The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

belfastgal

ordered the dell inspiron 6400 on monday after seeing it on here for £549 Great spec and great laptop, it came with laptop bag, double memory and a webcam.i oredered on monday and hubby shouted at me for spending over £500 on darling son so rang them to cancel it on tues and they offered me £50 off as it had been dispatched so on wednesday the laptop arrived ( AND HUBBY HAS CALMED DOWN ...LOL ) slightly...
its brilliant for £499

bigvince76

Can anyone help me find a good deal on a 17” laptop? I don’t care about spec as long as it has a DVD player. The best I can find is around £800. I do not want the latest bells and whistles, just a bloody big screen. 17inchers have been around for ages now, so any clues as to where I can get ‘last years model’ would be much appreciated.

pete1024

Would highly recommend the AMD turion 64 processor, it uses less power overall than a centrino (because it has a built in memory controller), it has as much claut, 64 bit extensions, its cheaper & it's more stable as its basically a low power opteron CPU.

candygirl

Sorry to be a total simpleton.i need a laptop for using upstairs.i already have a desktop pc connected to braodband downstairs, so what would i have to do or buy to also have my laptop on braodband upstairs!!

Hillfly

candygirl wrote:

Sorry to be a total simpleton.i need a laptop for using upstairs.i already have a desktop pc connected to braodband downstairs, so what would i have to do or buy to also have my laptop on braodband upstairs!!

If you have a phone socket upstairs you can plug your modem in and off you go - however you wont be able to have your downstairs pc on at the same time.

The best solution would be to get a 'wireless modem router' eg. Netgear DG834G.
You could plug this in to your phone socket downstairs and connect your pc to it. Then get yourself a laptop with wireless and you should be able to connect to the wireless router anywhere in your house ( you may also get a laptop without wireless and buy a speerate wireless card for the laptop). Search the techie forum some more and you will find some guides on how to set up a wireless network.

Hillfly

bigvince76 wrote:

Can anyone help me find a good deal on a 17” laptop? I don’t care about spec as long as it has a DVD player. The best I can find is around £800. I do not want the latest bells and whistles, just a bloody big screen. 17inchers have been around for ages now, so any clues as to where I can get ‘last years model’ would be much appreciated.

How about this for £599 if you are not fussed about enything but screen size!

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_7103WSMi_LX.ACK05.057/version-1.asp

If you can find the extra funds why not buy this 20.1 inch beauty!
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_9802WKMi_LX.AAZ05.043/version-1.asp

anley1

Garcia

Seems pretty quiet to me, got it running next to me now and cannot hear anything apart from the fan going on my desktop PC.

John Lewis are good people, I'm sure if you go in there and ask them to unplug the PC (from where it's on show) and take it into a private back room to hear it for yourself. I doubt this would be a problem.

Like I said I'm very happy, especially with the 2 year warranty. Tried to do everything possible to knock the price down from £699 but they wouldn't budge

belfastgal

Arzon wrote:

Hi could you tell me what spec you got for that price? as i might buy one aswell, thanks alot!

its the Inspiron 6400 , its in the papers most days, came with 1.85gh 80gb harddrive widescreen 15.4 and a dell laptop bag and logiteck web cam which son thinks is great foe msn. daughter also has acer aspire 1642 which is also brilliant but the dell worked out cheaper. check their website or look in the sun . daily mail etc

anley1

I think PC World are advertising a dual core HP at £799. I don't know the specs but it seems like a good price.

But then again, is dual core really that? I've got a dual core Dell desktop and to me it doesn't really seem any faster (for email, Word, Internet, not games etc) than my HP Laptop which is sign core AMD Turion 64.

Maybe the new Windows will need dual core but I'm not planning to buy that when XP has got at least 3-4 more years left in it.

IcyEars

My favourite shop for all PC Stuff is CCL (https://www.cclonline.com). Pretty much everything they do is good quality stuff and it's usually some of the cheapest I've managed to find on-line.

Just thought I'd mention it since I've never seen their name on here but their cheapest is currently £387 for a reasonable spec Tosh laptop. Their range is quite good and they do pretty much everything PC related.

To save even more, if you are based near Bradford, W Yorks, you can collect your order and save on Postage.

Just so everyone know's, I'm not a rep for them but everything I have bought to build my own PC's since 1994 had come from them and it has always worked out cheaper than buying a ready made PC.

Well worth considering.