Laptop - 15" screen, SSD, i5 CPU for £500

[MovedGoalPosts]

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. 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?

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.

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?

[Jimmy-J]

Have you considered buying a manufacturer refurbished one to save money. They normally come with a full 12 month warranty, and are in great condition. I'd stay away from some HP models though.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Even refurbished stuff doesn't seem to fit the bill. You can have SSD with the small screens 10"-11" type thing, or alternatively you are expected to be buying an all powerful brute of a machine, with budget to match.

[Jimmy-J]

Was just thinking that the money you will save can go towards a larger SSD.

[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.

[alferret]

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.

I just got an SSD and it was a toss up between the Sandisk Ultra plus (very good Marvel controller) & Samsung 840 EVO. Opted to pay a little more for the EVO.
As QTX says, get the lappy you want, ditch the mechanical and pop in the SSD, install windows and use the mechanical drive as a portable.

[MovedGoalPosts]

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.

I should point out this isn't for me, I've just been asked to spec something up, and am really struggling to find something that makes sense. 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.

[qasdfdsaq]

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.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Thanks for the thoughts.

I suppose it comes down to what an individual buyer considers to be budget components. I still see laptops being marketed with celeron and pentium processors. That to me is the bottom end.

It still strikes me odd that manufacturers seem happy with these low speed HDDs and yet will otehrwise go for a reasonable spec CPU,sometimes a mobile version of a GPU rather than the embedded CPU's graphics, current networking and alls sorts, and yet with SSD's becoming mainstream affordability, there are so few apparent options, even from manufacturers such as Dell who have previously allowed so much customisation.

The hybrid HDD/SDD generally has a slow platter hard drive, coupled with a small amount of the NAND type stuff. Effectively the solid state memory part of the drive acts as a cache and can't be sufficient to hold the relevant parts of the OS and say office to really speed up all of the loading times. Any new data is going to be loaded at normal HDD speeds as it needs to be recorded on the HDD that is the main store. So yes a hybrid helps but only if the user is doing a lot of repetitive stuff.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Rob

Thanks for the thoughts. I suppose it comes down to what an individual buyer considers to be budget components. I still see laptops being marketed with celeron and pentium processors.

I guess. But Celerons and Pentiums are really targeted at the ultra-low end and embedded devices these days. I'd personally say anything under £500 is still in the economy/mainstream range, £500-1000 being midrange/enthusiast and £1000+ being high end.

That to me is the bottom end. It still strikes me odd that manufacturers seem happy with these low speed HDDs and yet will otehrwise go for a reasonable spec CPU,sometimes a mobile version of a GPU rather than the embedded CPU's graphics, current networking and alls sorts,

I have an £600 i5 machine from 4 years ago with 4GB of RAM, but 100Mbps ethernet and single-band wireless - while my £600 machine from 8 years ago already had gigabit LAN and dual-band wireless.

A lot of things are actually getting worse and being cut down for economy's sake and companies are counting on average consumers not knowing enough to notice. This is especially true of laptop graphics cards, which are almost always cut-down versions of two-generations old desktop parts re-badged with the same model numbers as the latest generation.

and yet with SSD's becoming mainstream affordability, there are so few apparent options, even from manufacturers such as Dell who have previously allowed so much customisation.

Yeah it's a shame Dell don't do that customization anymore and the only direct laptop they sell with an SSD is a £1500 XPS. HP don't seem to offer customizatino on their website either but I might be looking in the wrong place.

I know for certain Dell and HP still do customized laptops, I recently bought several including specifically specifying they replace the stock HDD with an SSD on one and adding a 4G modem on the other - but that was via business channels. In both cases they even came with an additional slot for a second SSD.

The hybrid HDD/SDD generally has a slow platter hard drive, coupled with a small amount of the NAND type stuff. Effectively the solid state memory part of the drive acts as a cache and can't be sufficient to hold the relevant parts of the OS and say office to really speed up all of the loading times.

I disagree here, and to be blunt, most of the industry disagrees - both people who make drives and people who review them. There's a good reason all the manufacturers have provided just 8GB of NAND - because that's a sufficient amount for most people.

Think about it. The Windows installer is barely 3GB - that's with all optional components and a bootable Windows install on the disk as well. Office still fits on 1-2 700MB CDs depending on what package you buy. The vast majority of Windows files are not used on most startups, so the actual 'hot' area required for startup is ~2GB.

Take a look at this SSHD review:
http://techreport.com/review/25425/s...ive-reviewed/4
which shows a hybrid drive (with only have 8GB cache) improving Windows bootup speed by 102%, and coming within 1.1 seconds of a high-end 240GB SSD.

Another one that focuses solely on the laptop model:
http://techreport.com/review/24561/s...ve-reviewed/10
Shows the laptop hybrid drive coming within 0.3 seconds of a mid-range SSD and 8.8 seconds faster than the fastest laptop drive. Even when loading a 5GB+ game in addition to Windows, it outperforms the fastest desktop drive in the world, being 45% faster than a high performance 7200RPM laptop drive, and only 14% slower than an SSD.

Another different site showing SSHDs with 8GB cache coming closer to 120GB SSDs than the fastest 10,000RPM desktop drive, both for loading Windows and loading Adobe CS5:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...-review-7.html

Another site using replay benchmarks showing the SSHD performing between 3x and 7x faster than high end laptop drives while loading Windows, Games, Office applications and running virus scans:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/549...ew/index8.html

Another review, this time showing the 8GB SSHD booting Windows faster than 30GB and 60GB flash accelerators:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...500gb_review/8

Any new data is going to be loaded at normal HDD speeds as it needs to be recorded on the HDD that is the main store. So yes a hybrid helps but only if the user is doing a lot of repetitive stuff.

With all due respect, the professionals designing these drives know what they're doing and know a lot more than you do on the subject. Booting Windows faster, starting Office, web browsing and general productivity use are the exact usage scenario these drives were designed to be best at - and numerous independent reviews have proven they work.

On a side note, one thing I hadn't thought of yesterday: M.2 SSDs. Many modern laptops come with a dedicated slot on the motherboard for an SSD, and these are full-fat high-performance SSDs with a faster interface than ordinary ones.

If you're unwilling to 'throw away' the bundled hard drive, then adding an SSD to a HDD-equipped laptop is a good compromise. Most modern chipsets even allow you to use the SSD as hybrid cache for any hard drive. Or add a 60-120GB SSD for system, applications and games, and leave the 500GB HDD for music/movies/etc. that don't need to be read quickly. M.2 SSDs can be faster than ordinary SSDs, and don't cost a whole lot more, and almost all mid/high end laptops come with one, if not two or more of these slots.