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Originally Posted by Rob

I'm really struggling with this for a general home / office use, internet, wordprocessing, email etc, machine that would last 3 years or so. Portability is less of a concern, but reasonable keyboard is important as there will be a lot of text entry, which is why tablet and small screens aren't really suited. There seem to be quite a few lappys out there with 15" screens, current i5 CPUs, 4GB and sometimes more RAM, permutations of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.

Funny enough I've got one just like that I'm planning on selling ... but it's a bit old.

But they are all handicapped by 5400RPM hard drives. It seems that manufacturers see storage capacity as more important than performance, but with many people having external drives, NAS and even cloud space then a really big drive isn't essential? For some even a 120GB SSD would suffice on a general purpose machine to fit the OS, Office and some local data storage. 240GB SSDs could be ideal. How much difference would that make to a laptop price between a 500GB or even 1TB HDD that are commonly fitted and a SSD? £30, £50?

No, they see cost as more important than performance. You're asking for a mid/low performance laptop. Manufacturers fit similar classes of components together. You've asked for a low/mid spec CPU, low/mid-spec RAM, and those will come with a low/mid-spec HDD. It makes no sense to pair a machine with low RAM and a slow CPU and superfast storage. Especially storage that's expensive, and hard not yet the norm in high-end laptops.

What I don't want to be doing is buying a lappy that immediately gets the HDD thrown out for a SSD. I've seen a couple of options for the Hybride SSB/HDD drives, but I'm not convinced that offers the real performance gains when arguably it's someone booting up and going straight to Office type applications, or interweb, rather than keep reading the same smaller bits of cached data over and over.

But that's exactly where hybrid drives give the most performance gains. Windows booting up and running Office type applications are reading the same smaller bits of cached data over and over. After all, how often do you reinstall Windows and Office? Static data that is accessed frequently on every bootup is exactly what SSHDs are best at (which is why the biggest storage manufacturers in the world specifically designed them that way - do you think they'd be selling drives that don't work in the majority of computers?)

I realise that for the use specified even an i5 CPU might be overkill, but I find nothing worse than a sluggish computer. Any thoughts or recommendations?

I'd say the SSD is the most overkill part. Based on your usage an ordinary hard drive will boot up and read everything it'll ever need to read within 20 seconds anyway so an SSD isn't going to save you much.

---------- Post added at 00:20 ---------- Previous post was at 00:19 ----------

Originally Posted by Qtx

Think the 5400rpm in laptops is to keep them cooler and use less power/battery compared to the faster ones. If you are happy to install Windows yourself, just get a machine and relace the drive. I would expect most i5 machines are new enough to not have issues with SSD and you can always get a usb caddy and use the drive it came with as an external extra drive when/if needed. 128GB seem to be the sweet size to get for SSD for price. This one is £45 but usually the 64GB are £35, so worth that extra tenner imo.

^^ Agreed. Although anything built in the last ten years shouldn't have issues with an SSD. 256GB is now the sweet spot for SSD pricing by the way, but 128 is just barely off the low end of said spot.

---------- Post added at 00:29 ---------- Previous post was at 00:20 ----------

Originally Posted by Rob

I understand the logic of reusing the HDD as a portable drive. But there is no need for such a drive as the vast majority of the time the lappy would be in a location with network storage available (and on the rare occasion that there wasn't a network, portability would mean you wouldn't want to be carrying a separate drive as well. It just seems silly to be forced to pay for something that I don't want to then have to swap it out in turn no doubt affecting warranty on the lappy.

Well you can always buy a laptop from a manufacturer that lets you customize the parts. That said, your logic is unfortunately the opposite of how it works in practice.

The cost of a, say, 500GB drive adds barely £20 or so to the overall cost of the laptop. However buying a laptop with an SSD usually involves a markup of 50-100% or more over the 'street' price of the same SSD. You'd be wasting more money buying a laptop with an SSD than buying one with a hard drive then throwing it out.

(Also it usually has no effect on the warranty, hard/solid state drives are user-serviceable parts on most machines)

It's as if the laptop manufacturer's have actually given up on innovation in the sector and are all trying to compete with either desktop replacements and outright power, or portability, or use the cheapest nastiest stuff hidden around a reasonable CPU.

No, not really, as I explained earlier, low-end laptops come with low-end storage. Don't forget the distinction between i3's and i5's in the laptop space is absolutely nothing at all like the distinction between i3's and i5's in the desktop space, in fact it's virtually nil.