Sub-£300 laptop bargains.

Marie_8667

I agree with you. I am also confused by the choice.
John Lewis has a Toshiba Satellite Laptop,L40-17U,1.66GHZ with 15.4 inch display for £379-free 2 year guarantee and free delivery.
Opinions on this deal please.

Snapelover

My 12 year old daughter has saved hard and received her Toshiba Satellite Pro A210-1AZ Laptop yesterday. (I am so proud that she has actually managed to refrain from spending it:rotfl:.) It comes with free 90 days Norton security. Anyone who has bought one - is there any other security she needs to put on or does the Norton do the job? Also, after the free 90 days we will obviously be looking to put something else on which is available for free. Any advice on this would be great.

polybear

Hi,

The general opinion on Norton seems to be DON'T!! It has a very bad reputation for really slowing things down.

See here for alternatives:
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/free-anti-virus-software

Brian.

Snapelover

polybear wrote: »

Hi,

The general opinion on Norton seems to be DON'T!! It has a very bad reputation for really slowing things down.

See here for alternatives:
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/free-anti-virus-software

Brian.

Thanks.

Should we uninstall it from the laptop as it was already installed upon receipt???

boatman

Probably best to uninstall it. Norton gets in to everything!!! As i understand it The Vista firewall will be fine so you'll need anti virus, AVG or Avast and some sort of spyware remover, i use ccleaner with the odd use of spybot.

Snapelover

boatman wrote: »

Probably best to uninstall it. Norton gets in to everything!!! As i understand it The Vista firewall will be fine so you'll need anti virus, AVG or Avast and some sort of spyware remover, i use ccleaner with the odd use of spybot.

So Avast or AVG, ccleaner and Spybot is enough then? Obviously, we don't want to 'hog' her laptop with loads of stuff which will slow it down but it needs to be protected.

zcaprd7

Ebuyer are pretty cheap?

HP 530 Laptop Intel Celeron M 520 1x 1GB 120GB brightview 15.4" widescreen DVD±RW WLAN Vista Home Basic - £278.62 inc vat

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140709

zcaprd7

Or this for under £250 - Acer EXTENSA 5220-100508CI Celeron Mobile 540 80GB 512MB DVD/CD-RW 15.4IN Vista Home Basic

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/141735

clair2305

dear all

I've been watching this thread as I'm thinking of buying a new laptop....and am intrigued by the conversation developing around Norton.

I've had Norton's on my desktop PC for years and it still works fine. But I've got two people (friend and mother in law) with laptops with wireless internet cards and connections who have had nothing but problems and the people that have been sorting out their laptops have said it is because of Norton's.

My MIL is now too scared to use her laptop as she has no virus protection (techy person didn't advise her about another one) and my friend's laptop slowed down and now has a virus. Her techy person (her ISP) are sending her a disk with virus protection (not sure which one) to install, but they said the same about Norton's.

I've been defending Norton's, like I say it works absolutely fine on my mother's PC, a desktop, no wireless connection. And they've been around for years, surely it's just a setting that needs to be changed.

But now I'm wondering. I'm in the process of ordering my BT broadband, prob wireless and it comes with Norton's free.

Why are there so many problems with it? Is it just because of the wireless connections? I'd like some info please.

Also, what freebie virus protections are good? I'm loath to download AVG as we did have this on my mother's previous PC and there were at least 3 trojans on there that it didn't detect.

Is there another pay for virus protection that's better?

Thanks for this

mikegahan

Dear Claire 2305
I can highly recommend the free version of AVIRA ANTI VIRUS, available at www.free-av.com. I have it on my laptop and it does not harm my wireless nor use up too many resources. The Comodo version at www.comodo.com is also good. See also their firewall and anti-malware offers both of which are highly recommended by the geeks. If you go to the home page of Download.com they are actually recommending a free security software suite. I had the paid version of Mcfee security suite and it was so powerful it reduced my old underpowered lappie to a crawl. All security solutions are a compromise. You could have any number of programmes installed. You might also think of getting a different browser. Firefox is useful & more secure and I found the free Opera browser(just Google it) improved my browsing speed by a factor of 2. There are also free anti key logger tools but I digress. For the ultra geeky you could go to a linux solution. I have a linux programme on my old lappie and it works a treat! Mike