new laptop

wayne

hi i,m looking to buy a laptop and have a top budget price of 350 pounds.has anyone got any hand advice on what to look for?whats a fast speed and is 20meg memory enough.i,ve been told that all laptops come ready equipped for wireless connection is this true?any advice would be gratefully recieved.thanks in advance.

ABH_3

wayne wrote:

hi i,m looking to buy a laptop and have a top budget price of 350 pounds.has anyone got any hand advice on what to look for?

Though prices of laptops are coming down, it's unusual to get anything that could be considered 'new' in that price bracket without its got some limitations. One of these would be no wireless conectivity, missing pcmcia slots etc. A reasonably cheap laptop at the present time is this one Acer Aspire 3004LC http://shopping.zdnet.co.uk/0,39033135,29018266,00.htm, however, before you get all excited, it doesn't have wireless connectivity built in. Though it does have a 'Type I/II' slot aka a pcmcia slot which will allow you to buy a seperate card which will add this functionality, but it comes at a price in that it doesn't keep within the profile of the laptop, so you have this 1 inch worth of black plastic protruding from the side of the laptop.

whats a fast speed

Really depends upon what your going to be doing with it, how much weight you want to carry etc.

and is 20meg memory enough.

It sounds like you've been looking at some 'old' laptops. 20MB of Memory\Ram in this day and age is nowhere near enough if you want or intend on running something like XP Home. You will need 256MB Minimum! If you intend on running a variant of Linux, or DOS even, then you should get away with such a small amount of ram, but what with it being relatively cheap. It would be a good idea to get more.

i,ve been told that all laptops come ready equipped for wireless connection is this true?

No, that's not true as described above.

any advice would be gratefully recieved.thanks in advance.

Read this: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=2045297&postcount=10 the bit you need to focus on is midway down the page as to the purpose of the laptop.

Then post back.

HTH

Little_John

Gonna have to be blunt with this one
£350 your budget isnt enough, the bottom price for a laptop is £400 and that is the dell inspiron 1300 if you can wait you could get it cheaper as they put them on offer pretty often.

But they are pretty limiting in what they will do, they now have 2 flavours for that price
a centrino which is a much better procesor and includes wireless but the other specs are low 256mb memory 40gb hard drive CDrw/DVDrom
and a
Celeron it has 512mb memory, 60gb hard drive, DVDrw and it has wireless built in.

My personal choce would go for the centrino the performance of the processor can compensate for the lack of memory and the memory can be upgraded later easily The cpu cant.

They are pretty much the cheapest laptops you will find new other than that you could look at the Acer range.