PC World Laptop, £199!

Brockyman

Just thought I would add that my sister runs a Pentium 200mmx with 128mb of ram and Windows 98 and it suits her needs perfectly. It's 10 years old now but copes very well with a broadband connection, even with only 4mb of video ram!! (I'm not kidding here by the way). A machine like this £199 laptop would blow her mind but she won't get one because she simply doesn't need it, it would exceed her requirements many times over.
Incidentaly, many of the posters on here clearly do not have machines capable of running spelling and grammar checkers at the same time. Either that or they don't know enough about computers to do the spell and grammar checks. They do make me smile though.

Ian.

nintendosensei

Windows 98, that processor as you say copes very well, but 98 and XP are very different, especially in terms of what they demand from the computer. You can't simply compare the clock speed of the VIA to an Intel or AMD, it means less now than ever before! Here are some benchmarks, http://www.beareyes.com.cn/2/lib/200601/18/20060118181_5.htm
This VIA is probably just as good as, at the very best a 1Ghz Intel/AMD machine. In ALL benchmarks concerning the CPU processing power it gets trounced and has less than half of the performance of it's competitors. I hope whoever has bought one already looks to get a refund.

P.S NEVER TRY AND LOOK FOR VIA BENCHMARKS, IT TAKES AGES!

smartsuit

No matter how you put it, there are people that would rather buy the cheapest they can new rather than spend the same money on a second hand item of a better spec. For those people this would be perfect.
For example, I could have bought a new car for £4k but it would have been the most basic car on this planet. Instead, I spent my 4k on a 9 year old Range Rover that cost its previous owner £25k 5 years ago and its first owner bought it new for over £50k!
What will the £4k new car be worth in 3 years time............£500? My range rover in 3 years, not far off what I paid for it!

haloman

This is going to crawl running XP, and I wouldn't recommend 98 to my worst enemies. Ignore the published minimum specs, consider we're 2 service packs, dozens of updates and the fact the minimum specs were well known to be a joke in the first place.

Even for basic browsing, it is underspeced and the fact it's approximately the same speed as a decent 6 year old laptop isn't anything to be proud of. This is around the same speed as a 1ghz desktop for basic PC applications (and it is physically incapable of doing anything more than that).

Anyone trying to run Linux on it is going to face an uphill battle with the obscure hardware. The lack of memory and small HDD isn't going to help it in the slightest to do much at all. These aren't going to be able to run OpenOffice.org effectively (think the JVM memory overhead - the thing slows my home machine down and it's 3x the spec), although should run older versions of Office fine.

They are passable, and I mean that in a broadest sense possible, as browsing machines. And the fact is says it has 64kb cache just scares me wondering which cache, and why they're advertising it?!? And the shocking memory bandwidth results combined with the 256mb of memory and lack of HDD space just scares me.

This truly is £200 worth of hardware and I wouldn't consider it a bargain. You'll get a better deal in March for £300 for a laptop that's at least twice as good, and you can get a desktop that's actually worthwhile for around the same price.

(BTW, I would recommend anyone getting this to avoid using FireFox - use Opera instead, avoid installing Java, use a lightweight player instead of awful WMP such as Foobar2000 and VLC, and keep using Windows Messenger rather thna upgrading to Windows Live Messenger. Using any software that uses any memory is going to kill this machine, and avoid installing anything unnecessary.)

MercilessKiller

smartsuit wrote:

No matter how you put it, there are people that would rather buy the cheapest they can new rather than spend the same money on a second hand item of a better spec. For those people this would be perfect.
For example, I could have bought a new car for £4k but it would have been the most basic car on this planet. Instead, I spent my 4k on a 9 year old Range Rover that cost its previous owner £25k 5 years ago and its first owner bought it new for over £50k!
What will the £4k new car be worth in 3 years time............£500? My range rover in 3 years, not far off what I paid for it!

LOL are you kidding me??!!??!!

