What's the best laptop I can buy for under £450

Tom99

Some people find having to wait 60sec for a laptop to boot up, or for an older laptop several minutes, a real pain so well worth the extra for a SSD taking 5sec or so, others are happy to wait, put the kettle on or whatever, each to his own.

jbond

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Hmm you like to "shout", but hey I read your post, and it is not a question of shaving off seconds of boot time, how much ram have you got, what do you use your Dell for, when you realise how much an SSD can help if you are paging a lot then ....just saying. Oh and discussions like this aren't helping the OP

No, I don't like to "shout"! Just emphasising a point I was trying to make! As for the rest of what you said, I'm well aware of all of that thank you!
As far as the OP, not sure they're coming back, haven't responded back for a while, but we'll see.......

AndyPix

jbond wrote: »

Bearing in mind what the OP originally posted, I don't really think you read properly and understood my post!
I cannot be bothered to explain everything to you, but I do NOT intend to go out and buy an SSD, just to shave off 30secs from my laptops boot time!
If boot time is a major major issue for YOU PERSONALLY, then you do what you like!
I'm not saying I would accept a several minutes boot time either, I am just saying what is acceptable to ME!
Each to their own I guess?!

I understood just fine .. You think your Dell with its I3 is 'super fast' without an SSD and even though you have no idea how it will perform with an SSD you feel the need to shout and tell everyone that you dont want one .. and to 'disagree strongly' with someone who says it will improve the machines speed under load .


I say again .. That's a bit strange

EveryWhere

DollyTheSheep wrote: »

SSD is a must nowadays, makes such an amazing difference. I have always gone cheap for laptops but my last one was a HP 250 with an i7 and 8GB of RAM and SSD drive. It is super fast, I love it. A bit over £450 on Amazon but worth the extra imo.

https://amzn.to/2OUZ1Ai

Not even within budget and with Windows 10 Home and a slow HDD.

EveryWhere

grumpycrab wrote: »

Please don't take this the wrong way, but your posts are a little...short on information ...and a little random...
Best bang for buck? Minimum spec these days is 256GB SSD, 8GB memory and the best CPU you can afford...somthing like this
https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/lenovo-v330-14-inch-laptop-ryzen-5-2500u-8gb-ddr4-256gb-ssd-full-hd-37599-cclonline-3208811
(battery and screen on this may be average at best)

As you state, TN screen instead of IPS and battery life compromised. Also CPU throttling under load and SATA SSD as opposed to PCIe SSD.

EveryWhere

Cisco001 wrote: »

For£450, you could look for Ryzen 5 2500u with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD

Asus VivoBook X505ZA-BQ200T AMD Ryzen 5 Radeon Vega 8 4GB RAM 256 GB SSD 15.6in Laptop £400
https://www.very.co.uk/asus-vivobook-x505za-bq200t-amd-ryzen-5-radeon-vega-8-4gb-ram-256-gb-ssd-156in-laptop/1600292958.prd?sku=sku20881231&cm_mmc=google-_-PLA+-+Generic-_-All-_-PRODUCT_GROUP_p42038307416_&utm_campaign=Generic_Electricals+-+Asus+-+Laptops&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_term=PRODUCT_GROUP&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9by2y6nA4QIVA7DtCh2rRg-4EAQYAiABEgJnAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Lenovo V330-14ARR AMD Ryzen 5 2500U 8GB 256GB Radeon Vega 8 14 Inch FHD Windows 10 Laptop 81B1001EUK £370
https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/lenovo-v330-14arr-ryzen-5-2500u-8gb-256gb-14-inch-windows-10-laptop-81b1001euk/version.asp?refsource=LDadwords&refsource=ldadwords&mkwid=sH8ZafCWV_dc&pcrid=309784609155&product=81B1001EUK&pgrid=62778145838&ptaid=pla-558680306605&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5oCZqKrA4QIVSuWaCh0nIQIAEAkYAyABEgINrvD_BwE

First link shown as Out Of Stock, although no mention of IPS screen nor PCIe SSD.

New link here; https://www.very.co.uk/asus-vivobook-x505za-bq200t-amd-ryzen-5-radeon-vega-8-4gb-ram-256-gb-ssd-156in-laptop/1600292958.prd

Second device has already received a dishonourable mention earlier.

EveryWhere

charlotte_rose wrote: »

My current machine is a Dell Inspirion 15 3000 series. Its about 30-months old

H/D 928 GB
i5 -5200 CPU @ 2.20GHz

Its fine for my current use which is confined to excel, word and browsing.

Ideally with Full HD IPS screen, PCIe/NVMe SSD and Windows 10 Pro. Don't know if you will find within budget, as I haven't yet looked.

toshi

GDB2222 wrote: »

I have a pretty old PC, which got an awful lot faster when I replaced the HDD array with an SSD array. It makes most difference when the machine is working hard, doing things like speech recognition. You would not notice the difference just browsing from one page to the next. I agree with you that there's not a lot of need to shave a few seconds off the boot time.

This is an interesting observation, We tend to think things like speech recognition is very Processor intensive work, yes it may be still true, but it turned out that the hard disk bottleneck is so significant. The CPU really pushes forward the sluggish hard disk.

I just have a chance to do some simple test in the real world computing, a performance comparison between 1) 2008 PC with SSD and 2) 2014 PC with Hard disk. (Please note the CPU cost/performance is more or less same in the last 10 years, In other words, This 2014 i5 CPU is still fairly powerful even today)

Task: compress an Outlook PST (11.5GB) file to complete (10.2GB)

1) Windows 7 Pro 64bit Sandisk x110 128GB SSD SATA1* 4GB AMD 64 X2 4800 + (2008 computer)


* Nvida SATA controller supports SATA2, but due to the hardware bug, SSDs are recognised as SATA1


AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ Benchmark 1254
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+X2+Dual+Core+4800%2B


2) Windows 7 Pro 64bit Seagate 500GB Hard Disk SATA3 8GB (Nearly 300GB free space) Intel i5-4570 (2014 computer)

Intel Core i5-4570 @ 3.20GHz Benchmark 7144
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-4570+%40+3.20GHz

Results:

1) CPU Benchmark 1254 + SSD SATA1 (2008) PC: 11 min
2) CPU Benchmark 7144 + Hard Disk SATA3 (2014) PC: 121 min


Thanks to the SSD, the far less powerful and older computer finished so quickly.



This is the another example of the painfully slow hard disk bottleneck. I would say anything you want to improve the performance, the first thing you need to do is to replace your hard disk with an SSD.

Well, anybody is happy with your hard disk now, no worry, your computer will be significantly slow down in a couple of years or less. (Windows Update make your Hard Disk computer slow down as well. - I have seen many posts here) But the good news is, if you can wait for getting an SSD, you are likely to get a bigger and a cheaper SSD!

Happy Computing

P.S. We will install SSDs to all 2) Computers with Windows 10 upgrade.