Advice on getting a new laptop

jasmin10

I was wondering what you guys think to this http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-4601.aspx

As I don't know too much about what I'm looking for. The only thing is this has Vista on it. As I have XP Professional I would want to put some software from that on it such as Access. Could I put that on a vista platform?

patwa_2

As for the laptop itself, it's quite fast by today's standards, the 2GB of RAM is good as most laptops in that price range only have 1GB, large hard drive size and it's got bluetooth which you'll find useful if you ave a mobile phone with bluetooth and want to sync contacts between it and your laptop, etc.

it's not the best for games, and you'll get poor performance for recent games although the older ones should be fine. The 64Mb of shared video is an average amount for a laptop bought 2 years ago, but most now have 128MB or more. but don't get me wrong, if you're not looking for a gaming laptop it's fine. got WiFi (standard nowadays) Hi Definition Audio (again standard) but the in-built card reader is useful for transferring photos, etc from your camera/phone. Monitor resolution is moderately high so you'll get reasonable clarity for viewing documents, graphics, etc.

Now for vista. yes, Office will run on Vista no problem. You should note though that whereas Office 2003 installs fine on Vista, should you decide to upgrade to Office 2007 in the future, the standard office 2007 document format is not viewable by Office 2003. There is a viewer for Office 2003 available, and you can save documents created in Office 2007 in the older format, but that rather defeats the purpose of 2007's advanced features.

Also, note that there are still compatibility issues between some games and Vista, and many smaller developers still haven't updated their program's code to work on Vista. This shouldn't be a problem though unless you frequently download and test drive a lot of programs from the net. 95% of the most popular and mainstream applications work fine.

Most hardware that you may want to use with the laptop should work fine. As the number of devices that are used with laptops are less than those used with desktops, the problem of incompatibility isn't such an issue. Pen drives, for example are fine, but if you're going to use a webcam for example, it'd be wise to check that the manufacturer has drivers that support vista.

A few more points to consider:
Battery life
Weight
Exact terms of the warranty (e.g collect & return, international traveller, phone support), cost of extension.

All in all it looks a good machine overall. the basic specs are quite respectable if not a little impressive for the price. It'd be good to see that video memory notched up to 128MB to bring it into the same league as other manufacturers' models, but it does seem to mainly be a work model rather than a gamer's model. Note the points raised above and if possible find some reviews for the machine. See if you can see the machine up close either at Tesco's or elsewhere before you buy. Note the returns policy carefully - Tesco would let me look at a laptop and even use it as long as I didn't open any of the software CDs, but a friend was told he couldn't bring it back if the box had been opened. So get this cleared up before you buy if you've any doubt whatsoever.

Hope this helps.

H.