A second hand item of better spec would have no Windows (or an illegal version as its none transferrable i think...) - No warranty against faults or a return policy (I dont care what you say about PC World.. the warranty is there...) etc etc..

A second hand item is old and damaged.. thats why you can get it cheaper!!!!

This NEW laptop is perfect for the reasons everyone else is suggesting too. We seem to be in agreement now.

REMEMBER ONCE AGAIN who this laptop is aimed for. Also remember this is posted in the part of the forum to alert people to the deal so thats the end of the debate really!

THANK YOU OP FOR ALERTING ME TO THIS DEAL

am sure the gran will be very happy!


EDIT: And at the post above mine.. you gotta stop raising the price!! OF COURSE more expensive laptops are going to be better.. why are you stating the obvious as an argument? It doesnt work like that... This is a moneysavingforum.. ok it might be better value but this is a budget cheap laaptop that cna be easily afforded end of! No argument needed.

haloman

People seem to forget that saving money doesn't consist of buying crappy stuff because it's cheap, as that's a false economy.

poppy10_2

youngwilly wrote:

This is a genuine bargain for those looking for a cheap laptop. As a 'techie' I have to say that some of the comments regarding this latop have been way over the top. To describe this as comparable to a '10 year old laptop' shows a complete lack of knowledge of computers (10 years ago you would have had a 386 processor with a 60Mhz processor if you were buying top of the range, and costing over £2000). Unless you intend to download and store lots of whole films or thousands of music files then a 20Gb hard drive is more than ample for most uses.

I would buy this for £199 and add as much memory as the board allows (1Gb if possible) which would cost around £50 or less- the machine would then run Microsoft Office 2003 comfortably (mine runs on a slower laptop). For £250 you would have a laptop that would have cost you over £1000 a year ago.

What absolute drivel:rotfl: , you could easily have got a pentium running at 233MHz or better 10 years ago. And in case you didn't know, laptop memory is extremely expensive - it would certainly cost a lot more than £50 to add 1GB of RAM to this piece of junk. No way would this have cost £1000 a year ago try a quarter of that price. :rotfl:

calibrax

poppy10 wrote:

What absolute drivel:rotfl: , you could easily have got a pentium running at 233MHz or better 10 years ago.

Not true. Hes talking about a laptop... the P233 was available in 1996, but not in a laptop.

poppy10 wrote:

And in case you didn't know, laptop memory is extremely expensive - it would certainly cost a lot more than £50 to add 1GB of RAM to this piece of junk. No way would this have cost £1000 a year ago try a quarter of that price. :rotfl:

Laptop memory is not that expensive for a relatively low spec machine such as this. And you think the laptop would have cost £250 a year ago? No chance. You can't even get one now for less than that, except in special limited deals like this!

youngwilly

Sadly there are a few 'know-alls' on this thread who can't bear to face the simple truth. The £199 laptop is an absolute bargain, as noted by Melodytoon above who actually bought one. Comments comparing the VIA processor to imaginary Pentiums of 10 years ago also expose the level of ignorance at work.

No-one is claiming this laptop will compete in a 'benchmark test' against an Intel or AMD processor - but it doesnt have to. The average processor barely gets above 40% peak usage during normal use - check the performance manager if you know how. Benchmark tests are fairly useless anyway as they are not real world tests.

I have an old Pentium 2 that runs Windows XP SP2 and Office 2000 perfectly well - the only limit is the amount of RAM I can get in it means it has to page file to hard disk which slows it down everso slightly. The kids even play games on it like Worms and the SIMS.

This laptop far exceeds the power of my old Pentium 2.

Money saving is about spending as little as possible to get what you want or need. This laptop fits the bill perfectly !

Oh and I bought an 512Mb laptop memory chip on Ebay last week for £18.00 and there are several on sale right now for under £20 - cheap as chips!

youngwilly

oh and just for the record the Pentium 2 was not introduced by Intel until May 7th 1997 , and it cost over $800 just for the processor.