Can anyone recommend a good cheap laptop

motorguy

fred246 wrote: »

My daughter has got a lovely desktop that I built for her. She wanted a laptop to research and write essays on the move. She paid £230 for a Lenovo Yoga. 4GB RAM. 64GB storage. Mainly uses cloud storage. Processor 1600 on CPU benchmark. She is very happy with it. Laptops aren't easy to repair so have a limited lifespan. I think it had a 2 year warranty. You would never pay for a repair. Just dispose & replace.

Thats such bad advice - especially from you Fred. :eek:

Lots of ex business laptops with an easy to fit and endless supply of spare parts. SSD drives are easy replaced, RAM easy replaced, batteries easy replaced, keyboards, screens, shells, power supplies. No reason at all why a good business quality machine wont see its 10th birthday and still be in use.

motorguy

This is as much laptop as is required by most - Lenovo T450, i5, 8Gb RAM, 240GB SSD, Win10 £239.99 + £20 sorted.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T450-Intel-Core-i5-5300U-8GB-240-SSD-Win10-Laptop-Webcam/153182079727?epid=26023831498&hash=item23aa5d0aef:g:17UAAOSwlv9bnV9l:rk:2:pf:0

Modular to work at, no problems getting spare parts. I ran a T440S for around a year there, great machine. Amazing build quality.

motorguy

fred246 wrote: »

The YOGA is perfect for her needs. It has no moving parts and should be perfect for at least 10 years. If there is a problem I would fix it. If I couldn't we would rather buy a new laptop than PAY for a repair. My friend took a laptop for repair and when it came back they wanted twice the original quote which ended up much greater than the price of a new laptop. When he refused to pay he was assaulted and ended up in hospital.

If ever there was an example of penny wise and pound foolish. :eek:

The point being you less likely to be able to fix it as anything that might need replaced is likely to be soldered in and / or parts not readily available and / or disproportionately expensive and probably a lot more prone to wear and tear / failure in the first place.

Dont know where you're getting your laptops repaired - presumably by the brother of the person you used to service your cars - but i've a decent bloke in the next town over from me who does the stuff i dont want to. I've had laptop repairs / upgrades done by them for £40 for 2 hours plus work. Hes happy for me to supply the parts - stuff i wouldnt want to tackle myself.

motorguy

fred246 wrote: »

What do people do with all this RAM? My desktop PC has 2GB and works perfectly. If it didn't I'd put more in but it doesn't need it. My daughter reckons she only has problems when she has more than 40 windows open at a time. Is this for gaming?

I've 10 or so Chrome TABs open here, Excel and word, calculator and little else and my machine is sitting at around 3Gb usage. 4Gb is the min i'd want to run Win10 on. 8Gb is the ideal.

RAM is dirt cheap so no need to scrimp on it.

I would not recommend someone goes out these days and settles for a laptop with 2Gb. It might work for your limited requirements, but 4Gb should be a min.

motorguy

Last place i worked gave me one of these to use - Lenovo Thinkpad X240. Slightly smaller screen, probably slightly newer, slightly cheaper when spec'd to 8Gb RAM 240Gb SSD

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-X240-Core-i5-4300U-8GB-Ram-240GB-SSD-Webcam-Windows-10-Laptop/232586864889?hash=item362741e8f9:m:mC3lR-7ShqAifbXeqTfA5bQ:rk:1:pf:0

arciere

EveryWhere wrote: »

This is really nonsense.

There is much more than just maximum sequential read and write speeds.

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-SSD-speed-index/42

Otherwise, according to your statement, my ACER Aspire ZG5 would perform much the same with an HDD. It does not, not even close, by any measure.

At a guess, in a real world setting, I would say that an SSD fitted to a SATA 1 connection would be around three times faster than an HDD.

Again this nonsense thing.
The Aspire ZG5 has a 945GSE chipset, which supports SATAII, which is double the speed than SATAI.
Your Acer performs faster with an SSD drive because:
A) Your chipset supports SATA II and it's not limited to SATA I;
Your original HDD is a crappy 5,400RPM Hitachi drive. ANY newer HDD drive will be much faster than this anyway.

So, back to the previous statement, yes and no. If your computer supports faster speeds then yes, if it's an old SATA I, it's not worth it.
If your original HDD is really old and slow you might even want to consider replacing it with a newer 500GB HDD disk, similar speeds to an SSD drive (in that case), much bigger in terms of space and cheaper too.

EveryWhere

arciere wrote: »

Again this nonsense thing.
The Aspire ZG5 has a 945GSE chipset, which supports SATAII, which is double the speed than SATAI.
Your Acer performs faster with an SSD drive because:
A) Your chipset supports SATA II and it's not limited to SATA I;
Your original HDD is a crappy 5,400RPM Hitachi drive. ANY newer HDD drive will be much faster than this anyway.

So, back to the previous statement, yes and no. If your computer supports faster speeds then yes, if it's an old SATA I, it's not worth it.
If your original HDD is really old and slow you might even want to consider replacing it with a newer 500GB HDD disk, similar speeds to an SSD drive (in that case), much bigger in terms of space and cheaper too.

Everything you have written is wrong.

https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Acer/aspire-one-(a150) SATA 1

and the original HDD was 120GB.

arciere

EveryWhere wrote: »

Everything you have written is wrong.

https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Acer/aspire-one-(a150) SATA 1

and the original HDD was 120GB.

404 page not found.
You said your laptop was a ZG5.
ZG5 has an Atom N270 which works with an Intel 945GSE chipset. I found the specs here:
https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/acer/aspire_one_zg5_linux/255307/specs/

The 945GSE supports SATA II

Yes, I saw that the original drive was a 120GB HDD.

Also, maybe I'm looking at the wrong model, but on the Crucial website there is no upgrade suggested for the ZG5 (I'm talking about drives), only RAM.

debitcardmayhem

arciere wrote: »

404 page not found.
You said your laptop was a ZG5.
ZG5 has an Atom N270 which works with an Intel 945GSE chipset. I found the specs here:
https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/acer/aspire_one_zg5_linux/255307/specs/

The 945GSE supports SATA II

Yes, I saw that the original drive was a 120GB HDD.

https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Acer/aspire-one-(a150)

the forum missed a bracket (and has in my post), although these arguments don't help the OP.

Thankfully motorguy has posted two possibles;)

EveryWhere

arciere wrote: »

404 page not found.
You said your laptop was a ZG5.
ZG5 has an Atom N270 which works with an Intel 945GSE chipset. I found the specs here:
https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/acer/aspire_one_zg5_linux/255307/specs/

The 945GSE supports SATA II

Yes, I saw that the original drive was a 120GB HDD.

You are completely wrong, again. On everything. You should know better than to argue with me.
Read this


Apart from that, I'm posting from another even older laptop that doesn't even have AHCI and the performance again is much improved after fitting an SSD.

Stop posting erroneous theoretical nonsense. You have it all wrong.