I need to buy a laptop (help!)

Zziggi

I'm a complete technophobe! However i need to buy a laptop. I have been "told" by my friend i need a laptop with a minimum of 1024 RAM and minimum of 80GB hard drive, DVD-ROM. I need to be able to get on the internet with it, use it to write essays etc etc.

Help! Can anyone give me any pointers? Where is the best place generally to go for laptops? What sort of budget should i set myself? I am afriad that if i go to a shop at the minute then I am going to look like a right mug who'll buy anything.

Can anyone help please?

Moneymaker

I bought two Apple Mac iBooks off eBay. £300 should get you a decent used one. For a technophobe, an Apple Mac is ideal. It gives you complete freedom from worries about "viruses", "spyware" etc. and is generally reckoned to be more user-friendly than a PC running Windows software.

If there's an Apple Store or John Lewis near you, there'll be someone there who can demonstrate the latest models.

Example: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330077889745&ssPageName=ADME:B:WNA:UK:12

Zagu

Zziggi wrote:

I need to be able to get on the internet with it, use it to write essays etc etc.

Id say that you wouldnt need one with a gig of memory or a 80Gb hard drive. 512Mb and around 40Gb should be fine. PC world and Dell do reasonable ones for £350-400 that would meet your needs I think.

The Great 'Cheapest Decent Laptop' Hunt

Idiophreak

Zagu wrote:

Id say that you wouldnt need one with a gig of memory or a 80Gb hard drive. 512Mb and around 40Gb should be fine. PC world and Dell do reasonable ones for £350-400 that would meet your needs I think.

I agree in part.

tbh I think it's worth getting one with a gig of memory - XP really does struggle on 512, especially once the graphics card has stolen a bunch of it.

But i wouldn't worry too much about the HDD - 40 is plenty for most people. If you're going to be downloading 100s of movies, music etc, you'll probably need additional storage (external harddrive) anyway.

I bought an acer from ebuyer for just short of £400 the other week. Is pretty good. It's only got 512mb, so am upgrading asap to make it a little more usable, but aside from that, it's great.

You might want to give yourself a little bit more of a budget if you want full copies of office etc though.

edit: If you're writing essays, I assume you're still in education, so it's worth finding out if your institution is part of the academic aliance (MSAA?) - this can often give you much cheaper (or free) copies of office etc.

coolagarry

Take a look here. It might give you some ideas
http://www.dmxdimension.com/
of have a look here
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbrange.html?AXI

ITtim

If your only browsing the net and doing essays then entry level would be fine. Around £400. I don't agree on the memory thing. I would say 512 would be fine. 256 would be too little really but remember that XP can run on only 128 so to say 512 isn't enough for office and browsing isn't strictly true although i would say the more memory the better. You certainly don't need 1 gig.

Zagu

Idiophreak wrote:

I agree in part.

tbh I think it's worth getting one with a gig of memory - XP really does struggle on 512, especially once the graphics card has stolen a bunch of it.

I think thats only down to peoples expectations really. It was less than 3 years ago that companies were supplying XP laptops with 128 Mb! Have a look at post #4 on the link in my post! 512 Mb should be fine for light internet use/mail/word stuff. Good point about the academic license though. :T

I dont know how quickly you need it, but theres been a lot of speculation about a surplus of lower spec laptops being sold once Vista becomes available, as Vista requires a higher spec laptop. If you can wait a month or so, it might be worth waiting, if it does materalise, which it might not!

Idiophreak

most entry level lappies these days are "Vista enabled" anyway, so I can't see there being too much of a surplus once Vista's out?

BillScarab

I use a 512Mb laptop for work and rarely have any issues with memory, a few colleagues still have laptops with 256Mb they do have some issues. Therefore I would recommend at least 512Mb, if you can get !Gb cheaply fine, but don't spend a lot extra for it.

Zagu

Idiophreak wrote:

most entry level lappies these days are "Vista enabled" anyway, so I can't see there being too much of a surplus once Vista's out?

I think theres a possibility it might happen. As you have, rightly, pointed out, the recommended minimum spec. is often unworkable. MS claim that XP needs;

"128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)"

Hmmm, 64Mb?!!!! Anyway, everyone appears to agree that you need at least four times the recommended memory for XP. While its unlikely that you will need 4x for Vista, I dont think that many will want to run it with under 1Gb, hence the possible drop in demand for 512Mb machines with slower CPUs. Only time will tell....

Idiophreak

I'm wondering if it's just my box that's not good then, if everyone else thinks that 512 is fine.

It's just little things bother me, like it can take 2 or 3 seconds for explorer to load. Am I being too fussy?

I wonder if it's all the junk acer installed on it slowing it down.

Maybe I'll try a clean XP install and see if that's any better.