PC World Laptop, £199!

toasterman

As an aside to PC World - as I know a few people mentioned buying from the Dell Outlet, earlier.
I've just spotted a flaw with getting a pc from them.
http://outlet.dell.com/Emea_Dfo/EuDispatcher?target=SpecPage&serviceTag=Z271RGHF&sessionID=FS2vdN9v!1383299314!848982073!1167259247348
Thats the cheapest Inspiron laptop showing, and its £338.
However - if you read the small print, delivery from the Dell Outlet centre is £60 inc vat!
Total = £398.

You can buy an Inspiron with a faster processor and double the ram, new, from their normal shop - for £388 inc vat and shipping. And if you just wanted a cheap but usable laptop - they have them as cheap as £329 inc vat and shipping. The outlet isn't all its cracked up to be, methinks

Kilty_2

Sometimes you'll get a really good deal at the Outlet but very rarely on their bottom end offerings, usually on the higher priced stuff and only occasionally.

MercilessKiller

AMO wrote:

Okay, I rest my case. It will be interesting to see how long people keep these laptops for. Assuming that they only need to surf the internet and read email and don't mind waiting for the laptop to loadup and loadup applications for the first time and do only one thing at a time and fairly slowly at that then it probably is fine for the patient minded.

Assuming they can make the PC last for a year, then its an outgoing of £200 / year. If they can make it last 2 years, then £100 / year, etc.

However, I would certainly not recommend this deal to anyone. I would tell them to spend closer to the £400 mark and then see them run the laptop into the ground. Much better to spend £400 and make it last twice as long, than £200 here.

But most people here are looking at spending more to beef up the machine as it is sooo slow anyway.

AMO

Im sorry but I regard this as bad advice. Your pushing everyone away from buying a £200 laptop (easily affordable) and telling them to spend double when they may only use BASIC functions which the £200 would do!!! I think 2 years is the least amount of time this laptop would be used by someone like a young teenager or at the other end of the scale as it does basic basic things that they want!

Why on EARTH would a 10 year old kid want a £400 laptop! The only difference for him would be music downloads and games, but maybe he has a dekstop pc downstairs for thta and the laptop could be for homework in his room while the dad needs the pc.. Thats just one example of how a £200 laptop would be fantastic! Why WASTE £200 on extra spec's that you simply won't be using!!!

AMO i've said it in every post.. THINK of who the target audience of this deal is. For you or me, fine £400 minimum! For people that don't have computers at the moment or have specific use for them (inc linux), then this £200 is a great deal end of!!! Its your OPINION that they should spend double to get better value, but thats not fact by a long shot....

AMO

MercilessKiller wrote:

Im sorry but I regard this as bad advice. Your pushing everyone away from buying a £200 laptop (easily affordable) and telling them to spend double when they may only use BASIC functions which the £200 would do!!! I think 2 years is the least amount of time this laptop would be used by someone like a young teenager or at the other end of the scale as it does basic basic things that they want!

Why on EARTH would a 10 year old kid want a £400 laptop! The only difference for him would be music downloads and games, but maybe he has a dekstop pc downstairs for thta and the laptop could be for homework in his room while the dad needs the pc.. Thats just one example of how a £200 laptop would be fantastic! Why WASTE £200 on extra spec's that you simply won't be using!!!

AMO i've said it in every post.. THINK of who the target audience of this deal is. For you or me, fine £400 minimum! For people that don't have computers at the moment or have specific use for them (inc linux), then this £200 is a great deal end of!!! Its your OPINION that they should spend double to get better value, but thats not fact by a long shot....

Not really. I don't have a problem with people buying £200 cars and running them into the ground. I don't really have a problem with people buying £200 laptops either.

However, its nothing to do with the target audience. My points have been in this thread:

1) The majority of people that buy this laptop will need to upgrade the memory. There has been one person that has stated otherwise, but I believe she is in the minority. This laptop is horrendously slow without a memory fixup. The people supporting this laptop are stating its cost at £200 when in reality, they know that they will upgrade it and its real cost (even though still poor value) is at closer to the £250 mark.

