Sub-£350 powerful laptops discussion

Jamesdeer001

Hi All

I was wondering if I could get some help!. I've had an Acer Aspire 5630 for nearly 4 years. It has served me relatively well. I use it for general about the house, internet, video watching etc and the only game I really play is Football manager. I've upgraded the RAM and upgraded to Win7. I have normally formatted it about once a year as I normally find performance decreases just before!

More recently though, I have found the laptop overheating and is now turning it self off due to heat. Also the battery life is pretty much non-existant (about 5 mins - is this normal?).

Anyway, I've basically come to the conclusion that I'll porbably need a new laptop soon! (performance is already down and it has only been 6 months since last format).
So firstly, are there any places you can sell your old laptops like mobile recycling places? Or is ebay the only option for something like this?
Secondly, I'm after recommendations of what I could possibly buy...!
I don't travel too much with it, but would like around 3+ hours worth of battery use (I don't have a desktop so definitely require a laptop)
for around the house. I do a fair amount of iplayer/video watching on it, as well as a lot of music playing. Similarly, a lot of internet surfing and office based products. Game wise, I only play football manager. The only editting I do is conversion of video/audio formats for my ipod and mobile. My budget is £350 or less.

Would you say the following is a good laptop

http://direct.asda.com/Lenovo-G550-15.6%22-Black-Notebook---4gb-RAM---320gb-Storage---Windows-7-Premium/000595376,default,pd.html

and does anyone have any alternatives.

Thanks in advance

bob_man_uk

bob_man_uk wrote: »

I know im asking for something thats very difficult to come by but im not asking for a gaming powerhouse... just some games that are... relatively old, hell i though i heard rumors that intel chipsets were starting to become more lower end gaming friendly. but youve made your point!

just as an fyi, i bought an asus ee pc today, not bad at £119 1gb ram and 250gb hard drive im happy for now

harz99

bob_man_uk wrote: »

just as an fyi, i bought an asus ee pc today, not bad at £119 1gb ram and 250gb hard drive im happy for now

It would be very useful to others if you gave some more info as well on your FYI post - not least where/whom you bought from...........

bob_man_uk

harz99 wrote: »

It would be very useful to others if you gave some more info as well on your FYI post - not least where/whom you bought from...........

cash generator... need i say more

Elysium

Hi.
I've used this site for a while, and it has been very useful. I have finally decided to create an account.

I have had my current laptop for about 4 years now, and it's been great. In fact I wouldn't be looking to replace it if I hadn't dropped it, cracked the screen, broken to case/hinge and busted to CD Drive. I had the techie at work look at it and he said it's fixable, but not very economical - ie i would be better off buying a budget laptop.

I'm not very techie when it comes to laptops.
I am looking for a laptop (sub 400 quid) that could cope with the following:
- Running multiple programs (itunes, photoshop, web browser, windows live messenger, plus having document folders open)
- Basic Photo editing
- Basic video editing
- Needs a firewire port (i have a digital camcorder that uses DV Tape, which needs firewire to transfer to the computer)
- Must have a CD burner (i burn a lot of CDs for my car and for parties so the originals don't get lost/scratched/stolen)
- DVD Burner

i don't know if it's possible to have all this for under 400, but if theres a laptop that can do most of it, i would be more than happy. the video editing stuff could be dropped, as i believe that would be the hardest. Photoshop and music is what i use it mostly for.

Although i do use it for music, good speakers aren't a necessity as most the music is just burned on to a CD to be be used elsewhere.

If there is a laptop that would match it for just over £400 (less than 500) that people know of then perhaps i would consider going for that

Any help / information would be greatly appreciated
Thanks


EDIT: Was broswing around and found a deal for this:

Compaq Presario CQ610-440sa

AMD Athlon II Dual Core M320 2.1GHz
4GB RAM
160GB HDD
15.6" HD BrightView
DVD Writer, Wireless Internet
Webcam, HDMI
Windows 7 Home Premium

£349.93

downside is i dont think it has a firewire port.... but like i said thats not end of the world

BigBro_1980

Hi,

I was wondering if I could get some help here... Whilst I am technical enough to work may around a desktop PC, my laptop/netbook knowledge is somewhat lacking.

