Sub-£350 powerful laptops discussion

Snooze

With any popular make you're always gonna get a ton of people that never have problems - it's stands to reason. Dell's ('Home user' brand) and Acer's certainly have more than their fair share of problems vs. other makes and there is a hugely disproportionate number of well built machines vs. Friday-5pm built machines. As I said before, you only need to look on this tech forum and virtually every day you'll see 2 or 3 folks posting with some hardware related problem on a Dell or Acer. And this is only this site!

It's not difficult to see why though. Acer and Dell are the cheapest 'proper' laptops you can buy when you compare them via other makes on a spec vs. spec basis. This quite simply translates into poor quality components and questionable build quality. Even on Dell's own website in the reviews section you'll see tons of people complaining about how their screen bezel has fallen off. The reason for this? Because it's held on with double-sided sticky tape! Do you really want to be paying £400 for that kind of "quality" ?

Other issues with them -

Bad ventilation causing overheating
Noisy fans
Poor quality keys and keyboard not giving the user any 'feel' and making it difficult to type accurately
Poor quality mouse pads with no 'feel' and noisy left/right click buttons
Poor quality power socket on the Acer's which snap off regular as clockwork

It's entirely your choice but if it were me I would rather pay a bit extra for a make that doesn't have a reputation for problems. You might get lucky and it never gives you any problems at all for the next 5/10/20 years, but if it does then good luck arguing it out with the manufacturer/retailer who will just fob you off "we couldn't find anything wrong with it" BS excuses when it comes back from being "repaired". Is it really worth all the potential hassle to save £10/20 ?

Just to give an example of paying good money and getting a good quality well built machine - I bought an IBM Thinkpad back in the early 90s for - what was then - an arm and a leg. 18 years on it's still going strong and has never given me any problems whatsoever and believe me it's had some serious abuse in that time. Okay, my microwave oven has got a more powerful processor in it that the IBM has now, but back then it was a powerful machine and it will still easily kick most brand new £200 netbooks into the weeds nearly 20 years on. I wonder how many Dell and Acer laptops will still be going strong in 5-10 years, never mind nearly 20.

Jamesdeer001

Snooze wrote: »

With any popular make you're always gonna get a ton of people that never have problems - it's stands to reason. Dell's ('Home user' brand) and Acer's certainly have more than their fair share of problems vs. other makes and there is a hugely disproportionate number of well built machines vs. Friday-5pm built machines. As I said before, you only need to look on this tech forum and virtually every day you'll see 2 or 3 folks posting with some hardware related problem on a Dell or Acer. And this is only this site!

It's not difficult to see why though. Acer and Dell are the cheapest 'proper' laptops you can buy when you compare them via other makes on a spec vs. spec basis. This quite simply translates into poor quality components and questionable build quality. Even on Dell's own website in the reviews section you'll see tons of people complaining about how their screen bezel has fallen off. The reason for this? Because it's held on with double-sided sticky tape! Do you really want to be paying £400 for that kind of "quality" ?

Other issues with them -

Bad ventilation causing overheating
Noisy fans
Poor quality keys and keyboard not giving the user any 'feel' and making it difficult to type accurately
Poor quality mouse pads with no 'feel' and noisy left/right click buttons
Poor quality power socket on the Acer's which snap off regular as clockwork

It's entirely your choice but if it were me I would rather pay a bit extra for a make that doesn't have a reputation for problems. You might get lucky and it never gives you any problems at all for the next 5/10/20 years, but if it does then good luck arguing it out with the manufacturer/retailer who will just fob you off "we couldn't find anything wrong with it" BS excuses when it comes back from being "repaired". Is it really worth all the potential hassle to save £10/20 ?

Just to give an example of paying good money and getting a good quality well built machine - I bought an IBM Thinkpad back in the early 90s for - what was then - an arm and a leg. 18 years on it's still going strong and has never given me any problems whatsoever and believe me it's had some serious abuse in that time. Okay, my microwave oven has got a more powerful processor in it that the IBM has now, but back then it was a powerful machine and it will still easily kick most brand new £200 netbooks into the weeds nearly 20 years on. I wonder how many Dell and Acer laptops will still be going strong in 5-10 years, never mind nearly 20.

