New Laptop Advice

neil · Post by **neil** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:19 pm

Needing to buy a laptop for home use. Looking for fairly cheap and cheerful so was thinking of a basic Dell one. I'm a bit out of touch with the latest specs though. They've got 4 at the £400 to £500 mark: http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/produ ... l=en&s=dhs
All with different processors. What am I better with - AMD or Intel, and if I go AMD what's the difference between the Sempron, Athlon, and Turion processors?? Anyone got any advice?

dezzy · Post by **dezzy** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:26 pm

Dell Inspiron with an Intel Core Duo processor and Windows XP (NOT Vista!) would be good choice. I've had a Dell Inspiron laptop for work for a few years and it's served me well. Just recently helped a mate choose one too and he's happy with it.

BiggestNizzy · Post by **BiggestNizzy** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:35 pm

tesco where doing a laptop for £300, PC world something similar, if you sign upto orange broadband you get £300 off a laptop but i'm not sure what the catch is.

DO NOT GET VISTA

failing that just look at what has the biggest numbers, trawl through a computer shopper.

dezzy · Post by **dezzy** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:43 pm

BiggestNizzy wrote: i'm not sure what the catch is.
DO NOT GET VISTA

That, my friend, is the catch . . . they all come with Vista!

tut · Post by **tut** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:44 pm

Neil

The 1501 is the best value and it has a dedicated Video card. Normally I start with the screen and its resolution, but they are all the same at 15.4" and 1280 x 800.

However the O/S, Vista Basic is a waste of time, you need Vista Home Premium, and preferably 2gb of memory to run it. Therefore go to "Select with Windows Vista" and "Customise", and select "Home Premium" at £23.50. Unfortunately an extra 1gb of memory is £111, which is ridiculous, so you will need to stick with 1gb. As this is made up of 2x512mb modules, you will not be able to add any more without ditching those.

Also it is worth going for the 6 cell Li-ion battery at £11.75 as it almost doubles battery power.

Try that lot for starters.

tut

tut · Post by **tut** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:56 pm

ps The 90 day warranty is a f***ing joke, but then that is Dell.

I have actually taken Vista off of two of our desktops and installed XP, but that was because it would not run programs that I needed and there were no drivers for. On a new notebook it will be OK for the installed programs, and new drivers and compatibility are coming through the pipeline.

SP1 will be out before too long, and that is what a lot of businesses are waiting for before taking the leap. However Vista is here to stay, and it WILL take over from XP, just as XP did from NT and 2000.

tut

EliseR · Post by **EliseR** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 12:01 am

Avoid Vista for the time being, otherwise make sure you got 2GB memory. Vista is GREAT when it runs smoothly, and I prefer it over XP in many ways - but you really need a decent amount of ram.

If your a techy, install XP on a second drive and play about with both.

G.
PS - Tut is spot on, get a Premium Vista.

robin · Post by **robin** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 7:59 am

What do you actually want to do with the laptop?

If it's surfing the web, reading email, and writing a few letters you would be better of with a mac (actually, you would be better of with a free unix rather than apple's boxed unix, but that's too much for most people to cope with to start with).

DELL laptops may be cheap, but while they ship with MS bloatware and tiny memory configurations (tiny for the chosen s/w - 512MByte should be *more* than almost anyone should ever need - now you need 2GByte for VISTA!?) they are nearly useless as you would be quicker using pencil and paper for writing and your mobile telephone for accessing the internet ...

OTOH if you could get a modern cheap laptop to run windows2000 you would have a great machine

Cheers,
Robin

BiggestNizzy · Post by **BiggestNizzy** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 8:03 am

you could always get vista say no to the terms and conditions and send it back to microsoft for a refund IIRC thats what it says in the terms and conditions then you just install xp/linux etc.

robin · Post by **robin** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:36 am

Good luck with getting that refund ...

skellyjohn · Post by **skellyjohn** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:38 am

I just got a new one from PC World. They told me in there - and so did one of my geek friends - that an Intel Core Duo processor works best for VISTA and vice versa. Got mine for £500.

robin · Post by **robin** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 1:41 pm

And of course they have no interest in selling you an intel core duo processor or vista

/rant on

The reason that MS windows and other s/w appears to work better on dual core processors is because so much of their code is apparantly not asynchronous - i.e. it spins in a loop hogging the processor waiting for whatever is happening next - if you want some other application (or even just the clock) to make any progress, you need another CPU or at least another CPU core ... what other reason can there be for needing two really fast CPU where previously one moderately fast CPU was adequate!

