Sub-£350 powerful laptops discussion

TakeThis

rothchick wrote: »

The i5 once sounds good but its out of stock. Have seen it on comet http://www.comet.co.uk/p/Laptops/buy-ASUS-X53E-SX1111V-Laptop/781231
Its a different colour but same model so am assuming its the same?

I would be spending my money on any of them. My post was just to discourage you from spending that amount on a first generation i3. Better to get the ASUS for £10 more.

But for me, since I have little use for the latest and greatest processor, I spend accordingly.

You may obtain a better processor, but then lose out with a poorer battery, less connectivity....

Not sure why you feel that you need an i5.

Sugar_Junkie

Hi could I pick your brains. My mum is after a new laptop but I always get desktop PCs and know little about laptops. She has around £400 to spend and will use it largely for the internet, and streaming the odd tv program, but she also uses Photoshop fairly regularly for touching up photos. That's where I get stuck. I don't know what to look for in a laptop to make sure it'll run photoshop ok. Any advice?

silvercar

silvercar wrote: »

I need to replace my desktop, and I'm thinking that I wouldn't lose anything by getting a laptop instead. I have a wireless keyboard and mouse and a newish acer screen that I could plug into the laptop when needed, so what would my loss be?

My current desktop is 8 years old, spec is:

MS Windows XP
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
991 MB RAM(think this was upgraded from the original)
NVIDIA GeForce2 Integrated GPU.

I don't know what half that stuff means, the computer was built by a mate who know longer builds computers for people so it would be a question of buying something off the shelf.

Could I get something better in a laptop for around £350? I don't want refurbished and I don't want Dell.

Used for emailing, internet and the odd facebook game. I have noticed that the current machine is slow on games and multi-tasking so do want something faster. Could I do that on a budget of £350 for a laptop or am I better getting a desktop?

Anyone help?

donny-gal

Hi silvercar

In the absence of any real experts, they may be working, here is my opinion:

I think in these days, unless you have a real reason for a desktop, laptops give far more flexibility, and the specs really have improved. The operating system has gone from XP to Vista and now Windows 7. I am no expert on Processors, but would expect most laptops around £350 to have a far better Processor than you have now. Ensure you have at least 4mb of memory, and you may want to look for one with a independent graphics card rather than one built into the motherboard if you want really special graphics.

All those mentioned on pages 57 & 58 look OK. Depends what games you want to run maybe you could give them some more info.
DG

silvercar

donny-gal wrote: »

Hi silvercar

In the absence of any real experts, they may be working, here is my opinion:

I think in these days, unless you have a real reason for a desktop, laptops give far more flexibility, and the specs really have improved. The operating system has gone from XP to Vista and now Windows 7. I am no expert on Processors, but would expect most laptops around £350 to have a far better Processor than you have now. Ensure you have at least 4mb of memory, and you may want to look for one with a independent graphics card rather than one built into the motherboard if you want really special graphics.

All those mentioned on pages 57 & 58 look OK. Depends what games you want to run maybe you could give them some more info.
DG

Thank you for replying.

the only games are really bejeweled blitz and zuma blitz, at the moment.:o:o

eleanora_

Hi!

I was wondering if anyone can recommend me a laptop around the £350-£400 mark. I'll be using it mostly for Adobe Lightroom (processing large RAW files from my Canon 600D), browsing the internet, listening to music, streaming TV (Iplayer etc), and maaaaybe playing the Sims 3

I'd like a decent hard drive size (due to my collection of photos and music) - around 500GB minimum. I don't want an Acer, as I've had them before and wasn't impressed by the flimsy feel of the build. So far I've been looking at this, this, this and this. Can anyone suggest any others that would be good?

Thanks in advance

donny-gal

eleanora

If you are looking for reliability this table helps show you the more reliable makes. Asus & Toshiba come out the best with HP being the worst. This is a little old now, but I have not found a newer one.

If you check out the ones shown on the last two pages, you will find many options.
DG

Knarf44

Of course many people have their favourite laptop brands and will defend their particular brand to the hilt. I work in laptop repairs and can only go by my personal experience of the brands we see regularly with problems and by far the most problematic are HP and the cheaper Sony Vaios. Dells you can be lucky or unlucky with; similarly with Medion and Toshiba. We rarely see Asus or Lenovo laptops in the shop and when we do it's usually for simple problems like failed hard drive or viruses.

Personally, I have been using an Asus laptop for the last 15 months which is on 12-14 hours a day - so far it's proved very reliable.

neilj203

Knarf44 wrote: »

Of course many people have their favourite laptop brands and will defend their particular brand to the hilt. I work in laptop repairs and can only go by my personal experience of the brands we see regularly with problems and by far the most problematic are HP and the cheaper Sony Vaios. Dells you can be lucky or unlucky with; similarly with Medion and Toshiba. We rarely see Asus or Lenovo laptops in the shop and when we do it's usually for simple problems like failed hard drive or viruses.

Personally, I have been using an Asus laptop for the last 15 months which is on 12-14 hours a day - so far it's proved very reliable.

That's very reassuring. I've just bought the Asus K54H ebuyer.com £349 (as recommended in earlier posts). So far I think it's terrific.
Web browsing is very quick.

JDPower

eleanora_ wrote: »

Hi!

I was wondering if anyone can recommend me a laptop around the £350-£400 mark. I'll be using it mostly for Adobe Lightroom (processing large RAW files from my Canon 600D), browsing the internet, listening to music, streaming TV (Iplayer etc), and maaaaybe playing the Sims 3

I'd like a decent hard drive size (due to my collection of photos and music) - around 500GB minimum. I don't want an Acer, as I've had them before and wasn't impressed by the flimsy feel of the build. So far I've been looking at this, this, this and this. Can anyone suggest any others that would be good?

Thanks in advance

I would suggest if working with RAW files you would ideally be looking for a machine with dedicated graphics (or perhaps an i5 with shared graphics), this would also help the performance of TV streaming and Sims playing.
Of the four you mention you'd be wasting your time with the last two, which only leaves two HPs, which don't have a good reliabilty reputation.