Thanks for your reply and you've got me really thinking! For £450, there were some lovely specced sounding machines on the Dell outlet store (4gm Ram, i3 2.26ghz processor, 512 radeon graphics cards etc). Am now looking at Asus and found this which seems quite decent with good reviews

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/189888

It's difficult to know if you're making the right decison or if it's all much of a muchness and not to worry!!

harz99

bobbyday wrote: »

Thanks for your reply and you've got me really thinking! For £450, there were some lovely specced sounding machines on the Dell outlet store (4gm Ram, i3 2.26ghz processor, 512 radeon graphics cards etc). Am now looking at Asus and found this which seems quite decent with good reviews

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/189888

It's difficult to know if you're making the right decison or if it's all much of a muchness and not to worry!!

It should do everything you want as in your earlier post, and no it is not much of a muchness as others have already indicated.

Only thing I would say is try and find a retailer near you that has one in stock to at least look at and play with before you order "blind" on line, then if you are happy order one!

Snooze

harz99 wrote: »

It should do everything you want as in your earlier post, and no it is not much of a muchness as others have already indicated.

Only thing I would say is try and find a retailer near you that has one in stock to at least look at and play with before you order "blind" on line, then if you are happy order one!

I agree with this and forgot to put it in my other posts. Definitely test it out if you can, particularly mouse pad and keyboard feel. Some of these cheap ends machines are horrible to type on.

mr.brightside87

I bought my Compaq in march for £399. Apart from the battery life now dropping (my fault and the "anything happens" warranty I took out doesn't cover the battery), I can not fault it.

It's a Compaq Presario CQ61 http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/compaq-presario-cq61-417sa-04906504-pdt.html (for some reason, it says the ram is 2gb when it's 3gb...)

James_Bond

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:

Me and my friend both had HP laptops and the motherboard broke after 18 months. Exactly the same issue. After googling, it seemed a common problem with HP laptops, and they simply aren't interested if it happens outside the 12 month warranty.

New motherboard is essentially a write-off btw. My advice - stay clear of HP!

ventureuk

Well I can't really support the views on the home user DELL laptops, having had one for 4 years I am only having to change it due to damage caused by my daughter dropping it.

I've had a look around and for everyday use for a brand new basic Windows 7 laptop the Lenovo G500 seems pretty good value at £299 delivered from Laptops Direct, with Quidco it works out at £293.

I will not be gaming, editing video or rendering Toy Story 4 and I think it's a reasonable price all things considered, anyone know of a better deal ?

Robinhood

Have Dell laptops jumped up in price?

Wanted to buy one for my mum just for general use. Don't seem to be able to get anything half decent for around £400. Am i missing a trick? I remember last time I visited this site there were links to the dell site but having gone back through previous posts the most recent links are no longer valid. I'd like a dell as thats what I have and touch wood have had no probltms with it. Thats tempted fate!

spud17

Try http://www.dmxdimension.com/

or http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=uk&l=en&s=dfh

ventureuk

If it is of any use to others who want a fair priced laptop.....

I've just bought a ACER Aspire 5338 from Laptops Direct, Celeron T3000 Dual Core cpu, 4gb DDR3 memory, 250gb HDD, 15.6" 16:9 Cinematic Widescreen Display, Intel GMA 4500m graphics, Vista Home Premium, it cost £270, was described as refurbished but is actually new.

Staff at the shop were very helpful and explained that whilst many of the laptops are described as refurbished some are brand new and are simply overstock/foreign market/previous models sold as refurbished which allows the warranty to be reduced to 3 months and the price reduced accordingly.

My purchase was still wrapped in that clingfilm type plastic with factory labels and stickers attached. She could not officially tell me it was new, but did. It flys along with 4gb of memory and I'm quite happy with it.

Use Quidco to get a 2% pre vat off and it's a little cheaper still, you need to keep an eye on the website as some of the deals don't seem to last long.

Although I wanted a new DELL they do seem to have just jumped in price and whilst they all have Windows 7 in general, the price for a similar spec was £100 higher.