The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

£$&*"($£&(

For the price you can also get the heavier and nosier Pentium 4 laptops like this one at Comet.

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/320_219126.html

Personally I hate fan noise and because these run quite hot they usually have a lot of fan noise.

You'll probably find many Pentium-M/Centrino notebooks with 256mb RAM but adding more is very easy so I wouldn't worry about that.

On the floppy isue why would anyone use something with a tiny capacity when for no additional cost you can use something with 500 times the capacity.

£$&*"($£&(

Here's a rather good deal for anyone looking for a cheap laptop. It's a Comet package including a bag for £499. It comes with a 1.5ghz Celeron-M which is a decent processer not to be confused with any other type of Celeron:

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/993043.html

bring1t

BUMP.......anyone seen any decent (cheapish) laptops with centrino or celeron-m with a dedicated graphics card. Was going to get the office world one but was too late.

apintofstella

grahawk wrote:

I wouldn't expect to much support from Staples except to get it fixed if it goes wrong. However for £70 you can take out Acers own 3 year support for repairs and free telephone support.

We've got it at work - 4 times we've had an engineer out which on average we have requested 3 weeks before each of his visits. Absolutely useless! They haven't a clue.

Nile

I've been thinking about (and talking to friends about) buying a laptop computer for months........ but as a technophobe it's a daunting prospect.

I know we have some 'puter wizzards on this site......so was wondering if someone knowledgeable would give me some advice on what is the minimum spec I should be looking for.

I am prepared to buy a well known brand rather than the cheapest price but unknown quality version.

I would be using it to run MS Office Professional software........and hope to transfer my cd's to an MP3 player (and for the same reasons I haven't bought that yet either)........but don't need to play games on it.

Hope you can help.

£$&*"($£&(

You have lots of choices. The first thing to decide is whether you want a light notebook (less than 3kg) with longer battery life which will probably be much quieter. Or whether you want to get a larger heavier model which are described as desktop replacements.

The former have Pentium-M processors (and Centrino technolgy which includes wireless connectivity) or Celeron-M processors which are cheaper but good (and similar to Pentium-Ms in performance).

The latter will have Pentium processors or Celeron-D (D for desktop) processors (which aren't so good but would be fine for your needs) or AMD processors. These will run warmer and require more cooling and thus tend to have louder fans. I can't comment about AMD processors in laptops.

You'll be fine with shared graphics (Intel) but in all cases you should get 512mb RAM. Many come with 256mb so you'll need to include getting 256mb more in your budget.

If you want cheap and good get a Celeron-M laptop or AMD Sempron (Semprons are better than the Celeron-D s). If you want to spend more either a Pentium-M, pentium or AMD Athlon. Personally considering your needs I'd get a Celeron-M or if available a cheap Pentium-M laptop but then I like light and especailly quiet (the difference in noise can be great - I now have a Pentium_M laptop which is very quiet compared to my old laptop which had an older type of Celeron. Watch out for Celeron-D processors being called mobile Celerons though.

Party_Animal

What sort of price Grahawk?

Edinburghlass_2

and from where?

Fran

Nile,

Have you had a look through the Great Cheapest Decent Laptop Hunt thread?

£$&*"($£&(

At the momment this Celeron-M laptop looks like a good price for most tasks except recent games and highly complex graphics and music production applications (although it was £479 until recently).

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/320_232823.html