New laptop replacement - help required

[Farneyman]

So I managed to break my laptop and need to replace it. Don't really want to use high street/retail park store to buy something I could get cheaper online.

Was using a Toshiba with windows 7 and Intel celeron. I added 2gb to it through Crucial scan to a total of 4gb and this worked perfectly well for all I needed it for.

I have fibre broadband and it is mainly used for streaming YouTube, sky go and the odd bit of surfing. The odd microsoft office program for work also. All photos etc are stored on an external hard drive.

I don't want to break the bank but would have a budget of about 300. My knowledge of laptop software/hardware is pretty non exsistent.

Any suitable bargains from a reputable website I could order from?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Snelly]

I would try and stretch to spending a bit more get a MacBook if I was you. I'm a recent convert to them and think they are massively superior to even the best PCs.

A MacBook Air isn't too much more than you are currently thinking of spending and they are often offered on the refurbished area of the Apple web store at decent prices.

 

[Farneyman]

Not sure how compatible that would be for Microsoft programs I use for work that I sometimes access at home.

Am a fan of Mac units but looking for windows based machine.

Cheers

 

[Paul77]

I work in IT for a school and see a lot of cheap laptops. I think we have about 720 of them now. I switched to Apple totally last year after using Windows 8 and never looked back but it's not everyones cup of tea. Any Corei3/i5 system with at least 4Gb of memory should sit well with your budget. It's worth getting someone to swap the hard drive too for an SSD drive. This would make it super fast. If storage is a need then it's a no brainer to get a Hybrid-SSD swapped out.

SSD is just really fast storage, but usually low capacity
HSSD is really fast SSD like speeds but with large capacity bolted on. Not as fast as SSD but a lot faster than standard hard drives.

All laptop manufacters pretty much are the same underneath these days so you could buy anything. It's just how they look to your eyes that grabs you. It's when you go past the budget that you start to get fancy things like better speakers, blu ray drives, better screen and stuff, but essentially in the guts it's all the same.

Dependant on how old your broken laptop was, anything you buy now will still be faster

 

[Duckster]

TBH if all you use it for is surfing the net and a bit of working from home, just pop down to Tesco and see what they have on offer.

Normally cheaper than anywhere else. Whatever you have to spend, spend.

A refurbished Mac Air will set you back double what you are after spending.

You also won't need an SSD (yes, they are great if you can get one), but you don't need one.

As an example, I just randomly clicked this one and it should be fine for what your saying you use it for
http://www.tesco.com/direct/asus-x5...-black/124-1743.prd?pageLevel=&skuId=124-1743

 

[Crazyface]

http://www.tesco.com/direct/asus-x5...4gb-ram-1tb-black/115-0213.prd?skuId=115-0213

When about this? When sort of processor speed should I look at? My lappys broke too. This looks a cheap deal. I need HDMI. What is WiFi charging????

 

[virtuocity]

Macs are expensive, but great. I ran a business using a windows machine as a lot of my industry software wasn't Mac compatible. I went through 4 laptops in 3 years.

Have had my Mac for about a year and it's absolutely amazing- runs Office (you need to buy Mac version).

However, if you're sticking with Windows (and I'm no IT expert), I would definitely go with a SSD. The less moving parts, the better I reckon.

 

[PhilTheFragger]

If you can push the boat out to £379 then this Dell looks good
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-15-3543-laptop/pd?oc=cn54318&model_id=inspiron-15-3543-laptop

Intel I5 CPU (5th Generation), 8Gb RAM and a 1Tb Hdd

Or if you fancy a larger screen and a bit less grunt, then this 17 inch model looks good at £329
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-17-5749-laptop/pd?oc=cn74911&model_id=inspiron-17-5749-laptop

Intel I3 cpu, 4 Gb RAM, 1 Tb Hdd

Whatever you get it will have windows 8.1, Download Classic Shell from here http://www.fosshub.com/Classic-Shell.html/ClassicShellSetup_4_2_1.exe
it will give you the classic windows start menu and program list that is missing from Windows 8