New laptop - advice needed

Osem · 06-07-2011, 19:32

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 Â£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.

danielf · 06-07-2011, 19:48

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.

MovedGoalPosts · 06-07-2011, 20:21

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.

Osem · 06-07-2011, 21:07

Useful feedback guys and lots to think about. Thanks.

wazz · 06-07-2011, 23:12

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

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

Ben B · 06-07-2011, 23:31

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

danielf · 06-07-2011, 23:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ben B

<snip>. I would always advise on getting an AMD processor rather than Intel, but I guess that's down to personal opinions

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

candy1567 · 07-07-2011, 00:02

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 Â£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

haydnwalker · 07-07-2011, 08:56

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 Â£399. Good as a general use web/video/music/office machine

Osem · 07-07-2011, 13:22

TVM everyone

Waldo Pepper · 07-07-2011, 18:34

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 Â£35 for their "Tech guys" to install my SSD into a new laptop. Two screws and a quick swap would have been about Â£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.

Osem · 07-07-2011, 20:49

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.

Osem · 08-07-2011, 08:49

Found this earlier:

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

for Â£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'.

candy1567 · 08-07-2011, 08:58

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

Lord Nikon · 08-07-2011, 09:06

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.