Laptop recommendations

[DelB]

Evening all.

After a frustrating afternoon trying to do work on my laptop this aft, I have come to the conclusion that it is long overdue for replacement. To be fair, it's over five years old now which in laptop terms probably makes it prehistoric!

Does anyone have any recommendations of what or where is best to buy? I'm after something with a 17" screen, 4MB of RAM or more and an Intel processor. A bonus would be somewhere that would let me pay for it over six months, rather than forking out however much it'd cost a couple of months before Christmas!

Cheers.

 

[Iaing]

Dell, Del.

Inspiron should do the trick.

 

[DelB]

Cheers Iain. Have heard a few reports of poor build quality on Dell stuff. Is that unfounded?

 

[DannyOT]

I've got my last 3 laptops from the Dell Outlet. They're supposedly classed as either 'scratch and dent' of refurbished' yet all of them have looked like new. My last one was a Dell Studio 17 which when specced up on the Dell website would have been £940.....I got it for £500.

 

[philly169]

Depends how much you want to spend, I've never been a fan of Dell and have always brought Acer's and never had any problems. HP are looking very good at the moment, their Envy range is really nice and pretty good spec.

You'll probably want to go for something like an i5 Intel Processor, mid range but pretty good, 64 bit Windows 7 will allow you to up the RAM over 4GB if need be and should last for a while.

 

[brendy]

Dell outlet is very handy to use. I have bought our last 5 17" vostros from there, all came specced up with dedicated graphics, 4gb ram, i series or totr dual core processors. I swapped in an SSD drive into mine and it absolutely flies. Something I would recommend to everyone with a pc that they were thinking was becoming slow. Honestly, the speed increase moving away from regular spinning discs to memory based drives is fantastic.
2 of these laptops are used by our cad department across the water and have had no complaints whatsoever.

 

[RichardC]

Have you considered a Mac?

 

[RGDave]

Oooh, pick me!

I'm in the process of decommissioning my Vista laptop. I bought it in Feb 2007 a matter of days after Vista was released. In all honesty, despite people hating Vista, I've had nearly 5 years mostly excellent service.
However, it's had 2 hard drives, 4 power supplies and 2 batteries, so although it runs OK (still pretty efficient with T5500 dual core and 2gb RAM) I won't be buying HP in a hurry. I've also jumped ship to Canon printers in the last week.

I have spent a long time making my mind up. Here's a few thoughts to ponder.

HP and Acer are the biggest names. HP have the worst repair count (seriously, they are the Land Rover Freelander of the laptop world). Acer are fairly reliable, but....yuck....I've never seen so much junk on laptops ever. Also, I don't really like the designs.

In terms of the next boys in the park, 3 names come up. Dell, Asus and Lenovo. Also, Toshiba are in there.

Statistically for 2010, the list is Asus - Toshiba - Sony - Apple - Dell - Lenovo. Interesting to see Apple-the-untouchable languishing between these big Windows boys.

I work in an environment where almost everyone has windows and mac laptops in equal measure (not that there are exactly any other!) and the top complaint for hardware failure is surprisingly with Sony...so that's them out.

That narrows it down to 4, Toshiba/Asus/Lenovo and Dell.

I've been looking at them all, and t.b.h. I can't really find anything in Dell to recommend them. They look fairly cheap and the spec is not that special for the money.

You can buy a Windows 7 home premium 64 bit with an i3 Sandybridge processor and 4gb Ram for approx £400-450. Nobody from this planet really needs i5 or i7 unless they are gaming or running some serious software.

Out of the 3, it's up to you.

Lenovo - look understated, plain "business"-looking machines without frills. The thinkpads (name from old IBM) are rated. Asus - kind of funky, preloaded with lots of junk, but can be removed. Toshiba?....well, if you believe all the blogs, the quality is quite low although the failure rates are decent.

Personally, when I finish taking everything off my HP, I'll be getting either

Asus K series (cheap and decent PLUS make back-up disks using Asus's AI recovery)

or Lenovo B or G 570 series. (one chance only to back-up to DVDs).

zzzzzzz

zzzzzzz


sorry....

 

[RGDave]

Oh b.t.w. the Lenovo G770 is a 17" I think. Nice looking machine with decent spec at around £520.

 

[Smiffy]

I got Sam a Dell laptop for Christmas last year. Got to be honest, she's getting a bit frustrated with it. Takes a bloody age to load, it's not the quickest on the block. Build quality is good though, as is battery life.
Would I buy one again?? Nah.

 

[Jonny]

Speed issues at laptop start up are generally caused by the software loading in the background during the initial log-in/power-up phase of the startup cycle.

Depending on the version of windows you have you can configure certain services to load with a 'delayed start'. That way very memory intensive start-up processes can be delayed until after you have logged on to your profile thus allowing use, albeit the application response time might be slightly delayed initially.

The other reason is a massively fragmented hard drive or a virus.

That said the initial design for the IBM compatible machines we all still use is being changed. They are modifying this so we are not dependent upon certain components which dictate the load speed of the operating system and integrating that portion of the firmware back onto the processor areas of the machine. That will make things a hell of a lot faster on newer machines.

