Sub-£400 powerful laptops discussion

joshwa

In answer to the above question you should be looking for:

Dual core (ideally core 2 duo)
2gb ram
160gb hard drive
15.4" widescreen
Vista Home Premium

From Dell small business dell.com/uk the Dell Vostro 1510 is £360 inc vat (and free delivery) - dvd writer and wireless should be standard.

This looks like a good deal for dual core £300
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_5715Z-2A2G08Mi_LX.ALD0X.018/version-1.asp

And this looks like the cheapest core2duo with 2gb ram £350
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_5720-1A2G08Mi_Laptop_LX.AVG0X.177/version-1.asp

Although I don't know what the traditional shops (currys, comet etc) are likely to offer this bank holiday weekend?

This one's available for £330 but only has 1gb (2gb would be £30 from crucial)
http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/407100/FUJITSU-SIEMENS-AMILO-LI1718-1G

And this one's £308 for an AMD dual core with 2gb
http://www.simplyasus.com/ASUS_X50N-AP179C_410225.html

trigger2

joshwa - you sound like you know what you're talking about ! We need a new laptop, hubby uses it for storing photos & music,me I just browse the t'internet ! Would the Acer one for £299 be a good deal ? OH saw one (an HP one) advertised in Tesco for similar price but Windows vista basic instead, 1 GB Ram, 120 hard drive, DVD RW, Adobe reader, Media Player etc.
http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.203-0232.aspx
It seems ok but I really have no idea ? Which one would you recommend ?

regards & thanks

trigger

trigger2

bump please !

trigger2

bump please - someone !!

mortishian

Not sure if it'll help, but I had the £300 budget in place also, so after much deliberation I went for Chalit's second option:

2
Next alternative I found is the Acer Aspire 5720 Core 2 Duo on Play.com for the same price £330 as the Fujitsu above with very similar spec. For the same price you get a better processor (20% faster) however you sacrifice 80GB / half of your hard drive space and is a little heavier at 3.36kg.

Using the 5% voucher for Play.com that you'll find on the vouchers board plus Quidco brought it to just over budget at about £302.

Good specs for the price I thought. Hard drive is perhaps a bit skinny but the way the price of memory is going I'm pretty relaxed about being able to upgrade pretty cheaply by the time my daughter gets even remotely close to using it all.

Hope it helps anyway. I somehow suspect that like me you've been sat there pondering away for days and weeks when really I guess you've just got to bite the bullet and go for it eventually. I found that a decent bottle of wine helps in this regard

trigger2

thanks for that, I hadnt checked the vouchers out yet ! tbh I dunno if a smaller hard drive would make a difference to us, is it too early for that bottle yet ?!!

Miss_Cakey_Bun

I am one of those suspects I give in now and am off to PC world and let the devil take my money at least I will have a laptop and can stop worrying I am buying the wrong darn one....hey its only a laptop I am not a brain surgeon if I do it wrong someone wont die :rotfl:

mtfree

Looking for a decent laptop and been looking at the acer 5920 at pcworld for £399 its the only one i can find with 3GB of memory. Any comments would be helpful

joshwa

trigger2 wrote: »

joshwa - you sound like you know what you're talking about ! We need a new laptop, hubby uses it for storing photos & music,me I just browse the t'internet ! Would the Acer one for £299 be a good deal ? OH saw one (an HP one) advertised in Tesco for similar price but Windows vista basic instead, 1 GB Ram, 120 hard drive, DVD RW, Adobe reader, Media Player etc.
http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.203-0232.aspx
It seems ok but I really have no idea ? Which one would you recommend ?

regards & thanks

trigger

Windows Vista ideally needs 2gb of ram - basically it uses 1gb of ram just to load Windows itself - so any extra programs you want to run will need the extra memory. If you do any photo editing on it you'll want 2gb ram as that'll speed things up.

You'll also want at least an 80gb hard drive - photos these days can take up a lot of hard drive space.

If you want to spend £300 I would go for one with 2gb ram, and vista home premium. It gives you extra features (backup, media center etc) and is nicer to use than Basic.

The differences between the different Vista versions can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx

Personally I'd get the core2duo one fom play.com for £330 mentioned above.

joshwa

mtfree wrote: »

Looking for a decent laptop and been looking at the acer 5920 at pcworld for £399 its the only one i can find with 3GB of memory. Any comments would be helpful

this one? Looks like a good deal
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/353589