2) Money Saving Expert is all about value. Imagine going into a supermarket at the end of the day and their sandwiches which they have to chuck away are down from £1.99 to 10p. It's all very well buying one of them, but would you buy 20 just for the sake of them being cheap? You'd end up throwing many of them away and hence get less value out of them.

Well you might argue that one laptop is fine then. What people don't realise what the point I am trying to make on this thread is VALUE! They still don't get it.

The £200 laptop will not last more than 3 months unless you either change it to a lighter operating system, not really use it at all or increase at the very least the memory and use it for very basic stuff.

Now assuming that you are a person that is convinced that you can make the laptop last 1-2 years for example. What I am saying then is that a £400 laptop you can make last 5-6 years.

It's all about value. Laptops hitting the £400 mark have begun to hit the end of their depreciation cycle and those hitting £200 have begun to hit the start of the recycling cycle.

But the point is that no matter what your target audience, if you spend twice the amount, you'll get 3 or more times the longevity of the laptop for your money. It's all about VALUE regardless of whether you think you can run Win XP on IE6 and live with it.

If you cannot understand value, I really cannot argue this case further and by all means go for it. If you like this deal then good for you, but I cannot recommend it to anyone. It's cheap yes, but its NOT good value.

AMO

MercilessKiller

grrr get it out of your head that it wont last 3 months!!! This is purely dependant on what the laptop is used for..

I know MSE is about value but its also about grabbing things cheap.. and though you may get better value for £400 some people can't afford that.. and for those who will be doing basic things then there's no need to spend the extra cash!

Maybe this type of laptop is a good present for kids/grandparents for example whereby £400 is too expensive! Ok it lasts longer but for a bday pressie or whatever you aint spending that much...

i disagree that the target is irrelevant. My grandma has had an old awful spec laptop (with 256 ram) for years and she still uses it and even takes it abroad to spain. She uses the net and email and thats it! I cant use it as its too slow for me, but she loves it! There is no WAY i'd tell her to spend DOUBLE the amount if she was interested in this laptop.. not a chance.. Ok £400 is better value but at a 100% price increase!! Thats just silly unless its going to be worth it due to extensive use!

I understand value more than most being a poker player (If you know what i mean great, if you don't just believe me.. lot of value bets on the river etc...) but I wouldn't call a 100% pot raise with a low pocket pair.. just like I wouldnt spend the extra 100% when I have something that does me just fine...

This was a deal posted by the OP to make people aware. Whether we're going to get it or not is ireelevant but for you to say NO SPEND £400 INSTEAD whether its due to value or whatever, its just not the point of this post..

And there is no argument! there is no evidence/fact to say it wont last 5 years! The hardware has the same lifespan and a quick format every now and then will bring it up to scratch... thus your argument is majorly flawed!!!!

If you prove to me it will only last 3 months, you win.. but for me thats a silly comment. It will last a lot longer thus for someone who does nothing on it, its a good deal end of...

melodytoon

Well said, MercilessKiller. It's all well & good people saying that we'd be better off spending nearly £400 on something that will last so much longer, but where's the money to come from? My mother starts studying in February - she needed a computer, & getting her this laptop has given her enough time to get used to it & set herself up ready for her course. She's never going to be interested in playing games & watching dvds on it (the day I see her doing either of those, I'll fast-track her into Shady Pines ) - she just wants to type her work, do her research, save her work on the hard drive or on cd, & send e-mails. She doesn't need a £400 computer for that, & if she had the other £200 (she doesn't) she can think of better uses for it than spending it on software or hardware she'll never make good use of.

It's not so long ago when many of us didn't have e-mail & relied on postal services for sending correspondence. Yes, e-mail is great, but it won't get there any quicker just because you have 500 smilies & 50 stationery templates at your fingertips, or because the keyboard glows in the dark & the tower has a neon strip. The same applies to typed documents. If she needed to prepare top-notch presentations, print her work in a million colours & have them visible from the back of a huge conference hall, she might want something with ultra graphic capabilities. She doesn't need it - she'll be printing colour documents using her Dell 725 (another goodie that some people will probably slate) onto standard A4 paper in the required layout, & that's it. When she rang me this morning, she was typing on the laptop & playing a music cd via WinAmp at the same time. Yes, she has me to help her find freeware bits & bobs, but she's not daft or decrepit. On the contrary, I think she has her priorities straight. Instead of wanting to repeatedly open up the compuer to upgrade/insert the next 'best ever/fastest yet', she'll just get on with using it.

