Value laptop

[Andy B]

I'm looking for a new laptop for my daughter. Budget is c.£400. It's a minefield out there! Seem to be focusing down on HP laptops, but Acer, Dell, MSI and Toshiba play in this price range too.

Anyone got any clear recommendations?

The HP G6-1163 looks to do the job.

Everyone is pushing the new Core i processors. Are they worth it? It adds to the cost over a dual core but I guess it will future-proof to some degree?

Any comments welcomed please!

 

[shugie]

The Dell outlet for refurbished Dell kit is pretty good - http://www.dell.com/uk/dfh/p/laptops?c=uk&l=en&s=dfh&cs=ukdfh1&redirect=1

Just look at the budget, unless your daughter wants to do something very processor intensive, pretty much anything will do.

 

[MrIFan]

Just bought a Lenovo, after reading advice on here, from laptops direct. Dual core procesor, 4gb ram, 500gb hard drive and lenovo have a good rep for reliability, £350. Cracking little machine

 

[patzx12]

i bought a little Asus Eee PC seashell note book for travel, its fecking brilliant i use it for everyhhing

 

[Djalabajoe]

As shugie said it depends what she will use it for. Most laptops will handle email, internet, word processing, music and movies but for games you will need one with a dedicated video card.
I know a couple of people who have bought their kids quality £800+ business laptops only to find that they wont play any recent games as the only have "onboard" graphics where the graphics are rendered by a chip on the motherboard rather than by a separate card with its own memory.
You can get an idea below of the difference between a £479 Dell Inspirion 15R with a Geforce GT525 card and the £449 version of exactly the same laptop with onboard Intel graphics.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-525M.43889.0.html

most games playable in medium to low setting

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-3000.37948.0.html

most games not playable or only playable in low setting.

 

[Andy B]

Thnaks everyone for your replies.

Nostromo - I hadn't latched onto the issue of the graphics card particularly.

It's intended mainly for college work and Facebook! Some YouTube no doubt! She's not a gamer so I can't see any major issue here - but very interesting all the same. I think we might be veering towards a refurb'd Dell with an i3 Core processor.

 

[wessie]

The Dell outlet for refurbished Dell kit is pretty good - http://www.dell.com/uk/dfh/p/laptops?c=uk&l=en&s=dfh&cs=ukdfh1&redirect=1

Just look at the budget, unless your daughter wants to do something very processor intensive, pretty much anything will do.

in a similar vein, have a look at the Argos outlet on Ebay - often some good buys and they all come with a full guarantee

Buy a laptop to do laptop stuff - web surfing, office/student work. As long as it can stream media content & play the odd DVD it should be adequate in that price band. If she wants to play games buy a dedicated games console which will double as a media centre leaving the laptop for other stuff at the same time.

 

[marcusfordus]

Daily use issues

Try before you buy...... I've had a perfectly good working HP for years and around the end of last year HP were doing a very good trade-in on their newer range....... so I swapped.
I wish I hadn't as this new range has a crap mouse pad on it that drives me barmy.

My lad has a Compaq (which is HP produced) and that is a brillant bit of kit. I've had a hard drive fail on this new one already, but to their credit the HP return to base for repair worked very well.

Don't buy off the internet unless you have tried one in your local emporium !

 

[Andy B]

Thanks guys.

I've plumbed for a refurbished Dell at about a hundred quid saving. Time will tell.......