Looking for new laptop - suggestions please

CoastingHatbox

HereToday said:

CoastingHatbox said:

HereToday said:

Sadmum23 said:

Hi,
thank you for suggestions.
Bought a Lenovo a few years ago , it is the slowest thing ever. So did not want to go there again.
I dealt would like to spend around £350 -£400 .

I have had Dell in the past (desktops) and found them good so will give them a try

thank you 

Swap the horribly slow storage method(HDD) for a solid state drive costing £25 and it won't be slow any more.

It depends which Lenovo it is. Lenovo do produce some dog awful entry level laptops with CPUs that are fine for lightweight Linux distros but totally inadequate for Windows. Their midrange is much much better - both in terms of build quality and performance. A decent Windows Laptop really starts at £400 and that's when it has been discounted from its RRP. The marketing of PC Laptops doesn't really doesn't help consumers make good choices either.

It almost doesn't matter which Lenovo in terms of spec. If you can fit an SSD to it, it will be at least adequate.

So I cannot agree with you. I am running Windows 10 64-bit on a fourteen year old AMD Turion 64 X2  TL-60. The bottleneck lies with the storage method, not the CPU.

The Lenovo B50 with a Celeron N2840 sold like hotcakes. And is absolutely fine with an SSD in it. Until, for example, one core of the CPU is 100% utilised with the Anti-Malware service (Microsoft Defender) whilst updates are applying in the background and then it becomes unusable. I used to run a Gigabyte Brix with a Celeron N2807 and an SSD in it as my desktop, until about 3 years ago when most websites running heavy java script (typically social networking sites) would overwhelm it. The constant higher CPU usage also leads to thermal throttling on Laptops and other small form factor devices, which further exacerbates the problem. As do the mitigations applied in operating systems over the last 3 years for the Spectre/Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities - something your AMD CPU will be much less effected by. So once again, I stand by my comments.

The IO latency and throughput is the biggest performance constraint in a computer with a spinning HDD, but the SSD upgrade is not a magic bullet with all CPUs. The dual core Bay Trail and earlier CPUs, such as those mentioned above are much better when paired with an SSD and using a lighter weight operating system, or used as a Linux server for example running Samba or DNS/DHCP servers but they are not optimal for fully fledged Windows 10. Possibly a bit better with Windows 10 S.