The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

sablade

yes I did, its disgusting paypal allow just 30days to claim and this website takes more than 30days to send items, mind you alot of mail order states please allow 28days delivery.

Mind you a professional website taking paypal??

be wary

raeble

Well if you paid by credit card via paypal you should be able to get them to look into it. I would have thought.

lesley2004

This lap top is available in aldil from 11.11.04.

Is this a good deal?? I want it mainly for games and internet use.

Can someone explain to me how a firewire works! Does this allow me to use existing broadband on desktop pc? and if so is it easy to set up for a novice like myself?


Laptop £999.99
•Intel® CentrinoTM Mobile Technology •Intel® Pentium® M processor 735 • Intel® Pentium® M processor 735(1.7Ghz) • Multi Format DVD Burner • DVD–+ R/RW • Intel PRO/WIRELESS • LAN 2200 b/g • ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 128MB • High resolution • 15.1” SXGA+ Display • 80 GB Hard disk • 512 MB DDR RAM 333MHz • 4 in 1 Card Reader • Soundsystem • 2 internal speakers, internal • microphone connection • 3x USB 2.0, • Firewire IEEE1394 • VGA-Out, Mic-In, • Line-Out, • TV-Out (s-video) • 56k Modem V.90 and fast ethernet 10/100Mbit LAN (includes telephone cable) • Battery: Smart Li-Ion battery (8 cells).

Chippy_Minton

Can someone explain to me how a firewire works! Does this allow me to use existing broadband on desktop pc? and if so is it easy to set up for a novice like myself?

Firewire is a high speed serial port, typically used for connecting a camcorder, digital camera or MP3 player to the computer. I'm not aware of any way of using Firewire to connect to a broadband connection (i.e. ADSL router/modem). You would use USB or a PCI network card to connect wirelessly or via network cable to the router/modem.

mjr600

lesley, below is what I consider to be just about the best spec per £ on the market at the moment and nearly £400 cheaper than the supermarket special.


http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=66432

Unless you really need a 9700 graphics engine for the lastest games then the ebuyer laptop is first class.Its even widescreen making watching dvd's a treat.

lesley2004

Hi

Thanks for your reply

Have you purchased from ebayer before??
Are they a well known company?
Do you know if the after sales care good?

I have looked at the spec above this one which seems to have dvd rewriter also, it works about 690 incl delivery. Seems a good deal also.

Trouble is I dont understand all the technical jargon, and there are so many to choose from.

Are Acers a decent make?

Sorry so many queries.

mjr600

I have bought lots of bits from Ebuyer, they are a large concern, I've never dealt with aftersales since nothing I bought has been faulty.
ACER are one of the largest laptop producers in the world.
This laptop is an award winner, see here....

http://www.whatlaptop.co.uk/cPM6JBpoJoyL1w.html

Ask yourself if you need a DVD burner.

To burn a full DVD with data takes about fifteen minutes and are you really going to need 4.7 gigabytes of data storage ? its a great deal. Whilst it is burning you won't be able to use the laptop properly and it will be sucking power from the battery at an alarming rate.

If you want to copy prerecorded DVD's, films etc then a laptop just is not suitable. It'll take up to an hour to 'rip' the film, an hour to compress it and then another quarter to burn it to the blank DVD and you wont be able to use the laptop during the process.

If you want to put digital video from a digital camcorder onto DVD my advice is use a desktop PC.

These sort of heavy memory/battery/processor applications are not the stuff of cheap laptops.

Stick with the cheaper machine.

If you want to play the latest games or get into DVD burning buy a desktop.

£$&*"($£&(

I've been looking at replacing my Sony Vaio laptop.  Can anyone tell me what advantages you would gain with a Celeron model?  The processors seem to be fewer ghz, and I wondered why.
Thank you

There are fairly new mobile Celeron processors which are a cut down version of the Centrino processor. The design is very different and they are comparable to older processors with faster speeds. The older Celerons were some of the worst processors ever made and were beaten by far slower older rival AMD processors. It's highly likely that a new 1.3ghz mobile Celeron will be much better than an old 2.8ghz Celeron.

The main difference between the mobile celeron and centrino is that it has a 512kb cache (the more cache the better), which is half that of the centrino (but 4 times that of the older Celerons and the main reason these older processors are poor), and it doesn't have the power saving speed stepping technology which I know little about except it adjust the processor speed to save power.

The mobile celeron and centrino use less power, thus increasing battery life, and run cooler so the laptops are usually much quieter as they require less in the way of cooling fans.

sk79

I bought the aldi laptop when it was first released in September (it went on limited sale back then) and have only had one slight problem with the battery, but this was replaced in the last fortnight.

All in all, the laptop performs superbly and is superb value for money. I'd say buy it - you won't get better for that price.

Any specific questions about it, just ask...

flyer

Anybody have any views on Tiny Computers? They have some very good deals. Don't know anything about quality, service etc