The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

cosmile

i bought a medion laptop when it was offer at tcm for £399,had it 5 weeks and hard drive has failed and windows will not start,i hope it does not continue like this??anyone else had probs with medion?

dc2447

cosmile wrote:

i bought a medion laptop when it was offer at tcm for £399,had it 5 weeks and hard drive has failed and windows will not start,i hope it does not continue like this??anyone else had probs with medion?

TBH I would return the laptop - they hyave a shocking reputation

cosmile

dc2447 wrote:

TBH I would return the laptop - they hyave a shocking reputation

they are going to send a courier and repair it...can i return it and get my money back?? do u think i will have probs all the time?...i have a 3 yr warranty on it.

tightwadcross

I've just been made aware of a new laptop available from Tchibo from 7th December, and would like to ask anybody with a bit of techie knowledge if it's a deal or if there are better deals out there?

Cost is £899.00 and details can be found at https://www.tchibo.co.uk

Many Thanks :

dc2447

cosmile wrote:

they are going to send a courier and repair it...can i return it and get my money back?? do u think i will have probs all the time?...i have a 3 yr warranty on it.

I think distance selling regs mean you can get a refund for up to 30 days.

Fifer

My MIL wants to buy my technophobe FIL a laptop for Christmas so he can keep himself amused on the net in his retirement ... I'm looking for something like a fairly low spec Celeron-M 1.4 or 1.5 (with WiFi ...

I ended up getting the IBM from Staples at £399. Looks ideal. Thanks for the suggestions.

Jacinta

I wished I had seen this thread before I started looking for a laptop. There are some great links on here, which even after hours of Google I still didn't come across.

On ebay there are some great deals, but very few offering a warranty.

I wanted to buy a cheap lightweight laptop. I went for the Dell latitude c400, which I ordered from laptopsuperstore.co.uk.

Specs: Pentium 3M 1.2 Ghz, 512MB RAM, 20G hard drive, Wireless LAN, CDRW/DVD/Floppy drive, Windows 2000 professional, free USB pen drive, free carry case, free digital camera, 12 months warranty

Price = £369 including delivery and VAT.

I think perhaps I should have waited for the Christmas deals from Dell, as suggested on this site. I didn't know Dell were doing deals, since I couldn't find any cheap laptops on their website.

nemo183

I think I may have made this post before, but before you buy the latest "bargain" from a High Street store, or even online, remember that many budget systems don't include MS Office, which will cost you around £200 extra, depending on which version you buy. Also, the after sales service from a large store is likely to be hopeless.

I have recently bought several laptops from small, local shops, that at first glance I would previously ignored.

However, for example, one in particular seems to have access to almost unlimited supplies to a particular HP laptop that most people sell for around £500. However, he's quite relaxed about supplying it with MS Office Professional for no extra charge - but obviously without the disks. If you want to pay him in cash, he's also very flexible about the price - and will give you a discount of (surprise. surprise) around 17.5%.

Best still, if all goes pearshaped, he's prepared to take back the machine and sort you out.

So, don't always overlook that rather grotty looking local shop - you may get a much better deal than you think.

Sadly, it's also true that some small local dealers are hopelessly uncompetetive, and also offer useless after sales service.............

dc2447

It's nearly 2006, nobody needs to be held to ransom by microsoft anymore. There are free alternatives to MS Office that you can download for free.

Open Office

Jacinta

Thanks for the tip dc2447! I saw a lot of people auctioning laptops on ebay with Open Office but I didn't know if it was supposed to be any good or not.