Can anyone recommend a laptop to allow me to do the following:

1. General web browsing
2. View movies (mpgs/avi) when on the move
3. Some photo editing (ideally, I will be looking to install Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator)
4. Needs to be powerful enough to multitask multiple apps (browser, itunes, photo editing etc)
5. I will also be looking to install MS Office too.

I am unsure if there is anything around that is light enough to allow me to do the above. But I would be interested if anything can be recommended. The photo editing is not a must, but something that is a nice to have.

Thank you in advance.

BB

Jamesdeer001

bobbyday wrote: »

Hi All

I was wondering if I could get some help!. I've had an Acer Aspire 5630 for nearly 4 years. It has served me relatively well. I use it for general about the house, internet, video watching etc and the only game I really play is Football manager. I've upgraded the RAM and upgraded to Win7. I have normally formatted it about once a year as I normally find performance decreases just before!

More recently though, I have found the laptop overheating and is now turning it self off due to heat. Also the battery life is pretty much non-existant (about 5 mins - is this normal?).

Anyway, I've basically come to the conclusion that I'll porbably need a new laptop soon! (performance is already down and it has only been 6 months since last format).
So firstly, are there any places you can sell your old laptops like mobile recycling places? Or is ebay the only option for something like this?
Secondly, I'm after recommendations of what I could possibly buy...!
I don't travel too much with it, but would like around 3+ hours worth of battery use (I don't have a desktop so definitely require a laptop)
for around the house. I do a fair amount of iplayer/video watching on it, as well as a lot of music playing. Similarly, a lot of internet surfing and office based products. Game wise, I only play football manager. The only editting I do is conversion of video/audio formats for my ipod and mobile. My budget is £350 or less.

Would you say the following is a good laptop

http://direct.asda.com/Lenovo-G550-15.6%22-Black-Notebook---4gb-RAM---320gb-Storage---Windows-7-Premium/000595376,default,pd.html

and does anyone have any alternatives.

Thanks in advance

WOndeirng if anyone can help?

Snooze

Myself and other techies have already given recommendations for cheap end laptops over the past few pages of this thread. Perhaps people could help themselves by spending a few minutes looking back at the old posts instead of expecting us techies to repeat ourselves every other day because people can't be *rsed to look and wanting everything handing to them on a plate?

To summarise - the vast majority of people want a laptop for basic internet stuff - facebook, youtube, bit of word processing, light gaming, bit of music/video downloading. For this kind of stuff there's virtually nothing between all the different makes in the £300-500 bracket except slight differences in processor speed, amount of memory (RAM) and the size of the hard drive. Processor speed won't matter for what you want and neither will the size of the hard drive unless you do a lot of music/vid downloading where you'd be better looking for a laptop with 320-500 GB capacity. For different operating systems, you want min 1 GB of RAM running XP, min 2 GB of RAM running Vista (ideally 3 or 4 GB for Vista if you like to have a lot of apps running at the same time), min 2 GB of RAM for W7. The rest of the spec comes down to personal preference.

The manufacturers are all much of a muchness at this sort of price level, but personally I would avoid :

ADVENT (PC World own brand tat)
ACER (poor build quality and endless hardware issues - see regular forum posts from people with broken Acer laptops)
DELL (personal brand is utter crap, business end stuff much more reliable - see regular forum posrs from people with broken Dell laptops)

Safe brands :

COMPAQ (Presario range, etc)
SAMSUNG
TOSHIBA
SONY
HP (watch out for some G models, do some googling)

Ultra-safe (good build quality and reliability) :

LENOVO (not sure about SL models)
ASUS

Good places to get reviews on the machine you're interested in is to look for the product on amazon or ebuyer.com and then click the reviews tab. trustedreviews.com is also worth a look.

:beer:

Elysium

Snooze wrote: »

Myself and other techies have already given recommendations for cheap end laptops over the past few pages of this thread. Perhaps people could help themselves by spending a few minutes looking back at the old posts instead of expecting us techies to repeat ourselves every other day because people can't be *rsed to look and wanting everything handing to them on a plate?

