The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

dbs

Thinking of buying this http://www.johnlewis.com/230652600/Product.aspx £300

1gig of ram,160 hard drive,Vista basic, 1.6ghz so should not get drain the battery like a 2.0ghz would.

I only want to bank online,email,word, excel, bit of browsing,shopping online etc.

Reasons to buy 2 year warranty,toshiba good build,lack of speed on proccessor to save battery life.

Is Vista basic ok to use for what I want to do?

Do the laptops come with the Vista disc or pre-installed as I may want to put XP on it.

chili2001

dbs wrote: »

Thinking of buying this http://www.johnlewis.com/230652600/Product.aspx £300

1gig of ram,160 hard drive,Vista basic, 1.6ghz so should not get drain the battery like a 2.0ghz would.

I only want to bank online,email,word, excel, bit of browsing,shopping online etc.

Reasons to buy 2 year warranty,toshiba good build,lack of speed on proccessor to save battery life.

Is Vista basic ok to use for what I want to do?

Do the laptops come with the Vista disc or pre-installed as I may want to put XP on it.

This is a better spec for £339.99 with free cloud wi fi and laptop bag or £357.99 with a two year warranty +extras: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/164844 has better CPU but not a lot between the two but if you go for the john lewis one I would stick an extra gig of RAM in it. It has a very slow processor which might be a pain. Can't comment on Vista Basic because I use premium but I imagine it is less resource hungry. The CPU wouldn't have much if any impact on the battery life as the newer ones like these have all sorts of power saving functions so when the pc is idle so are they. If you want to save the battery turn down the screen brightness to minumum and turn off the wi fi or blutooth when your not using it. Hope this helps?

chili2001

dbs wrote: »

Does the laptops come with the Vista disc or pre-installed as I may want to put XP on it.

This varies from supplier to supplier, vista would be preinstalled but you usually have the option of making a full backup or "rescue disc" to reinstall it if there is not a spare OS disc supplied.

JimmyMackem

Hello, looked through a few pages but couldn't really work it out.

Basically I'm looking for a laptop to go to uni with, only game I really play is footy man which to work well really needs 2GB+ ram to run smoothly. I've got a decent budget but don't want to pay for what I don't need. Any help?? Use some photoshop and things too.

flea72

Know diddly squat about computing, but am looking for a laptop suitable for a teenager to use. Not into gaming, basically needs to be able to connect to internet, and type up schoolwork

have found two possibles, but not sure on which to go with

Toshiba £245 - 15.4" display, intel processor, 2gb ram, 160gb HDD, supermulti dvd drive, bluetooth, webcam, vista premium, mcafee

or

Elonex £195 - 15.4" wxga xbrite tft screen (?), intel celeron 1.7ghz 1mb processor, 120gb sata harddrive, 1gb ram, dvdrw drive, vista basic, wireless, 4in1 reader, kaspersky

or any other suggestions, in similar price range

Flea

dbs

Have you got a link to these deals?

phil11

Try Micromart magazine - usually have good deals. autdirect currently have websurfer laptops from £150.

flea72

phil11 wrote: »

Try Micromart magazine - usually have good deals. autdirect currently have websurfer laptops from £150.

tried autdirect, am i doing something wrong as they only seem to be selling 5 different laptops, and the one for £150 only has a 7" screen, which is way too small for doing schoolwork on

or was your reply to someone else?

Flea

hawkis

If it's of any use to anyone, Ebuyer are still doing this HP 550 laptop for £379.99:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/164845

Excellent spec for the money. I'm looking for a laptop for £400 or less so if anyone has any better suggestions, please post them!

Spec for the above:

Processor

• Intel® Core2 Duo Processor T5670
• 1.80 GHz
• 2 MB L2 cache
• 800 MHz FSB

Hard Drives

• 250 GB
• Hard disk drive speed 5400 rpm
• DVD+/RW SuperMulti DL LightScribe

Memory

• 2 x 2GB DDR2
• 2 SODIMM slots supporting dual channel memory
• Memory Upgradeable to 4GB Maximum
• Chipset Mobile, Intel® GME965

Operating system

• Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium 32-bit

Dimensions

• Weight 2.5 kg
• Product dimensions (W x D x H) 3.2 (at front) x 35.8 x 26.7 cm
• 15.4 inches diagonal TFT Display

Networking

• Intel 802.11a/b/g mini-pci card, Bluetooth
• WLAN
• 56K modem
• Intel Fast Ethernet Integrated Controller (10/100 NIC)

Expansion slots

• 1 ExpressCard/54 slot
• Secure Digital (SD) slot

External ports

• 3 x USB 2.0 ports
• 1 x VGA
• 1 x Stereo microphone in,
• 1 x Stereo headphone/line out
• 1 x Power connector
• 1 x RJ-11
• 1 x RJ-45

Software

• HP Recovery Manager
• Roxio Creator Basic 9

Graphics

• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• Graphic subsystem Up to 384 MB shared system memory
• Video resolutions 1280 x 800 WXGA BrightView

Audio

• High Definition Audio
• Mono speaker
• Stereo headphone/line out
• Stereo microphone in

Keyboard

• Full-sized keyboard
• Pointing device Touchpad with scroll zone

Power

• 6-cell (47 WHr) Lithium-Ion battery - Battery life Up to 4h30m
• External 65W AC adapter, HP Fast Charge Technology

Warranty

• 1 Year Standard Warranty

nzamcdza

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-3481.aspx

What do people think, seems like a good deal but as it is a lot better spec than the other ones in that price range i feel like im missing something???!!