Just to put that in perspective, we have a 100-user system that runs a massive database, plus a web-based user interface plus a bunch of reporting and admin functions on a single-2.8GHz P4 processor without any significant delays or hiccups - sure, when it's busy big queries take a while, but that's life - currently it's been running for 367 days - the application s/w has been upgraded a couple of times en route without needing to reboot once.

You just don't and won't get that from MS. Take the plunge and swap into a world where anything really is possible, provided you want to spend your time creatively rather than banging head against brick wall and ordering faster and faster processors and more and more memory.

/rant over

EliseR · Post by **EliseR** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 1:43 pm

robin wrote:And of course they have no interest in selling you an intel core duo processor or vista

/rant on

The reason that MS windows and other s/w appears to work better on dual core processors is because so much of their code is apparantly not asynchronous - i.e. it spins in a loop hogging the processor waiting for whatever is happening next - if you want some other application (or even just the clock) to make any progress, you need another CPU or at least another CPU core ... what other reason can there be for needing two really fast CPU where previously one moderately fast CPU was adequate!

Just to put that in perspective, we have a 100-user system that runs a massive database, plus a web-based user interface plus a bunch of reporting and admin functions on a single-2.8GHz P4 processor without any significant delays or hiccups - sure, when it's busy big queries take a while, but that's life - currently it's been running for 367 days - the application s/w has been upgraded a couple of times en route without needing to reboot once.

You just don't and won't get that from MS. Take the plunge and swap into a world where anything really is possible, provided you want to spend your time creatively rather than banging head against brick wall and ordering faster and faster processors and more and more memory.

/rant over

What system are you suggesting

/Edit: Just spotted "mac" somewhere!

Feckit, i'm going to agree with you. With Bootcamp, and VirtualPC for Mac, I see no reason why not to go for a mac and get the best of both worlds...

Except, they cost a gazillion times more pound for pound when comparing raw power!

My next "computer" will be one of those new macs. They look lovely.

G.

Corranga · Post by **Corranga** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 1:50 pm

tut wrote:ps The 90 day warranty is a f***ing joke, but then that is Dell.

Probably worth saying it is actually a 1 year warranty, but simply 90 days collect and return. After that, you have to get it to Dell, and I believe they only deal with 1 courier firm, and it costs £35 or something. Still probably cheaper than upgrading to the next level of Dell warranty mind.

Also, if you do buy Dell, try to find a basic machine that fits your requirements, their 'upgrade' costs are ridiculous!

I have 2 Dell laptops (1 about 4 or 5 years old, the other maybe 18months) and a brand new Acer in my house (g/fs work laptop). The Dells are perfect, and the old Dell has awful build quality, but everything still works, the newer Dell is well built and comfy to use. The Acer feels like its made of paper, and some things seem to be in odd places, personally, i'd avoid Acer with fears of something falling off it, and beyond that, my gf still uses her old Dell for work over the brand new Acer!

Also... Avoid Median/Hewlett Packard as they suck, avoid anything that doesn't have an AMD / Intel processor and look at screen resolution (and compare to a desktop or so) since you'll be staring at that laptop screen for a long time, and you can't exactly replace it!

Chris

Skyenet · Post by **Skyenet** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 3:13 pm

EliseR wrote:What system are you suggesting
/Edit: Just spotted "mac" somewhere!

Feckit, i'm going to agree with you. With Bootcamp, and VirtualPC for Mac, I see no reason why not to go for a mac and get the best of both worlds...

Except, they cost a gazillion times more pound for pound when comparing raw power!

My next "computer" will be one of those new macs. They look lovely.

G.

Theye are expensive but work well and in my experience 100% reliable. Macs come with all the applications I use complete in the box. The operating system and software just seems to do what you want with the minuimum of fuss. I still have a five year old one running the latest software and its never missed a beat.

Visted the new Apple store in Glasgow on Saturday (got the t-shirt to prove it

) and the new iMacs are just amazing bits of kit. Now using Dual Core and Core 2 Extreme processors they are certainly a lot faster than my oldest Mac. Love the clear displays and the latest version of iLife (iPhoto, iDvd, iMovie ect).

iBooks are pretty robust bits of kit and do hold their prices pretty well.

The biggest difference I find between a Mac and Windows machine is the lack of time you have to waste bothering about viruses and reinstalling o/s and software. Never had any o/s or software problems with my Mac hwoever the hours and hours I must have wasted in my life reinstalling Windows and getting applications to work is depressing.