LATEST DELL DEAL Great Laptop £292 Delivered !

Browntoa

the original thread over on Hotukdeals here (8.00am this morning, Mike T over there posts these as soon as they come up)

http://www.hotukdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81003

porridge

In the Daily Mail they have an advert for a Dell laptop for £269 (Inspiron 6400) it actually comes up at £376 though??????

Anyway, Can anyone advise me on which is the better laptop ?, It is for my 13 year old (xmas present, I know its early but I need to plan and budget), she uses it for the internet mainly

Aiadi

Browntoa wrote: »

the original thread over on Hotukdeals here (8.00am this morning, Mike T over there posts these as soon as they come up)

http://www.hotukdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81003

Thanks Browntoa for pointing this out. I have already posted the link from Mike on the techies forum "cheapest laptop hunt".

P.S. you can also read all the comments on this laptop there, some of them are very useful.

Nicolefury

I wish I had savings - this would have been a perfect uni laptop!!

dayvo

porridge wrote: »

In the Daily Mail they have an advert for a Dell laptop for £269 (Inspiron 6400) it actually comes up at £376 though??????

Anyway, Can anyone advise me on which is the better laptop ?, It is for my 13 year old (xmas present, I know its early but I need to plan and budget), she uses it for the internet mainly

Not sure about the £269 figure - was this definately including vat and delivery. I know the business site doesn't include these, which can be deceptive.

I almost bought the inspiron 6400 last week for £376. The only thing which put me off it was the graphics chipset - the GMA 950, which, based on the reviews I have seen, offers very poor 3d graphics performance, even compared to other integrated graphics cards.

If your daughter will be playing any kind of 3d games - perhaps social MMOGs like There or Second Life, then the Vostro would be better for that.

The Vostro 1000, has the ati radeon xpress 1150 card which by no means has good graphics - it is still integrated, and it can't deal with up to date games. But it is better than the intel 950. See this site to see the relative scores of each:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Radeon-Xpress-1150.2173.0.html

The duff 3d graphics chipset put me off the 6400 in the end, but if its not an issue for you then maybe that doesn't matter.

As far as features, the 6400 bills itself as an all rounder and as I recall has firewire svhs and playback controls on the front etc. Although I haven't read any vostro reviews, from the spec sheet and pics it doesn't appear to come with these features. However, I doubt your daughter would miss them all that much. The 6400 does have some decent speakers and based on the pics only, it doesn't appear that the vostro is as impressive in that area, but that is just a guess.

If all you want it for is surfing the internet then maybe it just comes down to cheapness. The vostro is cheaper - bear in mind that the inspiron 6400 at £376 has an dual core processor, and the sub £300 vostro doesn't - but even if you upgraded to an athlon dual core processor for £35, added a 9 cell battery and a truelife screen, it would still comes out about £15 cheaper than the 6400. And if you didn't want these upgrades, it is substantially cheaper. The Vostro 1000 has a 120 gig hard drive and Inspiron 6400 for £376 only has 80 gig. Not that I care about that. 120 gig seems like overkill to me.

The good thing about the 6400 is that it does come with xp professional as an option, wheras it doesn't seem like this does. That is really disappointing to me if there really is not possibility of swapping. From what I have heard, vista has a much harder job of working off of 1gb of memory than xp.

Anyway, thats my thinking on it. Take those factors into consideration when making your decision. I am going to ring them tomorrow and beg them to give me xp on the vostro. If they agree, I am definately getting it. If they don't - well I will probably still end up plumping for the vostro because of the slightly improved 3d graphics performance, and find an alternative way of getting hold of xp...cough

nej

What's a truelife screen?

Sid_Harper

nej wrote: »

What's a truelife screen?

Click on the "Help Me Choose" button above the options on Dell's website and it'll tell you all about it... it's basically a brighter clearer screen similar to those (rather more expensive) Sony laptops.

All these posts get very cluttered with questions that have the answers already there if you just spend a few seconds looking for them!

gromituk

Just a shame you're forced to buy an operating system with it - I wonder how much you could save if you weren't led by the nose into "upgrading" to Vista?

dayvo

gromituk wrote: »

Just a shame you're forced to buy an operating system with it - I wonder how much you could save if you weren't led by the nose into "upgrading" to Vista?

This is what frustrates me. I tried to get it with xp - the sales team all seem to be from an indian call centre, and are less interested in helping me than trying to make sure they get their commission.

They say they can give me xp professional, but i have to pay nearly sixty pounds more. They don't do an option for xp home apparently. Dell in the US give you that option but not in the UK.

I have already got a copy of xp I can use, but having looked up the procedure of installing xp onto a vista system, it seems it can cause driver isses and I don't feel confident enough to mess around with it because if I screw it up, dell won't want to know.

miss_not_alotofmoneypenny

Dell's laptops are expensive in my opinion .(they say they cut the middle man out, but how much do you think all that advertising is costing them? virtually every computer magazine and news paper nearly everyday as well as tv ads, wonder how much there shipping is costing them to)


AMD processors are highly underpowered and use a lot more power compared to intel's dual-core. They get outperformed on all benchmarks by a big margin by intel's dual core. THis does mean that there selling them cheap right now. If i was going to get a laptop with an AMD to compensate the processor i'd expect a decent dedicated graphics cards and a maybe a 17 inch monitor.

Take a look at the refurbished laptops on pc world(Which are essentially brand new) with same warranty as a new laptop.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/store/pcw_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1862880938.1184339035@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccchaddlgmihifecflgceggdhhmdfhj.0&page=ProductList&category_oid=-28487&show_all=true#(any):225:1050:PageNo_0:SortOrder_DOWN

At the of posting this the PCworld website seems to be down, probaly to many people browsing, if it don't work try later.