Sub-£350 powerful laptops discussion

Ogre_Nose_Grid

<Sigh> You're right! I didn't recognise the 'Renew' as anything else than a brand name. I will now edit my prior posts to ungush. After soul searching, I am going to wait for it to arrive & see whether it's grotty snot-covered scratched tat heisted from some Mancunian student, or a spanking new box from the excess inventory. I will post in the forum to let you know. Any bets?

"Who describes a laptop at 345+VAT?". Er, many people would but each to their own. If you sign up for quidco as I did it takes it down to less than 400 .....which is why it's posted in the sub-400 laptop thread. But as you were right about the big thing, peace.

UPDATE 23/8/10 - it arrived. It is spanking new stock.
Bad news ...now Out Of Stock - sorry I couldn't provide the evidence sooner.
Good news ... same vendor Microdirect has other "HP Renew" deals: suggest you have a look. Best current one is the DV6-1216SA at £398 with a HD 4530 card (not so good a card, but good at the price). It *could* be what Donnie terms a refurb, but as some of the models on the site say "Refurbished" and this one does not, I think it likely to be, like mine was, excess stock.

Elysium

Ok
Scrap my previous spec completely.
I have now decided I need a laptop that either:
1) Has a firewire port included
or
2) Has an express card slot where I can purchase a firewire expansion card


I've been looking all evening and I can't find a laptop sub £400 that has either of these. No, wait, I found one, but it was running windows vista and I would rather stick with XP than go to vista - i don't mind windows 7 though!

Maybe there is another name for ExpressCard slot, so I haven't noticed it listed in the specs. I know firewire is also known as something like IEEEE3 or something, but didn't see that either.

Anyone know any models that have either of the above in their specs? Cheers in advance!

EDIT: think i messed up... in the specs when they say "5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader for Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro or xD Picture cards" is that the same as an ExpressCard expansion slot? - ie, could i purchase a firewire card and put it in there?

JDPower

Elysium wrote: »

EDIT: think i messed up... in the specs when they say "5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader for Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro or xD Picture cards" is that the same as an ExpressCard expansion slot? - ie, could i purchase a firewire card and put it in there?

No, a card reader and express card slot are completely different things

CBPodge

I'm looking for a pretty decent laptop to be able to watch films, mess around on the internet and play Football Manager on. Ideally I'd like it to be relatively future proof (as a laptop can be, which isnt much) because I'd like it to be at least useable for 3-5 years.

The models I've narrowed down to are tiny url .com / 3ygeemk and tiny url .com /38ygsdl. I've split up those minilinks as I'm too new to post links, and thought it'd be easier than splitting up two massive amazon addresses.

Is there any real difference between the two? They seem to have almost identical specs. It's been difficult to find proper vaguely techy reviews for those 2 exact models. A couple of things I've sort of picked up:

Toshiba apparently do a 3-year warranty for £45. Good deal? Not sure if Samsung do similar, but I'd really want more than a 1-year warranty wouldn't I?

The Samsung may ship with 32-bit Windows 7, while the Tosh seems to have 64-bit. From what I understand 64-bit has the potential to run faster as it will use more than 3GB of RAM, while 32-bit won't. That seems a useful thing to have to extend the life of the machine, especially given that the Tosh appears to be upgradeable to 8GB of RAM if I fancied it.

I kind of get the major specs (Ram, processor etc.), but have no real clue about build quality or reputation of different brands, and no clue about the importance/effect of more minor things like response speed of a hard drive. Any help would be gratefully received.

Also, both links are to Amazon - is there a better dealer to use than them? Never had probs in the past with them, but ive never bought anything techy which might involve returns etc.

Qwoin

Asda have got £100 off atm making the price £199, seems a great deal but my local shop has run out.

baldmosher

CBPodge wrote: »

I kind of get the major specs (Ram, processor etc.), but have no real clue about build quality or reputation of different brands, and no clue about the importance/effect of more minor things like response speed of a hard drive.

Specs are neither here nor there unless you're pushing it hard with games or data work. Everything except Netbooks should play HD video and they all handle internet very easily.

I'd never spend big money on something I'm planning to use without first using it to make sure I like it. Distance Selling Regulations apply of course, but it's a pain in the bum to return stuff. At least type on it first because laptop keyboards vary wildly in both layout and responsiveness. Personally I prefer Scrabble tile keyboards on small machines and full size on big ones. A small backspace key is a deal breaker.

Edit: Champ Manager might well push it quite hard but I've not played it since I had a DX2-66 machine, so I'm hoping new PCs are better at crunching the results ;-)

baldmosher

Has anyone further up the thread mentioned any smaller (12") laptops? 30 pages is a lot of reading... :-D

BOBS

BOBS wrote: »

Ok - apologies - I did jump to conclusions and because I hadnt heard of Lenovo I totally disregarded it and if I had taken the time to look great reviews on Argos. Cant wait to Thursday now until I go pick it up :-) Think picking a laptop / computer is one of the toughest things to do - so much baffling info - thats why I am not looking at anymore now decision made -
thanks for the help.

Went to get Lenovo at Argos and it was out of stock -typical - came back on here yesterday and read through threads again and decided I would take chance and have today ordered this one off argos ebay .....
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/TOSHIBA-L500-15-6IN-LAPTOP-V1-REFURB-/350380933769?pt=UK_Computing_Laptops_EH#ht_2053wt_937
...... thought I have nothing to loose with 12 months warranty and saving £100+ thought they have it listed twice on their ebay site - £239.99 which i went for and exactly same product at £338.99 - anyone know why they do this?

djg77

I bought this for my mum's 60th Birthday from Argos its well built and a good spec (Dual Core Processor, 2gb Ram 250gb Hard Drive) and has built in Webcam and card reader. Its only available in store not for delivery. Only £329.


CPU and Memory:
AMD Athlon 2 dual core.
2.1GHz processor speed.
512MB cache.
2GB DDR2 RAM memory.
250GB hard drive.

Display features:
15.6in widescreen display.
High definition display.
Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.

DVD optical drives:
DVD-RW(read/write).

Graphics:
Dedicated ATI Radeon HD with 4200 graphics card.

Interfaces and connectivity:
5-in-1 media card reader.
Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick (MS), Memory Stick Pro (MS-Pro), xD, Multi-Media Card (MMC) compatible.
3 USB ports.
1 Ethernet port.
B/g/n wireless/WiFi enabled.

Multi-media features:
0.3MP built-in webcam.
Built-in mic.

Operating system and software:
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium.

ab48uk

Just to point out a typo in the latest Sub-£350 Laptops listings.
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/deals/cheap-laptop-deals
The eMachines E525 laptop is listed first as having 1GB of RAM, then later on 2GB.

ASDA direct confirms it is in fact 1GB. Unfortunately it also says the item is out of stock. The power of this site strikes again!