When "pentium" does not mean "pentium"

50Twuncle

stator wrote: »

Also look for a laptop with a SSD, don't settle for a magnetic drive any more, and look out for 'hybrid' drives, they aren't as good as SSDs but are bette rthan magnetic. Having a decent SSD is probably the single biggest performance boost for a laptop.

We are talking about cheap (sub £300) devices - which is less than any SSD laptpp (except chromebooks)

spannerzone

Yup, even a Celeron can outperform a better sounding CPU so never buy on the name alone.

Intel make so many variations that the names cannot be used as a measure of performance anymore. Research the model, that's the best way.

GunJack

50Twuncle wrote: »

We are talking about cheap (sub £300) devices - which is less than any SSD laptpp (except chromebooks)

so buy a sub-£300 laptop, and spend £30 on a SSD to put in it, clone the existing drive to the SSD, and voila!!

50Twuncle

GunJack wrote: »

so buy a sub-£300 laptop, and spend £30 on a SSD to put in it, clone the existing drive to the SSD, and voila!!

Thanks - good idea - which model would be a good start though ?

GunJack

50Twuncle wrote: »

Thanks - good idea - which model would be a good start though ?

dunno, not been paying attention

..however Nifty linked to one t'other day. 120GB I think for £30-ish

Robisere

Recently bought this for my wife:
http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/80LT00H7UK-Lenovo-B50-80_1810722.html

It is a great laptop, quite quick as it is fitted with a 128 GB SSD. Wife finds that plenty, as we have a NAS for external storage if necessary. It also offers the choice of Windows 7 Professional or Windows 10. Having set it up and used it myself, both of us are very pleased with it. It has Lenovo Recovery software in case of problems. The i3 processor is a bonus.

bingo_bango

paddyrg wrote: »

Good example - it's NOT an Intel processor :-)

That reminded me of an old machine I had with a Cyrix MII processor in it. The epitome of cheap 'n' cheerful back in the day.

That then reminded me of the call NASA put out for 8086 processors so that they could keep the space shuttle flying

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1985138.stm - For our younger users, the BBC site actually looked like that back in the day. Your computer is not broken.