New laptop - advice needed
 

Thinking about buying Osem Jnr a laptop as a little pre 'A' level thankyou for being a terrific lad and doing pretty much all we expect of him. So far 've been looking at Acer, Toshiba, HP and Compaq and it seems you can get quite a good machine for about £350.

I'm not really into these things so can anyone give any general advice re the various brands (reliability etc.) and suggest any decent suppliers. So far as spec is concerned he won't be gaming or anything heavy duty like that so it doesn't need to be super fast or anything. I'd reckon 3-4 gb RAM, 250gb HDD minimum, DVD rewriter, not sure about processors and all the various connections though so perhaps someone could suggest what we should look for as there are so many options.

Cheers as always.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Over the past 8 years, I've had a Toshiba, an Acer and a Dell. I found the Acer and Dell poor in terms of build quality. The Acer produced so much heat that it fried the Hard Drive. The Dell had a side-mounted audio plug, which gave in after 3 months as you invariably leaned on it when mousing. The keyboard of the Dell isn't very good either, with a few keys malfunctioning after 2 years.

So, on my experience, I'd opt for Toshiba, though my Toshiba was the first laptop I owned, so things may have changed. There's a couple of people on the forum that deal with laptops for work, and they may have a better idea of general brand reliability.

Regarding suppliers: I found laptopsdirect pretty decent both in terms of price and service.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

For work we swear by anything Dell. My laptop for work gets used daily and my only business machine, and has been fine for 5 years, even after it's been dropped a few times. Only thing that went wrong was the external power supply thing.

For personal use I recently bought a Samsung Q430 which is i5 CPU based. It's great but it is also quite high spec. But I must say it get's quite warm. It will be interesting to see how well it does long term. But short term I'd certainly look at the Samsung brand again.

Bottom line you need to be thinking about how the laptop would be used: weight and size versus protability, storage capacity, screen size (real estate may be more important than graphics quality unless they are into photo or other media editing and not gaming), balance the CPU speed with memory, make sure it has "n" speed wireless, and perhaps look at battery duration especially if it's going to get mobile use.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Useful feedback guys and lots to think about. Thanks.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

U can pick up a nice brand new laptop these days for £300-£500

go to john lewis/currys/pc world/asda/tesco ect ect and compare prices and laptops

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

I got my laptop with HP direct from hp.com. They have some good prices for the specs on there, far better than you would find in stores. Not had any real issues with it. I would always advise on getting an AMD processor rather than Intel, but I guess that's down to personal opinions :)

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

It's a pity Zing's gone, but he was definitely recommending Intel when he was last here...

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

have u tried www.misco.co.uk, thats where i got my last laptop from and they have got some good bargains at the minute as i was looking at their site for one for my daughter

we also get emails of fantastic deals they have, ie, got 48" LCD full HD tv, for £350, it was reduced to 400 but we also got 50 quid cashback, it had 2yr guarantee on it as well and with free delivery by DHL

and no am not on commission, wish i was would spend a fortune there lol

Juliex

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

I purchased a HP G6 yesterday as a replacment for my Wife's Dell Inspiron (which the build quality was poop).

It seems better built, and is ok Spec'd (quad core AMD Phenom/4gig RAM/500gig HDD) that was at PCWorld for £399. Good as a general use web/video/music/office machine :)

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

TVM everyone :)

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Avoid anything from the HP Pavilion series. Mine worked fine until about a few weeks after the warranty expired. HP were simply not interested.

Having Googled my problem of overheating and it seems the problem was rife regarding the Nvidia chip overheating. I have had to make huge mods to the motherboard by adding highly polished copper shims plus a dose of Artic Silver paste to replace what appears to be a piece of blue tack looking snot as a heatsink transfer material over the GPU. During me finding out what was overheating it sat on top of a huge floor fan blasting cold air over everything inside.

Fortunately for me I had the skill of dismantling the thing after watching several Youtube vids of how to solve the problem.

Despite this problem, I really liked my HP lappy as I had a good optimised version of W7 installed on my SSD with all my apps which I wasn't prepared to give up and buy another. PC World wanted £35 for their "Tech guys" to install my SSD into a new laptop. Two screws and a quick swap would have been about £400/hour from experience of some dork to do.

It took many hours to dismantle fix and put back together. Not something an average Joe would want to do.....so avoid at all cost.

BTW it's still going strong but with many physical mods that include a keyboard with a slight arc to hold down the copper shimms.

In my opinion re-laptops, as we get faster and hotter with multi core CPUs, there is a limit outside Moores law where we can cool them because of the huge amount of heat generated.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Thanks Waldo - good advice. I'm not looking for the highest spec machine and feel happeir about that now. :) We just want something which will be reasonably capable and reliable.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Found this earlier:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004H1T66...SIN=B004H1T66W

for £260 from Amazon.

What do you guys think? Anyone see any obvious and important omissions or weaknesses? The reviews seems OK on the whole (there's a few negatives and that's to be expected at this price) and there'd enough left over for a bag/accessories etc. and it's not the end of the world if it packs up after 18 months or he breaks it. I especially like the full keyboard with numeric pad which seems to be absent from many other machines we've looked at.

------------------------

One thing occurs to me, we have a 3 licence copy of Office 2007 Home/Student which I'd intend to install on any new laptop. As with many others I've seen, this laptop comes with Office 2010 installed but not activated. Aside from taking up hard disc space, is this likely to cause any issues if I try to load the older version? Would I need to uninstall the supplied version first? Not very experienced at this sort of thing so feel free to patronise me and state the 'obvious'. ;)

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Hi

to be honest i wouldn't go for an acer mate, but then thats just my opinion

i have the acer 5315 which is a couple of spec below the one u posted

there was nothing wrong with the machine, but its all the crap acer put on it especially the acer empowerism, in the end after the warranty was up i reformatted and installed my own windows 7.

the reason for this is that the acer empowerism controlls everything especially the laptop fan, as it does not run on a temperature basis but on a time basis which is controlled by the machine, so the laptop overheats especially if u try to take out the power option of the empowerism.

u can google this like i did and will find lots of ppl with the same prob with the empowerism. The other problem i had is if u let the computer go into hibernate, then wen u bring it out of hibernate then the fans do not kick in and the laptop overheats and shuts down. but on reboot the fans are fine, again i dont know if this is specific to the acer 5315 or it is due to their empowerism software (google it!!)

note this is only my opinion about acer laptops

Juliex

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

The NVidia overheat was the 88xx series GPU which has been retired. The Acer's still have southbridge problems.
Yes intel is always the best choice in a laptop, they run cooler and have better hardware level thermal management. If they get too hot they throttle back to cool down.
Ram - don't worry too much about it when you buy the laptop, it's cheaper to buy the extra via Crucial etc than to specify it in the purchase spec. The main things to look at are the CPU and Optical drive. Those are the most awkward to upgrade. (Cost, accessibility in terms of the CPU, availability in terms of the Optical drive)

Let's assume he's going to be gaming on the laptop, try to get one with NVIdia graphics (This I will admit is a personal preference, and the problematic 88xx has been retired.) and dedicated graphics memory (This is essential)

Dedicated vs Shared - If you have dedicated graphics ram that's ALL that ram is doing, if you have shared you end up with a bottleneck. Think of the system bus to memory as a motorway, the more traffic you throw down it the slower it all moves.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Thanks guys for the feedback. The laptop won't be used for gaming. He has an Xbox360, PS2 and PSP and he'll be told the laptop is for school work etc. and stuff like facebook (which thankfully he's not addicted to). Being a sensei, he spends a lot of his spare time practicing and teaching karate so I guess gaming occupies only about 30-40 mins a day just before bed.

Reliability is key so I'm interested to learn about the potential overheating issues but am not sure if the point Lord Nikon makes relates to Candy's issue or not. Could you clarify please.

TVM :tu:

--------

Just been surfing about the worrying potential overheating issues and found this add for the same model with better spec for £249 here:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-53...item3f0b92829d

Seems like an even better deal but does anyone know anything about the supplier?

Meantime I'm still looking into overheating....

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

It was more relating to Waldo's issue than Candy's

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

OK tks for clarifying.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Re getting rid of unwanted MSOrifiice and other crap take a look at http://pcdecrapifier.com/download

Seriously, it does what it says on the tin.

Oh and make a Backup, Recovery DVD before you do too much installing/removing.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

TVM will do.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Please go on. I don't think I had this problem with the installed Vista. I got rid of this and installed a copy of W7. It doesn't natively support my webcam which isn't an issue as I have no need for one however if it cannot control my fan then it becomes an issue. I have tried "Speedfan" but it doesn't help as it cannot recognise the stuff connected.
LTSpice used to run fine but despite all my mods and copper shimms, it is the only program that can bring my HP to stop.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

I'd say go for an Acer. If he's not doing gaming (and I doubt he's doing encoding) pretty much any laptop/notebook (ie. not a netbook) will do. aybe save yourself a few £ while the gift is still very much worthwhile and just as much use (to him) as a more expensive model.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Sounds like a plan :)

I do prefer the Acer keyoard layout with the numeric pad that's missing from many of the other models I've looked at. Having said that I found a rather nice looking Toshiba here @£300:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/258876...edium=products

Intel Core 2 Duo T6670 2.2GHz
4GB RAM
320GB HDD
15.6" HD,Webcam
DVD±RW
Free Webroot Internet Security + Free Carry Case

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

I'd be interested to know if anyone has a similar 'Tosh' and what they think of it. I've been seriously considering that ebuyer model for myself.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

As a Linux user, the three button mouse on Levano Thinkpad is brilliant though some report the quality is down from the IBM days when they were great build. Pricey though.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Absolute tosh if you ask me.

Crap screen, crap battery life, crap wireless that rarely works, crap touchpad placement (though a very good touchpad), crap hard drives that have the highest failure rates I've ever seen.

Toshiba are extremely variable when it comes to build quality but far as I'm concerned their low-end machines look, feel, and perform absolutely crap. The only reason I kept it was because it was free. Even then I avoid using it where possible.

As part of my "all things IT" job I work in laptop repairs and I've been through a fair few thousand working and broken laptops. Every manufacturer has it's duds and there's no manufacturer that's universally better than any other. But that particular range of Toshibas I'd definately avoid.

For low to mid-range value I'd say Acer are the ones to beat, mid to upper midrange HP & Samsung, top end Toshiba and Sony make various machines that are unbeatable at the top of their respective categories.

Dell machines tend to be quite reliable and serviceable across the range, and have great customizeability but just lack any particular unique selling points that'd let me recommend them.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

My thanks for all the information. I've always had Dells up to now so it's hard to judge alternatives. You can't beat real-life experience. :)

So, I'll go back to looking at the Acers. That was my original plan before I saw the Toshiba.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

i have as toshiba, i bought it from tesco's bout a year ago its the toshiba satellite L500

it has the numeric pad at the side, touch pad is great and very responsive, luv the feel of the keyboard, although the case looks a bit cheap but all in all a great laptop and ive had no probs with it heres my spec,
Key Features
- Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit (pre-installed, Toshiba-HDD recovery) and
Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 32-bit (pre-installed, Toshiba-HDD recovery)- Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T6600- DVD-RW SuperMulti drive (Double Layer)- 3072 MB (2048+ 1024) DDR RAM (800MHz)- 15.6" TruBrite® (1366 x 768) High Brightness display

its still running great, was easy to set up and easy to use, although it did take a bit to get used to the number keypad which makes the keyboard off centre a bit, as i am a typer i found my fingers felt in the wrong place lol

Juliex

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

You tend to only get the numerical keypad on larger laptops with screens 15-17" makes them less portable really. You can get USB keypads though if you would really miss it.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Nah don't do that!!! Get the Tosh, try it out in depth and then let me know if it lives up to its name so I can decide whether or not to buy one myself... ;)

These threads always seem to raise more questions than they answer don't they. :)

---------- Post added at 19:05 ---------- Previous post was at 19:04 ----------

Good point that man!

I tend to forget all the wonderful USB bits and pieces you can get these days but I'd still prefer not to rely on extras if I can avoid it.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Don't they just.

Been down to PC World today to get some 'hands on' time. I thought actually hefting them around and twiddling about on the keyboards might help. But quite honestly I'm no nearer to a decision even after that.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

What i hate about my parents Toshiba laptop is the annoying loud click when pressing the touch pad buttons, so for that reason alone i'd never buy a Toshiba if it suffers from that, luckily my trusty Dell doesn't suffer from that.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

The loud click is part of the overall cheap feel of the device. The Realtek wireless cards they use are junk, the crappy non-extendable battery is junk, and anything with a Toshiba hard drive in it is junk imo. I've had to replace 3 times more Toshiba hard drives than any other make.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Found these articles regarding reliability:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08...laptop_survey/

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile...laptops-651331

They're from Aug. 2008 and Nov 2009 so has something happened to the Toshiba offering since then?

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

I bought an ACER 5612WLMi several years ago and have no problems with it. I have recommended ACER to several friends who then bought ACERs and have also had no problems.

I've recently upgraded mine to Windows 7 and it handles that very well.

I'd recommend ACERs to anyone

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

I have also found this weekend that painting the heatsink in matt black spray paint dropped the internal temps by over 10 deg C. I think the heatpipe has died which apparently isn't uncommon. Matt black paint allows the heatsink to radiate heat into the air which is moved by the fan.

Re: New laptop - advice needed
 

Well in highly atypical style I have today purchased the following from Costco:

Toshiba Satellite C660 181 - AMD E350 dual core processor, 6gb RAM, 320gb HDD.

It hasn't got all the bells, whistles and gaming capability some machines have but I reckon it'll be fine for what my lad is going to use it for.

Cost £325 inc VAT and 2 year warranty.

Bought a Tech21 impact wrap sleeve at the same time for just over £10 inc VAT just like the one shown below.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tech21-Impac.../dp/B00357XCHS