laptop from America

sanya1995

Hi,
First of all, congratulations to all for this brilliant website. great job by Martin and equally good job to all posters.
My request is about your thoughts on the following topic. We are planning to go to USA in the summers. we would like to buy Laptop from there as there are opinions that due to the exchange rate, it might be cheaper. But on the cheapest laptop post even Dell systems with wait and appropriate discount do not look bad. W e would need something with dual core, 512 ram, 60 GB hard drive and right now XP seems a better option..
we would sppreciate your thoughs on the above and if possible where to buy such systems. please keep in mind we would be staying in hotels, so address might be difficult.

thanks

xenny

Remember to allow for the cost of an international warranty if you're considering doing this. I recently costed it for someone, and we concluded it wasn't worth the trouble.

gremlin666_2

One thing to remember you may well get charged duty if you get stopped at customs and they find out you bought it in the USA. There might also be a voltage difference to think about when you get it home.

vaio

and US laptops don't have the "£" key

colin79666

a mate of mine recently got a Lenovo (IBM) laptop from the US

customes charged him over £100 so think carefully...

Little_John

Power isn't an issue, pretty much all laptops now come with a dual voltage power supply 115~230 mobile phone chargers are the same. all you will need is something to convert the 2 pin plug to a 3 pin socket or buy a power cable for it for the UK.

The keyboard wont have a £? I'm not sure about that one but it will be configured for us layout where the " and @ are swapped round.

The spec is reasonably low so you probably can get something like that in the UK for about £400-£450 the savings may not be that great and could be wiped out if you get stopped by customs.

International warranty isn't that much of an issue, if you look after it it it shouldn't break but accidents do happen so make sure you have accidental damage protection on your home insurance and remember accidents happen in the home most companies will repair them where ever you are especially when it comes to portable devices.

There abouts in the US are you going? I know prices are usually pretty good when the exchange rate is about $1.60 /£1 and I have been a few times when it has been $2 / £1 its brilliant everything is so cheap. Thats why I'm going over there again soon.

Cricri

I concur with the others as far as custom charges are concerned: whenever I got some valuable parcels from the USA, I got hammered by custom taxes. If the parcel is handled by Fedex, the probability of custom charges is 100% from my experience.