu and gpu all that matters

 

[lee2009]

cpu and gpu all that matters

 

[Monkeh]

cpu and gpu all that matters

No, they're really not, but I'll leave you with that shortsighted opinion.