In relation to purchasing a laptop. What do you want it for? And if I had my choice of machines at the moment I would be tempted to go with a Samsung. They are one of the only companies out there who use purely native components rather than selecting the most price appropriate items from a generic shopping list (Dell, HP, and most of the other 'big' names do this). Samsung are one of the very best model you can get right now.

In relation to memory. If you get 4GB Ram ensure you have a 64bit OS. Using 4Gb RAM and a 32Bit OS only means you are wasting most of the memory as the operating system is unable to effectively access this. As for the Intel processors... they are reasonably good... but that doesn't make them the best. In many cases the ARM processors are much more appropriate for a laptop. Look at the power consumption on the processor you purchase if possible. A lot of intel dual core laptops have been known to overheat.

Oh... and beware of some of the Toshiba/HP/Dell machines out there. They have been known to crash and not restart at all requiring a complete rebuild to get back up and running. Make a backup disc for the OS as soon as you get the thing home!

 

[PhilTheFragger]

As a professional PC hero, I supply lots of PC's and laptops to various customers and it frustrates me when they ring up and say " i got a real bargain" my heart sinks at this point as invariably they have bought a pig in a poke.

Never be price lead

Always go for a particular spec and then find that spec at the best price.

For a standard 15.6 laptop the Dell new Inspiron 15 takes some beating

Intel I3 (2nd Generation)-THIS IS IMPORTANT!- CPU, 4 Gb RAM, 500GB Hard Drive , DVDRW , and 15 months of Mcafee thrown in all for £399 inc VAT & delivery

You can get the same spec with a 17inch screen for £499 its called the Inspiron 17 (natty title that)

I would avoid HP , Advent, Packard Bell

Alternative manufacturers would include Samsung, Acer (if you can get through all the crap software they include) and Toshiba

Thats the spec you should be looking at,

Shout or PM if you need any further pointers

As regards Brendys post about SSID drives, they are still expensive and you dont get the capacity of a standard hard drive.

I can see the logic of having a small one in a desktop machine as your boot disc with your data on a standard drive, but in a laptop where you only have space for one drive, its not yet time for these, maybe in 3 years time when the price drops, capacity rises and the failure rate improves

Fragger (PC Hero To The Gentry)

 

[PhilTheFragger]

Oh... and beware of some of the Toshiba/HP/Dell machines out there. They have been known to crash and not restart at all requiring a complete rebuild to get back up and running. Make a backup disc for the OS as soon as you get the thing home!

Id like to know where you get your information from, as far as I am concerned, this is scare mongering

Any piece of equipment is open to failure at any time, fact of life, but Im not seeing this

Fragger

 

[Jonny]

From the representatives at HP, Toshiba and Dell. I use their testing labs and other high end facilities on a regular basis for baselining various applications and solutions.

In addition our IT Support area has this as a known issue and you should be able to find out more by digging on the web.

Not saying that the rate of failure is such that it is certain... but of 50 HP machines we have in my direct business unit 10 have failed in the last 6 months. The organisation as a whole probably has around 50-60 thousand of the things but I have no idea of the rate of failure overall. We are generally fairly light users as well.

 

[Ethan]

Have you considered a Mac?

It appears not. Too bad.

 

[DannyOT]

A good way of deciding is to go into somewhere like Currys and have a play on the various machines in there. Although bang for buck specification wise is obviously one of the top priorities when buying a laptop, there's nothing worse than having a poorly built laptop as I found out when I bought an Acer which felt like it was made from a dustbin lid and contained about as much rubbish.

 

[brendy]

Phil, I paid just over 100 quid for the 128gb Crucial M4 SSD drive (which is Sata3 compatible for future upgrades). This is plenty for 99% of people as you really shouldnt be keeping much else on there other than the operating system, few programs and documents, images and documents should really be backed up onto a removable drive.

For those who love numbers, the windows experience for my Dell Vostro 1720, p8700 (Core 2 Duo 2.53ghz x 2), 4gb ram, Nvidia geforce 9600m GS and crucual M4 128 Sata 6gb/s SSD drive.

For the record though, most laptop "makes" are not actually made by that company. in fact Dell, HP and Apple are all made by the same company in Taiwan.

 

[Aztecs27]

It appears not. Too bad.

Indeed.

 

[RGDave]

Some interesting and knowledgeable stuff on here.....excellent.

With regard to SSDs and 32/64 bit, the argument is fairly pointless at this stage. i.m.o. an SSD is not great value for a laptop, even if you could get one for £100 or whatever, I'd have thought the process of getting it in and installing/cloning is kind of way too much hassle for a novice user. All laptops now come with 64bit windows (apart from the odd one here or there). I bought a desktop capable of installing 32/64 and went with the 32-bit pro version. It has 4gb RAM and clearly cannot use it all, but it's very impressive.

I wouldn't personally buy a laptop with less than 4gb RAM, but maybe someone more knowledgeable might have an insight into whether some of the bargains out there with i3s but only 3gb are OK long term? I'd imagine that once you've set up a laptop with itunes/camera software/anti-virus/office/mobile phone drivers and management programs, that just for the laptop to sit there doing nothing is probably going to use getting up towards 2 gb?

 

[RGDave]

Indeed.

Yes, but surely the question is if you're going to buy a laptop for 3-5 years use, do you want it to cost you £500 or £1,000.