Advice - Looking for an ultrabook or tablet or something

simon.griggs

Hi Shrimply,

Looking at your choice of laptop over and above the Dell you already have, this does not perform as well as your current laptop, but saves you just 200g, about the weight of a Large Dairy Milk.

If you want power to cover you on a three hour train journey, can you not use the power sockets that are on some of the trains these days? Alternatively, and I know this introduces more weight, but what about a second battery? You can pick them up on EBay for less than £15 and that should keep you powered for three hours in total.

If you need Windows on the move, what about this tablet, http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/5056925.htm which is available for £139. I bought the Android version of this for my Son, and was well impressed with the speed and quality of it for the price I paid. You can get the Android version for under £100 and if you want an Office App, then can I recommend WPS Office which is on the Play Store. This enables you to read and write Office Documents, and does a very good job. If you want an email app which looks and feels like the IPhone client, then Type App is worth a download.

As for Ultrabooks, these seem to start at around £600, and probably a lot of money for as you describe yourself, a poor Student. They save you about 400g or about two Dairy Milks, on the Laptop that you currently have.

I hope this helps.

Regards

Simon G

Jivesinger

John_Gray wrote: »

See what you think of this HP Stream 11 small laptop for £149 (until 17th Jan, probably). You'd have to budget for an SDHC card also (32 GB, say).

Reviews were pretty good, if you accept that it's a low-end box, no optical drive (so you'd have to install Stuff over the internet or from a USB Flash Drive), no ethernet socket (but USB/ethernet hubs are about £16) no possibility of main memory expansion above 2 GB, slow Celeron CPU.

Can be upgraded to Window 10 free, provided you have either a 16 GB SDHC card or USB Flash Drive connected, and a lot of patience!

Later...

I'm just back from my local Tesco Extra, having got one for £89! The assistant was staggered, and I didn't argue...

Blimey that's a good price! Did it have a year of Office 365 Personal as well?

[Deleted User]

duchy wrote: »

I got a rather dinky device for Christmas called an Osprey.-it's a mobile wi-fi device so when I'm out of range of free wifi I can still use the internet.

Is it anything like the Huawei MiFi Dongles?

Shrimply

Hi Guys,

This is a quick message to say thanks, I've been very busy and will try to have a proper look through all the options and everything later.

I'm guessing that none of you are fans of the elitebook (although it is currently £20 more expensive than it was). For me, pairing this with a cheap, £50 android tablet maybe makes most sense.

My logic is this, although the processor in the elitebook isn't the best, it also isn't that far off a first generation i3 I don't think. Am I wrong in saying the processor would still outstrip those in the cheaper tablets? The Ebuyer weight listed is wrong, I think it's actually over a kilo lighter than my current machine and considerably smaller. It also has an impressive listed battery life, and Windows 7, and a 3 year warranty which is all very attractive.

The key attraction here is that it's a full machine. So if I'm using a program on my main machine and want to continue doing so on a journey then I can.

My program use list is pretty small and generally lightweight use, and I have no issues at all on my current machine. Other than a browser and pdf viewer.

- Microsoft office suite
(However, I'm under increasing pressure to switch to LaTeX)

-Statistical Software (Anything heavy duty is not run locally)
Primarily R and R Studio

-Mendeley Reference Manager

-Gimp (very minor graphic editing) and not something that is hugely important for a portable machine.

That's pretty much it. My worry is that I buy a tablet, it isn't as capable as I need it to be and as a result is never used.

As a response to a few other points. When I say internet is poor, it very much is, my mobile internet goes on and off, as does the train/bus Wi-Fi (which are free anyway). So any devices that use a mobile network are unlikely to improve on this.

Plugs on trains are very much hit or miss and I always seem to miss, also often the trains are busy enough that even if there is sockets it's hard to get a seat next to them.

I'm really not remotely concerned about an optical drive, those days are behind us.

As an aside I think it's unlikely to help but I have a spare copy of Windows 8 . So anything I buy doesn't need to have a OS installed.

paddyrg

Mr_Toad wrote: »

It was more to do with the fact that the 250MB HD that it came with wasn't big enough for some of the database files and documentation I used to have on there. I upgraded to a standard 500MB drive the day I bought it as it was a lot cheaper than having an Apple upgrade. :rotfl:

I went SSD when they started to come down in price.

I'm making the joke that 500MB is about ⅔ of a CD, too small for even the operating system by an order of magnitude or so. You probably meant GB ;-)

1 million bytes ~ 1MB,
1 billion bytes ~ 1GB

1 million seconds ~ 11 days
1 billion seconds ~ 31 years

Quite a difference ;-)

Jivesinger

paddyrg wrote: »

I'm making the joke that 500MB is about ⅔ of a CD, too small for even the operating system by an order of magnitude or so.

I'm sadly old enough to remember when 500MB was an impossibly vast amount of storage (for operating system, data, everything), and I'd have found it difficult to believe you could use all of it.

paddyrg

Jivesinger wrote: »

I'm sadly old enough to remember when 500MB was an impossibly vast amount of storage (for operating system, data, everything), and I'd have found it difficult to believe you could use all of it.

My first laptop had a 20MB hard drive! It was a 286, it had a colour (ish - 16 different hues of grey) display, 640kB of basic RAM, but the extra 384k-odd of HIMEM was very helpful ;-)

20MB! It didn't leave a lot of space after installing Lotus123 from 7 floppies ;-)

Mr_Toad

paddyrg wrote: »

I'm making the joke that 500MB is about ⅔ of a CD, too small for even the operating system by an order of magnitude or so. You probably meant GB ;-)

1 million bytes ~ 1MB,
1 billion bytes ~ 1GB

1 million seconds ~ 11 days
1 billion seconds ~ 31 years

Quite a difference ;-)

Finger trouble on my part I'm afraid

spud17

Jivesinger wrote: »

I'm sadly old enough to remember when 500MB was an impossibly vast amount of storage (for operating system, data, everything), and I'd have found it difficult to believe you could use all of it.

My old hard drive being dispatched.:)

http://www.businessinsider.com/picture-of-ibm-hard-drive-on-airplane-2014-1?IR=T

..... and the replacement.

http://imgur.com/JXRR760

:rotfl: