Help. Can anyone recommend a laptop.

mickg213

Hi all. I am looking for a laptop. I want to be able to get wireless internet connection, store and edit my digital photos, basic word processing, spreadsheets etc; watch films & listen to music. I have seen a Compaq C310 in my local PC World for £449, is this any good or should I be looking elsewhere. I think £450 is about the most I want to spend. Any ideas? Thanks.

Mr_Vincent

£450 sounds about right for spending to me.
Laptops have come down in price and I myself would want to spend more than £500 if I was to buy one now.

My laptop is about 3 years old and bought for £699 from Comet.
It's a Travelmate Acer with a 30GB hard drive.

Naturally you will be looking for something more than 30GB.
Main thngs to look for.

4 USB ports - 2 is useless to you.
Floppy drive - no longer standard in pc's either laptop or desktop
Processor speed - must be Pentium 4 or above
and abviously operating system.

Avoid package deals if you can that include some handy programs thown in.

Staff in pc world should be able to help you get what you want - they deal with customers like you everyday though many members on this forum may disagree.

Good luck.
:cool:

£$&*"($£&(

Mr_Vincent wrote:

Main thngs to look for.

4 USB ports - 2 is useless to you.
Floppy drive - no longer standard in pc's either laptop or desktop
Processor speed - must be Pentium 4 or above
and abviously operating system.

Avoid package deals if you can that include some handy programs thown in.

You won't find a floppy drive on laptops anymore so it's not worth looking for. Why anyone would want a floppy drive these days is beyond me.

Your processor advice is rather out of date as well. Most Intel processor based laptops are dual core or Celeron-M with occasional Pentium-Ms around. Any of these will do . Celeron-M laptops are the cheapest. There are alternatives with AMD processors.

And why would you avoid package deals that have handy software thrown in?

Mr_Vincent

Shareware is a concern.

I am out of date but nobody responded.

Sounds like our friend has little to worry about with modern laptops.
They are all capable of doing what he is requesting.

I would still advise going for brand names with caution.
Smaller or relatively unkown brands do sometimes if not often offer better value for money.

j_davies

mickg213 wrote:

Hi all. I am looking for a laptop. I want to be able to get wireless internet connection, store and edit my digital photos, basic word processing, spreadsheets etc; watch films & listen to music. I have seen a Compaq C310 in my local PC World for £449, is this any good or should I be looking elsewhere. I think £450 is about the most I want to spend. Any ideas? Thanks.

I have just set up two of these laptops for a customer and I will say apart from the shortage of a XP CD and USB ports and the irritation of all the bundled rubbish they are a very nice laptop indeed, very quiet and quite a nice size with an easy button for enabling and disabling wireless.

murphy61

I'd go for a dell every time. We have 3 of them in our house, and only ever had 1 problem. Dell customer support is good now, much better than it used to be. Whatever laptop you get, you should go for a higher spec than you think you'll ever need. Programs are getting bigger and more memory-hungry all the time. No point in having it struggling in a year or two.

celtus

Novatech do a Laptop from £421.82 (inc Operating System) or £374.82 (without) which has a Intel Celeron M 420 1.6GHz Processor, 512MB DDR2 533MHz Memory, and has 3 usb ports, now it may not be the bees knees for playing top end games, but this would be the one i'd go for if i were in the market for a decent Laptop with Wireless LAN.

The likes of pc world charge...wait for it...£8.99 a month for cover while Novatech only charge a one off £39.98 for 2 years cover.

Before you ask i dont work for them, but i use them quite a bit, as they give good value for money and there customer service in my experience is 2nd to none.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbranges.html

Regards