Just upgraded to a 5 year old laptop for £33....

motorguy

Given i work in IT i find i'm very technology adverse when it comes to the latest gadget.

Granted, i've a Moto G, but its a budget smartphone doing 95% of what a Samsung S5 would do for me, for a quarter of the price, but otherwise, thats about it - my desktop PC, i bought off ebay last year - 2GB RAM, 80GB HDD, 2.2Ghz Dual Core processor. Used it for surfing, facebook, downloads, streaming music, word, excel, etc and it was great.

Fancied upgrading the hard disk as 80GB isnt big, but then i came up with the idea of a second hand laptop and a docking station.

SO, i bought a HP Compaq 6530b used laptop for £73 delivered off ebay - 14.1 inch screen, 2.53Ghz Dual Core Processors, Windows 7, 3 GB RAM, 250GB HDD, dvd rewriter, 4 USB ports, and a memory card reader built in. Battery is lasting a good 1.5 hours and its going great. I bought a docking station for £12.00 delivered. I have the docking station for the study, connected to the 23 inch monitor, and my wireless keyboard and mouse, and speakers, and have the laptop for downstairs for general surfing when its not needed upstairs.

Sold my old PC for £47, minus £7 postage. :beer:

I've stuck Office 2007 on it, google chrome, VLC player, Avast and paint.net. Performance is decent and i dont really need anything it cant do.

Cant help but feel 90% of those spending £500 on a laptop really dont need to?

Cyberman60

I'm ex IT too and don't waste money on the latest technology. I thought my hard disk was going on my adequate 2007 XPS as I had a grinding noise and overheating but it turns out to be the fan, so I'm just waiting for one to arrive from China for 7 quid so I can change it !!

...and if you want a good smartphone the chinese Cubot P5 is only about 62 quid on ebay, has a five inch screen and is brilliant for surfing (G3 and G4 compatible).

buglawton

Yup it's the more advanced users who can afford to be seriously unfashionable and save £££s!

John_Gray

I agree, but an i7 with 16GB of memory and an SSD is so speedy!

Tropez

Cant help but feel 90% of those spending £500 on a laptop really dont need to?

Some almost certainly don't need to spend that much. You get people who think they need a Core i7 for relatively basic computing tasks such as browsing and Office, because the marketing fluff has convinced them the i7 is the best for it; which might be the case but for most it is massive overkill.

That said I have a dual-core i7 laptop, 8Gb RAM, SSHD. I'll be honest, for what I do on it, yes it is actually overkill. But I like the speed it provides and I like the fact that should I need to do some of the more intensive tasks that I do on my desktop PC, while that laptop could never match my desktop's performance levels, it will at least be relatively capable of carrying them out.

My desktop PC is also overkill, really. I do some video editing so the extra CPU power and memory come in handy, and I do a lot of gaming so the powerful graphics card is also helpful. I could get away with having an i5 I would imagine but I don't plan on replacing this system now for a while, and the system that came before it has been handed to the wife with a few minor adjustments, so I'm not too concerned about the initial outlay.

Phones I find irksome. I had a basic Sony Xperia in the lower mid level range and it was fine - except for the paltry amount of memory on it. In the end, I had to buy an upgrade to a higher end model just to get enough memory for the various apps I wanted to use. The previous phone though was plenty fast enough.

Gloomendoom

motorguy wrote: »

Cant help but feel 90% of those spending £500 on a laptop really dont need to?

You're probably correct. My wife's newish Vaio took poorly a couple of weeks ago and had to be returned for repair. I dragged out my old Dell 6400 for her to use and it did everything she needed without any problem at all. It's a lot better at picking up weak wifi signals as well.

I'm not sure it would have coped quite so well if she had needed to use her CAD tools though.

Terry98

motorguy wrote: »

I bought a docking station for £12.00 delivered. I have the docking station for the study, connected to the 23 inch monitor, and my wireless keyboard and mouse, and speakers, and have the laptop for downstairs for general surfing when its not needed upstairs.

That's the first time I have read about a docking station for a laptop.

Apart from the advantage of seeing data on a bigger screen are there any other major plus points?

Wouldn't connecting the laptop to a tv using HDMI be a cheaper alternative?

Tropez

Terry98 wrote: »

That's the first time I have read about a docking station for a laptop.

Apart from the advantage of seeing data on a bigger screen are there any other major plus points?

Wouldn't connecting the laptop to a tv using HDMI be a cheaper alternative?

If it's an old laptop then it may not have a HDMI output.

Judging by the OPs set up - laptop in the study - I am assuming he has it set up at a desk when it is connected to the docking station and therefore he may not have a television in the same room, or it may be that he wishes to use a television while he uses his laptop, and picture in picture doesn't really work for doing both at once. Could also be that trailing a cable from his TV to his laptop would be inconvenient or hazardous.

Personally, I don't tend to like connecting laptops to TVs for working on. I think there's such a thing as a screen that is too big for computing.

motorguy

Terry98 wrote: »

That's the first time I have read about a docking station for a laptop.

Apart from the advantage of seeing data on a bigger screen are there any other major plus points?

Wouldn't connecting the laptop to a tv using HDMI be a cheaper alternative?

The docking station has all the peripherals and PSU already connected to it. So thats the speakers, the receiver for the wireless keyboard and mouse, the printer, the network cable and the monitor.

That means i just set the laptop onto it and everything works - no plugging everything in, or trying to find cables that have dropped down the back of the desk.

Keeps the desk area looking tidy when i dont have the laptop on it too - no loose wires lying about.

Also whilst i could have it set up to allow me to close the laptop over and just use the 23 inch screen, i run with both screens, and it does that automatically too (as it probably would if i was connecting the screen in directly)

Handier than connecting up every connection every time.

It also has a power button on it and an "eject" button to pop the laptop off the connector.

motorguy

Tropez wrote: »

If it's an old laptop then it may not have a HDMI output.

Judging by the OPs set up - laptop in the study - I am assuming he has it set up at a desk when it is connected to the docking station and therefore he may not have a television in the same room, or it may be that he wishes to use a television while he uses his laptop, and picture in picture doesn't really work for doing both at once. Could also be that trailing a cable from his TV to his laptop would be inconvenient or hazardous.

Personally, I don't tend to like connecting laptops to TVs for working on. I think there's such a thing as a screen that is too big for computing.

Just running a 23 inch monitor off it, not a TV. Big enough to be useful (spreadsheets, etc) but not so big as to be silly.