PC World Laptop, £199!

AMO

wolfman wrote:

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.

Fair enough!

Someone mentioned 'what if they don't have more than £200'. I'd say that that argument stands even if it laptops are available for £100. When do you draw the line?

Others also mention relatives going to Uni and about £200 is all they can afford. But then, why the luxury of a laptop? Why not a much more powerful desktop for your money. Also, going to uni isn't going to be just basic web surfing and MS Word. You'd end up needing to open up Adobe documents and possibly Power Point slides. To work effectively, you'd probably want to open up multiple windows.

I really don't think that people can do all that without getting frustrated at the slow down.

However, I pushed my point of view sufficiently now so I think I'll leave this thread. Time to spend more time money saving!

AMO

rogerramjet

I still think the cost of this was a good deal even if other didn't, but the offers over now.

As a side line, managed to get a Dell inspiron 1300 (1.6 celeron) today for £248.99, appears they were doing an offer on a £299 one yesterday with another £50 off for the first 30 customers, looks like the offer was running again today so managed to get one for my bro

offer was posted on the HUKD site, link below.....
http://www.hotukdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39531

scousemicky

chunter wrote:

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

School!

A woman in a hot air balloon realised she was lost. She reduced altitude
and spotted a man below. She descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse
me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet her an hour ago,
but I don't know where I am."

The man below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering
approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees
north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be in IT support", said the balloonist.

"I am" replied the man "- how did you know"?

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically,
correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact
is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The man below responded, "You must be in Management".

"I am", replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well", said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you're
going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot
air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you
expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in
exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow,
it's my fault!!”

:rotfl:

mriand

Good Morning, I have 3 PC's at home, 2 for the kids and my own. I built 2 myself (3.2ghz 1024mb ram etc) and one I bought from Comet last year special offer HP.
My father (72) has just started computer lessons and wanted a laptop to play with. I saw the advert on PC World for the £200 one and thought it would be ideal for him (I am sure he will get fed up shortly) so I went and queued for one (6:00am) and managed to get him one (I actually took my son and got 2).
So I brought it home turned it on and burned a recovery disc as per instructions. I then stuck my Belkin dongle in the back and updated windows (XP Home). I then loaded it with MS office 2003 proffesional and other bits of software (Avast anti virus etc) and I am seriously impressed.
It is not even slightly sluggish, it plays DVD's Burns DVD's, runs office applications with no problem, screen is OK, surfs like a trooper, the only thing I do not like is the speakers but most laptops have poor speakers.
My father is delighted.
It is covered by warranty.
It runs like a dream.
I cannot complain at the £200 price tag.
You get what you pay for and for £200 this is ideal as an entry level Laptop

Nix

Putting another slightly twisted angle on this now redundant argument.

Yesterday I was given a five year old Packard Bell laptop (I know, I know - but it was given! ) with a duff battery.

Anyone paid out for a laptop battery recently? This one'll cost me about £80!!

A brand new laptop with far better spec and a years guarantee for a mere £199 has got to be a bargain in anyones book.

PS - before anyone jumps in slamming the Packard Bell, it's still going strong despite hard use at University unlike my IBM Thinkpad; screen went after 2 years and the hard drive after 3. IBM NO HELP WHAT-SO-EVER!

Work it out Einstein! :wall:

FlyUK

AMO wrote:

Second point - when you start spending money on this machine, you have to compare this machine in equivalent categories. As a techy I am sure that you'll find it easy to source the memory to 'triple' it at no more than £30. Whether you can or not, kindly post the link so that others can benefit from this bargain. Also state what memory you'd have to chuck out to put in the new memory.

After all, we're talking about putting things into context right?

AMO

First and only site I looked at:

Ebuyer 512MB 533mhz PC2-4200 DDR2 SODIMM £32.01

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/118514

There is a spare slot for memory, so there is nothing to chuck out.

beara

FlyUK wrote:

First and only site I looked at:

Ebuyer 512MB 533mhz PC2-4200 DDR2 SODIMM £32.01

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/118514

There is a spare slot for memory, so there is nothing to chuck out.

