Good laptop for under £800
 

Hi all,

Looking at possibly getting a new laptop thru work and its so confusing with all the different types of processor etc so would like to know if anyone has any suggestions.

I'm think I would look for something under £800 (inc VAT). Needs to be 4gb at least, with a good battery life, quiet and needs a bit of meat in the performance department. Not sure between dual core , core 2 i3/i5 as which will be the best option. Also not bothered if it is AMD under the hood.

Typical use will be with an external monitor as well so a 13/14" is ok as well as the normal 15" screens. I would have most of the office apps open together with Firefox, Dreamweaver and an ftp app with normally firefox, ie and safari open as well :-).

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

See if you can find an Asus G50 or G70 series laptop. It's a 4Gb Ram gaming spec laptop so plenty of horsepower, mine is a Core 2 duo and can handle bioshock 2 smoother than a PS3, battery life is about 5 hours on a standard battery. External outputs are VGA and HDMI as standard, drive is SATA internal but can take 2 SATA drives internally, Optical drive is also SATA and it has an eSATA port, 4 USB2 ports, 1 firewire, Expresscard port and goes like a rocket.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

I received my Dell Studio 15 with the Core i3 M350 2.26GHz) CPU on Friday, everything else is stock although i could've specced it up a bit, so 3GB of DDR3, 320GB HD and an ATI Mobility HD 4570 512mb (which is quite impressive in what it will run smoothly!), came to £570 or thereabouts. The screen is clear and it runs whisper quiet. Lovely piece of kit :)

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Toshi...EN/version.asp something like this for example?


http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Asp...on.asp?PID=384 this ones better. This one outspecs the rest so far by a considerable amount

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

There's an 'England Expects' promo on a couple of high end Toshiba laptops with a full refund if England win the world cup (lol) ..just so you know. http://www.toshiba.co.uk/england/england-expects.php
Click the England Expects link at the top for the full range of laptops with the offer.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

I recently went for an i5 spec 15 series, great bit of kit! Sure it looks a bit 'cheap' but its actually very nice to use and the quality is far and away better than the Acer. On the topic of the Acer, I had five faulty machines in a row from them, yep FIVE!! The quality control on display was shocking, I had problems ranging from scratched screens to its 'insides' sticking out of the the keyboard - crazy!!
Between the Dell and Acer I would take the Dell even if your loosing out on spec a little. Like I mentioned the build quality of the Acer's I had were simply awful, really quite shocked at how bad they were.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

I have an Acer Aspire 5100 - Never again will I buy Acer, and I will advise people to avoid them. On mine the motherboard developed a problem with the optical drive interface. 1 in 10 times the optical drive will be recognised and will work. The rest of the time not even the bios will see it. All components have been reflowed, and / or X-Rayed to confirm proper connectivity. It's the board itself. Searching forums indicates I am far from the only one with the problem, and Acer do not want to know. I will never again buy an Acer laptop.

I bought an Asus G50 to replace it. and I will recommend those to as many people as will listen. Fantastic machines.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

Take a look at http://www.ebuyer.com/product/180894. Good specs, good price. Acer aren't the best brand but they sure do some nice specs for a nice price.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

And more often than not as an extra bonus they throw in a fault or two! Lol

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

For that kinda of cash you could get a lappy with dedicated graphic card memory.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

i have a acer 5740g its great

core i5 2.26ghz cpu
ati radeon hd 5470 (outputs 1080p piece of ****)
4 gig ddr3
led screen
500 gig hdd

great piece of kit for £600!

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

Mines the core i3 2.13GHz version with 320GB HD. Still great for £530. It won't be 4GB of DDR3 either I don't think. Don't they have to come in 3's? LED Screen means LED backlight, not OLED screen.

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

yes, it is ddr3 and yeah i know it is LED, low power consumption and excellent quality!

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

i3 i5 and some i7 are double channel only the top end i7 on the x58 are triple

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

i mean the frequency of the ram 2 x 2 gb ddr3 1066mhz

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

I was responding to Abyss

---------- Post added at 15:47 ---------- Previous post was at 15:45 ----------

incidentally even the triple channel machines do not need to be in 3's if you install 4 sticks for example it maps the 3 as triple channel and the other stick as single channel

Re: Good laptop for under £800
 

LED back-light still equals a massive reduction in thickness, and power consumption and a big increase in image quality. My LED backlit screen is brighter on the lowest setting than my friends cathode based screen is at its highest. And no, DDR3 Can come in pretty much any configuration DDR2 can with the added benefit in laptops that it seems to allow more machines to use more than 4GB RAM (i.e. maximum stick size is 4GB in most machines now rather than 2GB). Though this is more than likely due to the newer motherboards used in these laptops rather than anything else.