PC World Laptop, £199!

Kilty_2

I wouldnt touch that above £269 one either since it's an old Celeron that will eat the battery for a laugh.

Celeron-M is where it's at and they can be had for less than £350 now. £299 when Dell are needing to shift some

beara

As an aside - the ad in the paper (repeated today) states DVD Rewriter, but the supplied laptop is a dvd-rom/cd rewriter. I don't want to take it back as I'm pleased with it generally, but should there be any redress for the misdescription?

h4x3r

Kilty wrote:

Wasn't me that bought the laptop, I've more sense than to shop at PC World

At least someone does

AMO

MercilessKiller wrote:

I really disagree.

What are reasons or an OS to go slow? Large temp files? Can be deleted....
Too many programs? Can be uninstalled.

What you got to remember is that people who the laptop is aimed for wont be doing things that are going to exhaust the laptop as such. They'll be doing simple basic things... it will last for a long time to a user who simply looks at web pages and types documents. I don't undersatnd how anyone can disagree with that comment either.....

Please just keep an open mind about who the laptop is for. For me, you or a lot of MSE users it wouldnt last even 3 months.. for someone whos old, slow and does basic basic things.. it would last a long long time!

No. What you say is not really a fair comparison. First of all, a newer operating system offers more services - this means that it loads more programs into memory to perform background services and therefore is slower to load up and hogs more memory when running. It's nothing to do with temp files.

Secondly, people think that someone old can afford to wait a lot longer for a PC to do things and therefore everything is fine. If you take this to extremes, why not install Windows Vista on the machine and then give it to someone REALLY REALLY old. Trust me, by the time Windows loadsup, the'll probably have been born into the next life.

AMO

AMO

toasterman wrote:

How can people deny that this laptop is suitable for web browsing, emails, and homework? What stops it from being usable for this?

Because:

1) A desktop in all the comparisons so far will always perform faster because it has faster components especially in the areas of the hard drive and any energy saving options.

2) The resource requirements to surf internet and check email are much greater than they were 5 years ago. Go to hotmail now and compare it to 5 years ago. The cost to download all the heavy images and the richness of the application is such that you need a more sophisticated browser program and wider bandwidth and faster CPU to interpret the HTML generated by the browser.

Look at it this way. Many people are like yourself where you just want to 'simply check email and browse the internet'. If you really believe that resource requirements do not increase with time, that web pages are not more complex and need more powerful software, then try using this same laptop in a couple of years time.

Surely people realise by now that even 'simple web browsing' and 'emailing software' has become more sophisticated over time which requires more powerful hardware.

AMO

AMO

melodytoon wrote:

Not every buyer wants to play games, watch dvds, watch tv & do a multitude of other things they've heard other people do on theirs. Surely people should think about what they want the computer for, then look at whether it will meet their particular needs. Just because it won't meet some people's needs doesn't make it rubbish for everyone.

No, but everyone you speak to will want to do it on Windows XP with IE6 or later (or the Firefox/Opera alternatives)!

AMO

AMO

ManAtHome wrote:

Why do you assume it'll be rubbish - do supermarket bananas/beans etc suddenly become rubbish when the price is reduced? If PCW were making the same margin on these as the others they sell, surely they'd be flogging container-loads every day.

It's above average spec for a 5-6 year old laptop (which would have been a bit under £1k at the time) - in fact it's a higher spec than the one I'm using at the moment (8 years old...).

No-one is saying the PC is rubbish. It was fine in the past. However, this is MSE or Money Saving Expert and people on here try to explain the difference between something cheap and something good value.

AMO

AMO

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!

This is a different argument. If your old car slowed down in speed overtime because every year the speed limit increased by 10 mph and your car's maximum speed slowed by 10 mph such that to everyone else it appeared to be a milkfloat, would you still see things in the same light?

AMO

AMO

youngwilly wrote:

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.

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.

I'll bet that your machine is a desktop such that when resources run out and it overspills to using virtual memory on the desktop, the faster spinning of the hard drive of a desktop when compared to a laptop is less noticeable.

I'll bet that the games your kids play are games of yesterday - you can't expect users to install software of yesterday. Even Office 2000 is old now.

If you want any hope of running Win XP on this laptop, you really need to dig out yesterdays software.

AMO

Voyage34

I think, after much consideration, I'd rather have an etch-a-sketch than one of these.

Better ergonomics too