Best Laptop buy for approx £300.....

aahbarnes

tr3mor wrote: »

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.

Well I run XP with 756MB and it runs just fine.

Aiadi

tr3mor wrote: »

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.

And it will obviously also depend on what other crap you have running on it. If people do not know how to keep their PC clean then it doesn't really matter what OS they use, it'll always be slow.

pfpf

any chance of getting back on topic, and answering the OP's original post?

i missed last months £327 dell laptop and have found nothing close since

Aiadi

Equanimity1 wrote: »

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

Great, and in few months time chuck hundreds of pounds to upgrade to vista.:mad:

Equanimity1

a thanks to every 1 joining in the debate for and against Vista but don't confuse me too much.....

all I can say is that it makes sense for me to stay with XP and do not know enough about Vista .... I have heard a lot of certain programs not running on Vista and about the need of more memory.....

would I get a laptop cheaper with XP because of the Vista upgrade...?

thanks again

dellboy102

Wow, Aiadi seems so passionate about vista.

I brought a new desktop, core 2 duo, 3GB Ram, lots of hard drive space etc, came with vista premium, i've set up a dual boot with XP and I find myself using XP more, I prefer it to vista, even on a good spec machine XP just feels faster, I dont know why but both office 2003 and office 2007 run so much slower on vista for some reason, sometimes even simple things like making text bold takes 10secs which is just silly, looked on google and it seems i'm not the only one with issues like that.

so yeah, I would say op is right to stick to XP for now, I doubt its going to be phased out anytime soon because of its popularity.

Jakaru

I recently bought a laptop with vista premium on it, and took the approach of "Some stuff won't work straight away, but there will always be upgrades and downloads available'. I've put loads of software on it, several games, played around with all the vista features - and I've had No trouble.

In fact, I'd say Vista is much better than XP in the way it works with things. I desperately needing something printing yesterday, and had no idea where the install disk for my printer was. Plugged it into the USB anyway, vista knew what printer it was, connected to the internet, downloaded what it needed, installed it and printed my document. I sat there pleasantly bemused at its completely lack of Needing Me. XP was never so helpful.

(Update! Just took some Avi files - wanted to make them into a DVD. Windows DVD maker - picked the files - it made a menu, and wrote them all to disc. No 'Wrong File Type', 'Can't see your DVD writer' etc alerts? This can't be Windows surely... )

Now, as a Mac user by day - having just gone from Powermac G5 to Intel version - and macs ALWAYS being very user friendly (the model for Vista, ahem) - its been a royal pain the proverbial. Software crashes etc galore.

I'm getting a tad worries that Microsoft may finally be catching up with Apple in the usability stakes...

Anyway... Laptop. Vista may not NEED loads more ram etc - but regardless of what system, OS etc nowadays, getting less than 1gb on purpose is just stupid. The machine needs to do more than just start up - so give it a fighting chance of running a few programs etc at once.

Is Vista more hungry than XP - well maybe, but XP is old. Take new vista and install in on your Old XP machine, expect problems. Buying a new machine with it on though shouldn't really bring that much trouble.

spacegirl_2

I too would really appreciate a reply to the original 'decent laptop' question.

Aiadi

spacegirl wrote: »

I too would really appreciate a reply to the original 'decent laptop' question.

Answer is already there. Also from the techies board:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1993&page=67

Aiadi

dellboy102 wrote: »

Wow, Aiadi seems so passionate about vista.

Not really a question of being passionate about vista as I have issues with it as well (nothing's perfect;) ). The issue is really with people wasting their money trying to fight the inevitable. If you spend your money on a machine that can't run vista and can only cope with XP, then how long do you expect it to last for in terms of functionality and future-proofing?