Just to confirm - that's the right one for this e-systems machine is it please?

kwft

The good:
£200:

Sealed copy of XP home - now on ebay. Should bring the price to £150 -£160

Quiet: passive cooling helps immensely but for all the naysayers THERE IS A FAN ONBOARD TOO, have been using it sat on a feather duvet with no appreciable problems for about 4 hrs now.

More powerful than some on here would have you believe. See bottom...

RAM is DDR II based. 400Mhz FSB

The Bad:
Poor screen, can't remember is it bad contrast ratio where you have to look directly at the screen? Anyway 1024x768 & you have to look directly at it, but s'pose it helps if They can't see you watching !!!!!! on the train to work

To the person who found it 'grainy & pixellated', try the Cleartype Powertoy from Microsoft, it's free & what a difference it makes to ALL displays for text readability.

No wifi - already had USB 'G' dongle so no biggie but ebay is swarming with them anyway.

20Gb drive..broken down thus:
4Gb recovery partition - on a 20Gb drive it's just too big.
XP defaults: 2Gb sys restore, recycle bin set at default 10% - 1.6Gb, IE cache .5Gb

'Real' free space: 11.9Gb
Merged & reformatted HD. After XP install & most essential programs on HD: 3.5Gb used, 16Gb free.

The Ugly:
The speakers, ok they were never gonna be up to much but I think my wii remotes have better sound. There's a sound out jack anyway, get yer headphones on.

Final word for the laptop 'experts':
XP Home was junked/resold. Installed XP Pro, no memory upgrades.

At this very moment in time I am running:
Windows Live messenger
Word
Excel
VNC
Firefox
Outlook (Hosted Exchange)
Azureus
XP Firewall
J River Media Center: to stream video from LAN into a corner of the screen so I can watch an XviD from the desktop machine while I'm working.

For shame! The laptop is running smoothly & in a timely manner, to state that 256Mb RAM is inadequate for XP Home is merely highlighting a gap in your knowledge. Yes more RAM always helps but this machine is hardly crippled for it.

It is fair to say, dealing with knackered laptops on a fairly regular basis, that it's amazing the ways end users find to choke their PC/Laptops performance.

This is no fault of the machine however & I would expect that should I not run every .exe that IE offers me over the next 6 months, that the performance will still be the same.

Will I be getting more memory? yes, will I be buying a new HD? yes, but then I'm so impressed with the superhuman power that this laptop shouldn't have that I'm gonna multiboot it with SBS 03, Linux & XP pro.

I had just about finished working, but found this thread while looking for Via system tools, (most mobo temp progs don't support Via processors), and found the comments of 'stay away' to be ill advised & downright wrong. Maybe not the best machine for a novice, but for someone with a tech background (tech enough to format & reinstall XP) this was a diamond. I'm just sorry i couldn't have picked up more.

Seems like the criticism was levelled at PC World rather than the laptop. Fair comment I wouldn't let anyone in a lilac shirt near my PC. But to slate the laptop for price alone whilst knowing nothing about its real world performance was disappointing. I would urge that these comments, next time around, were based on empirical evidence rather than anecdotal 'it's a Via with 256Mb RAM so it must be crap', this is supposed to be about helping the consumer after all.

</rant>

biglugs

Sealed copy of XP home - now on ebay.

Selling the XP disc on ebay should be of absolutely NO benefit - without the serial number on the COA this disk is worth about £2. If you sell it with your COA then anyone else can take over your licence and you will have problems upgrading/reinstalling in future.
If you tell the buyer this is a genuine sealed copy of XP then you are lying - taking advantage of other people's naivety, which is just downright bad form.

Kilty_2

But to slate the laptop for price alone whilst knowing nothing about its real world performance was disappointing. I would urge that these comments, next time around, were based on empirical evidence rather than anecdotal 'it's a Via with 256Mb RAM so it must be crap', this is supposed to be about helping the consumer after all.

I've actually used machines based on the Via C7 processor before and know just how bad they are in comparison to their Intel counterparts.

For the sake of £100 I know for a fact it is not worth the drop in performance.

Saying it's fine with 256mb of RAM is ok if you use it as you are doing now, not exactly pushing it using Office applications are you? At the end of the day you need more RAM than you are using if you want to do anything more than type letters and you know that as well as I do.

Will I be getting more memory? yes, will I be buying a new HD? yes

So that will raise the price of your bargain laptop considerably; last time I checked laptop HDDs were not exactly cheap.