The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

LadFromWales85

In all honesty, are people paying £300 for a laptop going to pay £1-200 for Windows Vista?

I'd imagine the price of Vista will be irrelevant, as just like XP, most people will run it pirate anyway.

All of the last few Medions Woolies have had, have used the same battery, both wide and standard format I think. I know the battery is small, and it would be brill if there were a similarly (or better!) specced laptop around for a similar price, with a bigger battery.

I'm not prepared to pay much more, when it's just going to be a glorified web browser, heh!

As much as I'd love to upgrade all the PC's in this house to Vista upon its launch, I doubt it'll happen! I'll probably purchase a legitimate copy for this PC, and keep the rest on XP for the time being.

The Dell offers end today The £349 one only has a Celeron M processor too...what's this Acer one everyone speaks about? Looks like my best value is in the Medion at the moment though...least I'll get a free bag, and I'll probably blag a free mouse too

Kilty_2

Nothing wrong with a Celeron-M processor.

You can be sure that the build quality of the Dell is far better than the Medion, and you can upgrade the battery to 6 cell for £11.

New offers will start the day after they end, they always do .

You need to think about whether you need a long battery life and something that will take a few knocks, as I'd bet the Medion is down on both counts. The loss in performance going from 1.7ghz Pentium-M to 1.6ghz Celeron-M is nothing if you need a longer battery life and some decent build quality.

LadFromWales85

Battery life isn't too important, as the notebook will be used mostly at home, though portability isn't too much of an issue, so looking for a laptop with a big battery would be good

I'll take a look at Dell's site after payday, and see what I can do then...might even see what eBay has in store.

tomS_4

There are a couple of Advent PCs at £399 and £449 at PC would that look ok, though i have no idea what they are like as a make.
Sempron 3000+, 1GB Ram, 40gb or 60Gb hard drive, 15.4in widescreen, dvd rewriter multidrive (no idea if DL).
The cheap one has XP home, the more expensive one has media centre edition.

They both have ATI X200 integrated graphics, which should run VIsta Aero a lot better than the intel 900/950 graphics in a lot of other cheap laptops.

What do you think?

pavlovs_dog

tomS wrote:

There are a couple of Advent PCs at £399 and £449 at PC would that look ok, though i have no idea what they are like as a make.
Sempron 3000+, 1GB Ram, 40gb or 60Gb hard drive, 15.4in widescreen, dvd rewriter multidrive (no idea if DL).
The cheap one has XP home, the more expensive one has media centre edition.

They both have ATI X200 integrated graphics, which should run VIsta Aero a lot better than the intel 900/950 graphics in a lot of other cheap laptops.

What do you think?

whats the battery life like on them?

swizzle_2

There seems to be alot of talk about battery life, so what is ideal?

Am i wrong in thinking that if you are at home or say in a hotel room you can just plug it in-with the adaptor that came with it?

Also does it cost alot say to buy a replacement battery that would last longer?

Been looking at an Acer 3634, pricerunner says most popular under £400, but battery only 1.5 hours- which is not alot

pavlovs_dog

swizzle wrote:

There seems to be alot of talk about battery life, so what is ideal?

Am i wrong in thinking that if you are at home or say in a hotel room you can just plug it in-with the adaptor that came with it?

the whole reason that i am buying a laptop and not a desktop is the fact that it is mobile. my uni is 40 miles away from home (one way), and computer facilities are not as adequate as they should be. if i have a laptop, then i can do my work wherever i can find somewhere to park my bum. the whole campus is wifi enabled, so net access would not be a problem.

however they do not take kindly to students plugging in their laptop. whilst their are a few powerpoints dotted around where i could get away with sneakily plugging in my lappy, i am fighting the other students with the same idea for access to these. first come, first served and all that jazz

there is no point in me shelling out £500 quid on something that will run for 2 hours, if im going to have 4 -5 hours worth of work to do between lectures. anything less than 4hours batt life just isnt feasable for me.

this is why i cannot even contemplate the fantastic offer tescos currently have. were it not for the battery, that lappy would be ideal. but alas, ive so far only found 2 or 3 lappy in my budget with the specs required and the right level of battery life. and so the hunt continues :rolleyes:

im currently waiting for more details from tchibo about the lappy that they will shortly be selling.

LadFromWales85

tomS, took a look at PC World's site...saw the Advent £449 lappy with the Sempron...has a whopping 1.5 hours of battery life. That may sound ideal to some people who won't be away from the mains very often, but laptop batteries grow old quickly, even if not used much. Just a few months down the line, you'd be lucky to hit an hour from a battery that managed 1.5 hours from new.

Cheapest I've seen with a 'proper' graphics chip, although it still piggybacks system ram. At a price of £449 though, I'd be tempted to spend a little more and get a 64bit capable laptop, AMD Turion for example...

tomS_4

The better the components (screen, graphics card especially) the more they eat battery life. 3-4 hours is probably the max you'll get from a laptop.. but it will almost always be a lot less than that if you are using it intensively.

Sahame about the 1.5 hours ont he advent ones.. that is a bit low really. Otherwise they looked good. Still, if you will mostly use it at home and the office, it might be ok.

Ideally i'd look for one with enough battery life to play you a full dvd onthe train.. but then as movies keep getting longer and longer...

LadFromWales85

About movie playback...most laptops lack the ability to decode MPEG2 in hardware and/or don't come with playback software which utilises the hardware decoding facilities. In english, this means that playing DVD's will use lots of processing power, decoding the data in software, which means increased battery consumption in comparison to web browsing etc. The optical drive in constant use won't be good for the battery life either...

Think I'll give Comet a call and see what they have available right now...