PCWorld KnowHow voucher Like-For-Like laptop replacement worries

arciere

So, you are getting £750 for to replace your 9-year-old laptop? That's not too bad.

Pretty much any new CPU will be better than your old one. Also, the graphics card you had on the old laptop was a (now) ancient Radeon 4650, even the low-end Intel HD 5200 has better performance.
In your place, I would actually be quite happy that they couldn't fix it. If the blueray drive is critical, you could always get a USB one.

Paulus1982

arciere wrote: »

So, you are getting £750 for to replace your 9-year-old laptop? That's not too bad.

Pretty much any new CPU will be better than your old one. Also, the graphics card you had on the old laptop was a (now) ancient Radeon 4650, even the low-end Intel HD 5200 has better performance.
In your place, I would actually be quite happy that they couldn't fix it. If the blueray drive is critical, you could always get a USB one.

Yes, the value will get me a laptop with a better CPU/GPU, however, even going by their terms and conditions, it is not like-for-like. Blu-ray is not obsolete, it's their choice to not stock it. The next best thing I can do is buy an external Blu-ray writer that will cost me near £100. I will try to argue my case and have them increase the voucher to the value it would cost me to buy it from another store.

If it wasn't for me primarily using the laptop for the Blu-ray drive in the first place, I would gladly accept a laptop without one.

arciere

Paulus1982 wrote: »

Yes, the value will get me a laptop with a better CPU/GPU, however, even going by their terms and conditions, it is not like-for-like. Blu-ray is not obsolete, it's their choice to not stock it. The next best thing I can do is buy an external Blu-ray writer that will cost me near £100. I will try to argue my case and have them increase the voucher to the value it would cost me to buy it from another store.

If it wasn't for me primarily using the laptop for the Blu-ray drive in the first place, I would gladly accept a laptop without one.

I see that, but in my opinion you will still be better off with a £650 laptop + external Bluray drive. You could always ask them to give you just the Bluray back, they might say yes to that.

Paulus1982

Just to give you guys an update.

Went to my nearest Currys/PCWorld store and spoke to the manager about my situation. To my surprise, he was very good at understanding my needs and authorised a new laptop I was eyeing up at £800.

I now own the HP Pavilion 15 laptop:
Intel® Core™ i5-8300H
8 GB DDR4-2666 SDRAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti (4 GB GDDR5 dedicated)
1 TB 7200 rpm SATA
128 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD

Despite the lack of Blu-ray drive, which I'll now buy separately, the laptop is day and night difference. The screen is slightly smaller, but I prefer to have better inside specs for the price.

EveryWhere

Paulus1982 wrote: »

Just to give you guys an update.

Went to my nearest Currys/PCWorld store and spoke to the manager about my situation. To my surprise, he was very good at understanding my needs and authorised a new laptop I was eyeing up at £800.

I now own the HP Pavilion 15 laptop:
Intel® Core™ i5-8300H
8 GB DDR4-2666 SDRAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti (4 GB GDDR5 dedicated)
1 TB 7200 rpm SATA
128 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD

Despite the lack of Blu-ray drive, which I'll now buy separately, the laptop is day and night difference. The screen is slightly smaller, but I prefer to have better inside specs for the price.

This one?; https://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-15-cx0598na-15-6-intel-core-i5-gtx-1050-ti-gaming-laptop-1-tb-hdd-128-gb-ssd-10189868-pdt.html

Paulus1982

EveryWhere wrote: »

This one?; https://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-15-cx0598na-15-6-intel-core-i5-gtx-1050-ti-gaming-laptop-1-tb-hdd-128-gb-ssd-10189868-pdt.html

Yes that's the one.

For the price I had to play with, the i5-8300H is better than the low range i7 processor for my video/photo editing needs, combined with a decent graphics card. Also wanted SSD to boot system & programs quickly.

[Deleted User]

Did you manage to get a new Blu-ray drive?