Best Laptop buy for approx £300.....

Equanimity1

Can any1 help with the above question ....don't know a great deal about Laptops but would prefer to run XP..

Aiadi

I saw that you've been onto the Toshiba thread. It looks excellent value for the price but I can't understand why you want XP.

zappahey

Aiadi wrote: »

I saw that you've been onto the Toshiba thread. It looks excellent value for the price but I can't understand why you want XP.

Probably because XP is faster, less resource hungry and (currently) better supported than Vista. Dell have actually returned to offering XP on some PCs, such is the demand.

Equanimity1

That's exactly why ......quite happy with XP ....and would save money on resources i.e....memory etc..

rattla

I had to get a new laptop and have been effectivly 'forced' to get VISTA. I'm sure it is a great powerful piece of software, but if you have a low spec machine it's not going to be as good.

More importantly however, I would not choose to buy it for anohter six months until manufacturers have sorted out drivers.

A couple of examples:
I have a Belkin Pre-N Wireless network card, but Belkin do not have XP drivers yet, so I simply can't use it on my Vista Laptop.
I use turbo lister and up to a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't compatible so I couldn't use it at all.

Lastly if you have older versions of software, you may need to upgrade them for them to be fully compatible - I had Adobe Elements 2, but adobe are only making version 5 onwards fully compatible with VISTA.
:mad:

Equanimity1

rattla wrote: »

I had to get a new laptop and have been effectivly 'forced' to get VISTA. I'm sure it is a great powerful piece of software, but if you have a low spec machine it's not going to be as good.

More importantly however, I would not choose to buy it for anohter six months until manufacturers have sorted out drivers.

A couple of examples:
I have a Belkin Pre-N Wireless network card, but Belkin do not have XP drivers yet, so I simply can't use it on my Vista Laptop.
I use turbo lister and up to a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't compatible so I couldn't use it at all.

Lastly if you have older versions of software, you may need to upgrade them for them to be fully compatible - I had Adobe Elements 2, but adobe are only making version 5 onwards fully compatible with VISTA.
:mad:

I think I will stick with XP ....so now it's just finding the best deal!!!!

Aiadi

I refer you to the techies:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=447956

I have been using vista basic on a fujitsu siemens with exactly the same specs as the toshiba and been really happy with the way it is running. If you haven't had any experience running vista on this kind of machine, then how would you make such judgments as XP is better??

Aiadi

zappahey wrote: »

Probably because XP is faster, less resource hungry and (currently) better supported than Vista. Dell have actually returned to offering XP on some PCs, such is the demand.

Less resource hungry, I agree but the machines running Vista are also more powerful than the older ones from the days of XP. Better supported! where did you get that one from???

If people don't know what they are talking about, then please don't give advice based on intuition.

C00kie_2

A friend has a new laptop with Vista on it, i believe it's the basic edition, it's not compatable with many of her programs, it's far too resource hungry for the specs she has (even tho it was bundled with the machine). Until bugs are smoothed out, stick with what you know works especially if you're using it regularly.

Aiadi

C00kie wrote: »

A friend has a new laptop with Vista on it, i believe it's the basic edition, it's not compatable with many of her programs, it's far too resource hungry for the specs she has (even tho it was bundled with the machine). Until bugs are smoothed out, stick with what you know works especially if you're using it regularly.

Which of her programs is not vista compatible?? There are all sorts of solutions out there for these issues and people will just have to look for them. For example, Do you know that you can change a program property to make it run on vista but in XP compatibility mode??

tr3mor

C00kie wrote: »

A friend has a new laptop with Vista on it, i believe it's the basic edition, it's not compatable with many of her programs, it's far too resource hungry for the specs she has (even tho it was bundled with the machine). Until bugs are smoothed out, stick with what you know works especially if you're using it regularly.

From what I've seen Vista is no more resource hungry than XP. If you have less than 1GB of ram both will run crap.