The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

raeble

Tiny? Usual advice is steer well clear. My sister got a mac, printer, scanner and mini disc recorder under that student disability thingie. Plus various bits of software. Do you want to look at ibooks and powerbooks? Cheapest one is about £650 with educational discount for an ibook. Powerbooks start at about a grand.

lofty_2

tbh im not a great fan of macs. prefer PC's, must have a look at dabs tho.

raeble

Ok, but ibooks seem to have better battery life than pc laptops. Have you tried laptops direct?. There's also a list of suppliers here. You might also what to check out the main what laptop forum, people are always asking for laptop advice. I think there is a student there at the moment asking about laptops around the thousand pound mark.

steve237

Hi all,

I'm after a lightening fast Sony Vaio laptop with DVD recorder. Can anyone advise the best place(s) to get the best prices on Vaio's?

alexspratt

After research am considering the ACER Aspire 1362WLMi laptop.

Should I be concerned about abilities of AMD Sempron 2800+ processor? I like the idea of 3 hours of battery which nothing other than a Centrino can provide and that costs too much...

Otherwise I'm after 15.4" widescreen and DVDR/W, and preferably 512MB RAM, 40 GB HD and dedicated graphics. Not planning any video editing, just internet, digital photos, powerpoint and the odd vid clip in powerpoint.

Finally before I buy for £673 incl Vat (from Simply Computers) does anyone have any last minute better prices / laptop suggestions up their sleeve? ???

Thanks, Alex.

webhamster

Sempron is basically a crippled full athlon processor , much like a celeron to a pentium.

If you can stay clear of sony , the name is all your buying , usually older tech too.Try rockdirect , comes with 3 yr warranty as standard and more importantly with an althon full rather than its chopped little brother.

Insist on a notebook with at least a 512 mb ram config.O f the current setup its centrino , then athlon then p4 for battery life.....there is also other consdierations like more screen more power usage , more ram more power  and less cell in the battery less life.

Onboard shared video is fine if all your going to do is type and copy the occasional cd , but for video and gaming choose a dedicated setup for the graphics , like radeon 9600 and up , gfx 5200 and up , the more memmoury in the "gpu" the better , or the worse if looking for battery life.

Sometimes the deciding just gets harder.

For prices use a price checker , i would reccomend for support as the industry has awarded the best rockdirect.com , they give long warranties.For price of "semi" brands like the acer you mention either acernotebooksdirect or technoworld.com.

Hope I have helped.

milgo

Staples are doing a Centrino laptop for £599. I was looking at this today and was very tempted. It has a 1.5ghz Pentium-M processer and DVD writer.

Edit - and now I've got one. It's a real good deal.

Which model was it that you went for please grahawk?

£$&*"($£&(

It's a Acer Travelmate 292LMi

See it here

milgo

It's a Acer Travelmate 292LMi

See it here

The reason that I asked is that i was in my local office world and they had on offer the acer 291LCi for £499 inc VAT it looked like a good machine too me.

lofty_2

Have Staples sold laptops for a while, Their support might not be very good if its a new thing to them. Remember the problems with them back during the free speakers promotion!