To summarise - the vast majority of people want a laptop for basic internet stuff - facebook, youtube, bit of word processing, light gaming, bit of music/video downloading. For this kind of stuff there's virtually nothing between all the different makes in the £300-500 bracket except slight differences in processor speed, amount of memory (RAM) and the size of the hard drive. Processor speed won't matter for what you want and neither will the size of the hard drive unless you do a lot of music/vid downloading where you'd be better looking for a laptop with 320-500 GB capacity. For different operating systems, you want min 1 GB of RAM running XP, min 2 GB of RAM running Vista (ideally 3 or 4 GB for Vista if you like to have a lot of apps running at the same time), min 2 GB of RAM for W7. The rest of the spec comes down to personal preference.

The manufacturers are all much of a muchness at this sort of price level, but personally I would avoid :

ADVENT (PC World own brand tat)
ACER (poor build quality and endless hardware issues - see regular forum posts from people with broken Acer laptops)
DELL (personal brand is utter crap, business end stuff much more reliable - see regular forum posrs from people with broken Dell laptops)

Safe brands :

COMPAQ (Presario range, etc)
SAMSUNG
TOSHIBA
SONY
HP (watch out for some G models, do some googling)

Ultra-safe (good build quality and reliability) :

LENOVO (not sure about SL models)
ASUS

Good places to get reviews on the machine you're interested in is to look for the product on amazon or ebuyer.com and then click the reviews tab. trustedreviews.com is also worth a look.

:beer:

sorry if our posts annoyed you, but having done desktop building at college 8 years ago, i know that desktop pcs can be pretty much customised however you want within the price limit.

we didn't do anything on laptops, so i had no idea if it would be the same - different builds depending on exactly what you want - or whether at the lower end they tend to be pretty much the same

thanks for the advice in the 2nd half of the post

Jamesdeer001

Snooze wrote: »

Myself and other techies have already given recommendations for cheap end laptops over the past few pages of this thread. Perhaps people could help themselves by spending a few minutes looking back at the old posts instead of expecting us techies to repeat ourselves every other day because people can't be *rsed to look and wanting everything handing to them on a plate?

To summarise - the vast majority of people want a laptop for basic internet stuff - facebook, youtube, bit of word processing, light gaming, bit of music/video downloading. For this kind of stuff there's virtually nothing between all the different makes in the £300-500 bracket except slight differences in processor speed, amount of memory (RAM) and the size of the hard drive. Processor speed won't matter for what you want and neither will the size of the hard drive unless you do a lot of music/vid downloading where you'd be better looking for a laptop with 320-500 GB capacity. For different operating systems, you want min 1 GB of RAM running XP, min 2 GB of RAM running Vista (ideally 3 or 4 GB for Vista if you like to have a lot of apps running at the same time), min 2 GB of RAM for W7. The rest of the spec comes down to personal preference.

The manufacturers are all much of a muchness at this sort of price level, but personally I would avoid :

ADVENT (PC World own brand tat)
ACER (poor build quality and endless hardware issues - see regular forum posts from people with broken Acer laptops)
DELL (personal brand is utter crap, business end stuff much more reliable - see regular forum posrs from people with broken Dell laptops)

Safe brands :

COMPAQ (Presario range, etc)
SAMSUNG
TOSHIBA
SONY
HP (watch out for some G models, do some googling)

Ultra-safe (good build quality and reliability) :

LENOVO (not sure about SL models)
ASUS

Good places to get reviews on the machine you're interested in is to look for the product on amazon or ebuyer.com and then click the reviews tab. trustedreviews.com is also worth a look.

:beer:

Thank you for this response and apologies if asking the same questions as previous people had been frustrating.

Since asking, I've now started looking at the Dell outlet store as you seem to get genuine value for money. So it surprises me what you say about avoiding Dell. I always though they built solid and reliable equipment. Similarly, I've had a number of Acers and had no problem with them and the only failure has been the battery.

I'd like to go with Dell, but will ahve to go away and think about this now!