PC World Laptop, £199!

gam3r

Kilty wrote:

For business and internet use it certainly is NOT a bargain and shouldnt be touched with a bargepole, I don't care what any reviewer says.

Medion were selling refurbished Celeron machines on their own website a few months back.

Agreed. Passive cooling? Pffft...

There are a few decent laptops which are slighty more expensive, not by much and they are way better.

rthirlby

youngwilly wrote:

. 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).

Well of course I was exagerating lol !! :rotfl:
But not by much, nearly 9 years ago in 1998 saw the release of AMD's K62 processor upto a whopping 550MHz

To put this into perspective, an AMD K62 550MHz processor from way back when will give comparable "real life" performance to this VIA Cyrix processor. It might do ok with 512mb of memory but with only 256mb its a joke !!


I repair laptops for a living and have had thousands of laptops pass through my hands. So im uniquely experienced to say what is and what isnt a good laptop and this clearly is not good !!!

So telling me I have no idea what im talking about just doesnt sit right, check you facts


Its absoloutely bottom dollar, bargain basement, old technology.

drharrisjones

sounds good?

Kilty_2

At the end of the day, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys and this is no exception.

Spend £100 more and get a real bargain in the shape of a Dell Inspiron 1300. (If they aren't going for that price now they will be in a few weeks/months anyway, since the offers change every couple of hours)

john_kent

The Dell Inspiron is excellant for browsing , office and music.

Not for games as it doesnt have the best of graphics cards . But then again , £350 the £200 in a few months for Xbox 360 and you will have a wonderful combo of a decent home offic epc and a superb gaems console.

MercilessKiller

pulliptears wrote:

Like I said, you would struggle to do much other then type on it. I saw one of these on display a few weeks ago and the screen on it was truly awful in comparison to other display models. It seemed more pixilated and very dull.

Went into the store a week later and the EI Laptop was the only one not turned on.....

huh? thats insanely bad advice i'm afraid. It completely depends on who's using the computer. Of course for an extra £100 you can get better specs but thats the same with any product..

The specs there can EASILY surf the web and even download music files (as long as nothing else is being done at the same time...)

If all you do is use word processing packages and browse the web, check email etc.. then £200 is fine for that spec. If its going to be used a lot i'd recommend paying more obviously but for soemthing simple and basic i'd definitely go for this.

Its more than enough to play theme hospital which is better than most newer games anyway

Remember who the target is for £200 computers. Its not for people who use this forum (moneysavers...) Its for people who will hardly be using it but trying to get them digital.

MercilessKiller

trl002 wrote:

I agree! i heard that vista will be able to spy into your pc hard drive and will report if you have any "fake" stuff on there!

Absolute rubbish. XP can do that if they wanted it to anyway.

Vista is going to be a good OS in comparison to XP due to the major upgrades in the networking layer making it more secure (or at least easier to secure in the future)....

It wouldn't be profitable to re-release XP with a better look simply for money as they'd be found out very quickly and get into a lot of cr*p. I remember when EVERYONE hated XP.. and now people are using it and saying its lots better than vista..

argh sorry for getting aggro in last 2 posts but people REALLY need to be more open minded about things.

Im not saying Vista is amazing.. im saying don't count it out till you've actually used a proper version (which current RTM isn't due to driver supports)

haloman

I don't recommend buying this laptop. At £200, you are getting /exactly/ what you are paying for - in essence, crappy old technology. However, you're not going to get much better for the price - I'd recommend spending an extra £100-£150. I wouldn't really say now is the time to buy - rather, wait until about March.

The only site that has reviews for the processor is a chinese site, and the PCMark 2004 "real world" benchmark imply it is around 3/4 of the speed of a Pentium-M 1.1ghz. Now, and there's some guesswork here based on the results of an old Dell Dimension and a couple of other randomly found articles, but you're talking in the realm of a ~1-1.2ghz desktop machine. Combined with 256 meg of memory, this machine is going to absolutely crawl. And when Vista comes out, I wouldn't even bother trying to install it on this.

Comparing it to the C3 is also faulty. Basically, the C3 is good for what it is - it's cheap, it's small, it's passively cooled, it has a built in MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoder and is useful for streaming music to, putting under the telly, using as the hardware for a file-server running Debian etc. This would not, however, make it good for home use. People who buy stuff with the C3 are generally geeks buying it for it's strengths rather than its weaknesses.

ioscorpio

I went down to PC World this morning at about 8.30am and there was a queue of about 20 people, staff came out and gave tickets to the first 10 who wanted the laptop or the pc. When I went in the store, an assistant said it did not have an Intel processor and was only worth £200, so perhaps not the bargain, the ad leaves you to believe. I won't be going back tomorrow to try again for the 10 on offer.

steelwind101

Hello

I have just joint this forum b/c of the confusion over this VIA processor.

Its not a C3, it isnt 10 years old and it isnt that bad!!

Its a C7 and is a smiliar build the 300 series mobile celeron, it uses less battery and provides better security protocols.

It means u can get smaller lighter notebooks offering the same performance.

I know if you wanted to buy one you would have already googled the benchmarks, let me leave a little review of a computer a with the C7 in here for you.

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2006Apr/fea20060428035806.htm

Enjoy, it isnt that bad. If you want light weight, long lasting computing with out the "Intel cost" (now out of date 300 series mobile celeron, replaced with the 400 series) then at this price you cant go wrong.

Enjoy.