£1500 Laptop

bobdauilda

ANy recommendations out there for an all singing all dancing laptop at around this price give or take £100?
Ta

A_LANCASHIRE_LAD_2

bobdauilda wrote:

ANy recommendations out there for an all singing all dancing laptop at around this price give or take £100?
Ta

Yea stay away from PC WORLD !

bobdauilda

thanks, I was thinking of the Dell XPS m1710 but don't know if theres anything out there with better value and spec for the price?

carl_east

You often get pretty good deals on the dell outlet website (same as the main one). Although it's all about timing as they drop the pcs in once a day some time in the morning. It's normally on the hour or half hour. I saw two XPS laptops on there this morning.

But if you want to go through the main site then use quidco.com. You'll get 4.5% cashback. That's £65 on a £1500 laptop. The other thing is that if buy from their main site and call them up when you receive it and tell them that you want to return it they will often knock even more off the price because they don't want the expense of picking it up and having to sell it on the dell outlet site.

pin

Have a look at the following forums: www.notebookreviews.com, www.notebookforum.com and www.whatlaptop.co.uk/forum.

Many people have asked questions about what laptop they are looking for and the folks on that forum (who know a thing or five about laptops) have made decent suggestions.

carl_east

Also, if you're thinking off some of the big stores then don't forget the discount codes you can get for Currys, Dixons and PC World. Plus you'll get cashback via quidco from them and also cashback for Comet to. I would only really recommend Comet from those lot though. The others are a rip off.

Do you have to spend £1500? It's a lot to spend on a laptop now a days. You're very unlikely to need the computing power from it. £1000 will do pretty much as well.

bobdauilda

yep the £1500 is the settlement as it was a high end spec model.. DOnt really need that much power to be honest as I only ever use it for email these days...but may start using it for games and vid editing the babies etc, is there facility to make the laptop HD compatible for tv use too?

fairytooth

I would go for Dell too although I'm not sure you need to spend that much for what you want to do. I would say £800 tops, see here:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/nb_performance?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs

If you are determined to spend more then the Sony Vaio range would be excellent. As for TV, an external freeview tuner can be bought for around £40 - you still need a decent aerial to plug into it.

You can get Internet TV free from http://www.wwitv.com

bobdauilda

Fairytooth its replacing a sony vaio and as the one it replaces was only two years old and fraught with problems I am steering well clear of sony from now on as their customer service stinks.

fairytooth

Fair enough Bob but Sony still come out top favourites in laptops. I think you will find most customer service stinks ....

carl_east

I would enquire as to what your allowed to spend the £1500 on then. You may get away with adding loads of accessories like an mp3 player, expensive wireless keyboard and laser mouse, a bag, a new wireless router etc.

If not then you could get a top end Sony laptop from Comet and sell it on ebay. Then buy a cheaper one with the money and still have some spare.

You can hook the laptop up to a HD ready screen but need a good graphics card and some software to change the laptop resolution to match the tv. AVforums can help with that. See here.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=325759

Ideally you need a DVI output on the laptop that will feed your HDMI input on your flatscreen. My Dell Inspiron 9300 has a DVI output. I'm almost certain the XPS models will. My ATI graphics card still needs a bit of help to change the resolutions but the ATI have just released a new set of high end laptop graphics cards that do it for you. The XPS range may have these as an option. See the ATI website here to find out when one you need.

http://www.ati.com/products/mobile.html