Buying laptop from Currys PC World. Need pointing in the rright direction please.

david39

Yes - I would avoid Acer, too. They also have the Gateway brand of computers, one of which I bought. After 6 months the hard drive failed (that could happen to any machine) and they collected it and sent it to their approved repairer in Manchester.
Two weeks and several phone calls later, it had still not been repaired and the repairer told me that Acer had not sent them any replacement hard drives and he didn't know when any would arrive. Acer said that it was up to the repairer to provide the replacement hard drive.
I could have gone to any decent computer spares shop and bought the same hard drive over the counter and repaired it myself in a few minutes.
They finally agreed to refund my money, after which I bought an HP which has been faultless for the past two years.

Pssst

If you must buy from PCW/Currys..buy a toshiba laptop. I'd put the bit about putting old videos onto digital storage to one side as thats high capacity work. Other than that,you dont need anything high spec. My current machine is a tosh satellite A210-12u

http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/jsp/SUPPORTSECTION/discontinuedProductPage.do?service=UK&com.broadvision.session.new=Yes&PRODUCT_ID=132293

and it is more than capable of doing everything i want it to do. bought from john lewis about 18 months ago for about £350 ISTR.

Penny_Farthing_2

May look at your suggestion about selling them on ebay Isofa as the consensus seems to be that PCWorld/ Currys is not the best for price or customer service.

Prowla - my husband is in favour of sticking with XP and I thought he was just being weird (again). Is there a sensible reason to stick with it?

Thanks for direct choices totalsolutions. Will try the mag if it's written so I have a hope of understanding it - the title scares me off.

Thanks Grahawk - so Dell are really ok? Acer off the list now, then.

PSST don't think Toshiba is available in the shop only online where I can't pay with vouchers but will check it out.

So checking the ebay option or looking at HP, Dell, Sony,Samsung, Compaq,Asus

Weeds out the duds and gives me somewhere to start.

Thanks all - most helpful.

-TangleFoot-

Medion are apparently pretty popular in Germany; you can get this little gem direct from their online store for £500. Add a set of Edifier speakers from Play.com and you effectively get a better machine than the Toshiba A300 for just a few pounds more.

isofa

Not really sure why anyone would want to get a machine with XP on after Win 7 is released, as higher versions of Win 7 will have an XP compatibility / virtual machine mode, which includes a full licence of XP...

If you want to compare Dell prices and their current deals, use this website: www.dmxdimension.com

There is no sensible reason to stick with XP unless you have a set of old apps which won't run with Vista, but with Win 7 this is a non-argument.

I use both Macs and PCs and can see benefits and disadvantages to both. I've always found Apple hardware to be higher quality than most PC systems, to do a fair comparison you need to be looking at high-end PC laptops like Levono and good quality Sony's (lower end models aren't that good).

Still you'll get faster hardware for your money with a PC especially if you already have a lot of software. Horses for courses depends what you need it for etc.

Penny_Farthing_2

Yes isofa I think it was that he didn't want to shell out for new apps. We have XP currently. Useful to know that XP apps will run on Windows 7 so that makes it definitely worth waiting for so thanks for that.

isofa

Penny_Farthing wrote: »

Yes isofa I think it was that he didn't want to shell out for new apps. We have XP currently. Useful to know that XP apps will run on Windows 7 so that makes it definitely worth waiting for so thanks for that.

Only the Professional, Ultimate, (and Enterprise), editions of Win 7 will have the XP Compatibility mode built in, so watch out for that. You can still install Microsoft's free Virtual PC and install XP within that to run the XP Apps, but obviously you'll need an XP installer and licence for this.

What old apps do you want to run?

I keep a Virtual PC 2007 session just for Windows 2000 compatibility for some corporate clients still behind the times, it's very easy.

Penny_Farthing_2

office 97
money (v old one but does the job)
Broderbund Printmaster
media managers for phones
Semantec anitvirus (corporate version)
CAMedia (prog for digital camera)

Not much but adds to the cost (and the learning time?) if we have to replace

Marty_J

Penny_Farthing wrote: »

office 97
money (v old one but does the job)
Broderbund Printmaster
media managers for phones
Semantec anitvirus (corporate version)
CAMedia (prog for digital camera)

Not much but adds to the cost (and the learning time?) if we have to replace

That's a very old version of Office. You might find you're better off with Open Office.

You could replace Norton with Avira Antivir.

CAMedia could be replaced with Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery.

All of the above are free, and will work on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

-TangleFoot-

Marty_J wrote: »

CAMedia could be replaced with Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Alternatively, it could be replaced with... nothing. Even if the camera cannot normally be accessed without it, a simple card reader would render it totally redundant.