Cheap it may well have been, but this laptop is very valuable to her because it's enabled her to start her studying. That's all it was required to do. She bought it for a specific purpose & it meets her needs.

This debate is unusual, because while it's getting too precious for words, its actual value is depreciating with almost every negative comment containing exaggerated points trying to make a pretty pointless one. Value is directly related to the use you have for something. 1000 tins of beans for 1p per 100 is of no value to someone who can't eat them, can't sell them & has nowhere to store them. Telling someone it's better to spend £400 or more on a computer when they haven't got the money & need the computer now is similarly pointless. I'm leaving the debate now, but by all means ask us in a year if we've had problems with the machine, as the discussion about resolving them will be worth more at that time than it is now. Thanks again to the OP for posting the info.

wolfman

h4x3r wrote:

right common and think u think 256mb on mem is enough and ur saying the laptop is not gonna stress out?

firstly the consumer would need an anti virus so prob come with norton internet securty 2006 :mad: thats 1 thing that would slow ur pc down as hell as it is like bloatware

seondly once u install all u need such as office, msn, norton etc etc its going to be taking up alot of mem like now im using ie7, msn, wmp10 and using 478mb this is on my laptop and its not using anything else. So already ur stressing out the ram if u have 256mb

i know what ur saying think about the cosumer, ive had my cuzion brought a budget pc with and after 6 months the laptop was peice of junk.

i just like to add Serivce Pack 2 with loads and loads of updates and paths also think ahead when sp3 comes out this laptops is already dead

I think it's been mentioned, but a £200 laptop will only be for basic functionality. You mention high resource usage, but you're hardly using the most efficient applications. Switch IE7 for Opera, MSN for Trillian (or Gaim), WMP10 for VLC and you'll start to see quite a difference. And don't use Norton. Either buy Nod32, or use AVG (free).

Windows can easily be tweaked to be much lighter. Disabling services, removing autostarts etc...

The original XP will run on the laptop without any problems. In fact I think it'd be fine even with SP2. I've got an old P3 733Mhz with 256mb RAM using XP SP2 and that runs ok. I can't really speak for using a VIA cpu, but I'm sure it'd be ok for browsing, sending email, viewing photo's, and doing the odd bit of word processing.

And if not, the hardware is still a bargain should you want to run Linux, there's no doubt about that. But that may not suite a lot of people.

AMO wrote:

Because:
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.

I wouldn't say it's changed quite to the extent you mention. Run a light browser like Opera and it should cope no problem. If needs be you can disable feature rich content, such as AJAX or heavy Flash scripts. Apart from that I can't see what has changed hugely in the past 5 years, at least not professionally.

AMO wrote:

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.

I don't think they'll increase quite at the rate your stating. Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr may become more intensive, but most of your big sites such as Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and many of the web mail clients, will still offer a stripped down version. You just have to look at how much browsers have changed over the last 5 years, and the difference isn't huge, especially not when compared to the progression of hardware.



For £200 pounds the laptop is good value if all you plan on doing is a little browsing, emails, view photos etc... It may be a little bit light on raw power, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem, especially for the more technically minded.

Wish I'd seen it earlier, would have been tempted myself.

chunter

Too many people off on holidays.
The quicker you're all back to work, the better.
And the replies get a bit shorter...
:rotfl:

£$&*"($£&(

The claim from Via is that the Via C7 provides similar performance to a similar speed Pentium-M or Celeron-M. The only reference to a test I could find (didn't look for too long) where a similar spec laptop was used suggests the performance is 50 to 75% lower than the Pentium-M or Celeron-M. Read into this what you like.

trebor21

bottom line,
if you want to surf type letters this pc is fine
much else then u need to spend the money