Best value laptops

[Tasslehoff]

Hi,

Looking at buying a new laptop soon, want to try and keep it under £600. What do you guys reckon is best value for money at the moment? I've been told that any brand should do, providing it has a i5/i7 processor.

And advice would be appreciated

[Saab Dastard]

I've been thinking about a Lenovo TS Edge E520 Core i5 - around £600. Not sure about the offset trackpad though...

SD

[Genghis the Engineer]

I doubt that many are poor nowadays - it's such a competitive market that the prices tend to be pretty consistent, and the quality very uniform.

Lenovo - they who used to manufacture for IBM, have an excellent reputation, I doubt you'd go wrong.

I happen to get a good deal on Toshibas, so am on my second. Currenly a Portege because I like the long battery life and light weight, don't mind the smallish screen, and didn't want to compromise on computing power. Like my previous Toshiba (which is now running very happy with my brother 5+ years after I bought it) it's flawlessly reliable.

Things I'd personally look at when buying a laptop:
- Average score on Amazon !
- Battery life, and availability of a spare battery
- Weight
- Does it have a card slot?
- Can I turn the touchpad off ? (mine has a button to do this, which is really useful when I'm doing a lot of typing on public transport!
- How's the screen?
- I'd not buy a seriously underpowered netbook (which most of them are).
- Lots of USB ports, ability to drive external screen(s).
- How good are the speakers (I tend to watch DVDs when working away - it's the one thing however that Toshiba are really crap at, so I end up using headphones.)

G

[mixture]

- Can I turn the touchpad off ? (mine has a button to do this, which is really useful when I'm doing a lot of typing on public transport!

You should have just bought a Thinkpad with a nipple.

I also think your typing style is a bit suspect if you manage to activate the trackpad whilst typing.

I've been told that any brand should do

Every PC laptop at a particular price point is, for all intensive purposes, the same.* Save for one or two minor differences (e.g. a couple more USB ports or whatever).

What ends up differentiating them is post-sales support. That's where the difference between the manufacturers becomes apparent.

Toshiba post-sales is good. HP and Lenovo next. Then Dell and the smaller brands last.


* = We're not talking Apple laptops here, as that's chalk and cheese. Apple laptops are generally always a worthwhile investment.

[Genghis the Engineer]

I also think your typing style is a bit suspect if you manage to activate the trackpad whilst typing

Possibly true, but it tends to only give me trouble when the laptop is genuinely on my lap, and I'm crammed into a seat in steerage on British Rail or Easyjet. Sadly, that's quite often.

G

[mixture]

Maybe you need a FrogPad, a one handed compact keyboard.

(Never used one myself, but have been occasionally been tempted to buy one for curiosity !).

[srobarts]

I have had a ThinkPad Edge 15 for just over a year now and when SWiMBOs laptop expired I bought her the E520. We are delighted with both, the offset touchpad takes a little getting used to until one realises that it is centred on the keyboard and the addition of the numeric keypad means it has to move across. Incidentally I now swap machines when I have a lot of numeric work as the numeric keypad is a welcome addition on the E520.
The touch pad is fine but can be over sensitive for gestures which means in cramped areas you can accidentally zoom or scroll when you don't want to. I have turned of the gestures feature for both of ours and all is now fine. I am a lifelong TrackPoint (Nipple) fan so only leave the touchpad alive for those who borrow my machine.
One of the other factors I always weigh into the financial decision is the extended warranty. With laptop repairs so costly I always add a warranty extension to 3 years. On more than one occasion it has paid for itself enough times over to cover the times I did not need it.

[green granite]

I also think your typing style is a bit suspect if you manage to activate the trackpad whilst typing

Not if you're a trained typist, your hands are quite low, SWMBO (85wpm at her peak) has the bottom thumb joint of her hands about 5mm above the pad and she was always complaining about the cursor jumping about whilst typing, having found out how to to disable the pad the problem disappeared. Also the fact that the manufactures bother to provide an option to switch off the pad whilst typing says it all really. .

[Mike-Bracknell]

My best advice for anyone looking to buy a cheap laptop is:

Go into Currys/Comet/PC World, and try out the keyboard and trackpad/nipple/etc for yourself. If you can get on with it then you're going to save yourself inevitable heartache and disappointment. Then do an about-face, spending no money in the aforementioned shops, and buy it online from a reputable shop that gives you decent aftersales (if you need that).

Aside from that, most components (as is already mentioned) are much of a muchness at those price-points that you're not likely to have any specific pluses or minuses from ownership, so look for differentiation on software bundled with it, and go "Professional" rather than "Home" on Windows if you can.

[Tasslehoff]

Thanks for the replies; so no real need to stick to the intel CPU's?

[mixture]

intel CPU's?

I'd say stick with a decent intel.

[Saab Dastard]

Srobarts,

Thanks for your feedback - very helpful!

I've been a "nipple fan" like you for years (I disable trackpads completely, if possible), and I'm also keen on the separate numeric keypad - hence my interest in the E520 - so it's really good to hear positive feedback on that model.

Mike B

go "Professional" rather than "Home" on Windows if you can.

I agree that was certainly the case with XP, but I'm not sure it's so true now with 7 - unless you need to join a domain or use the XP compatibility mode. Win 7 Home Premium is a much more "complete" OS than XP Home, IMHO.

SD

[Mike-Bracknell]

Originally Posted by Saab Dastard

I agree that was certainly the case with XP, but I'm not sure it's so true now with 7 - unless you need to join a domain or use the XP compatibility mode. Win 7 Home Premium is a much more "complete" OS than XP Home, IMHO.

SD

Whilst I agree it's not a dealbreaker (hence leaving it to the end and using it as a differentiation between laptops), the question of extended support could be a differentiator:

Microsoft unlikely to be offering extended support for consumer editions of Vista - Computeractive - News

(as is usually the case, I couldn't find the specific definitive link I wanted to put up so that above is a near approximation - extrapolate to Win7 with care).

Also, if you DO want to join a domain, Microsoft in their extreme generosity offer a version upgrade from Home to Premium for £120!!

[Milo Minderbinder]

fro a reliability / repairability point of view DON'T buy anything from

Acer
Packard Bell
Gateway
E-machines
Ei-Systems
Advent
MSI
ECS/Elite
Asus

the first five are all part of the Acer empire and have reliability issues
All suffer from poor availability of spare motherboards if a replacement is required

From both issue,, Dell,. HP/Compaq / Lenovo are far ahead

[mixture]

Saab Dastard,

See the comparison here

Go non-pro and you don't get, for example :

XP compatability mode
Network Backup (obvious you can do this with robocopy/thirdparty)

[Saab Dastard]

Mixture, I'm very aware indeed of the differences between the 2 editions.

My point is that the Home Premium version of Win 7 is not as crippled as XP Home was - you couldn't even properly use NTFS security! At least 7 Home has a backup program, even if it's not network backup.

SD

[mixture]

I'll take your word for it, but I would still say that unless the original poster is hellbent on scraping every penny of savings, I would still suggest going pro.

[rgbrock1]

I would whole-heartedly recommend Acer laptops and/or netbooks. The build quality might not be as great as those of other manufacture but they definitely give "bang for the buck". (Or Pound in your case!)

The Mrs. and I have an Acer Aspire something-or-other with a 17" LCD screen and Dolby digital speakers. We bought it a couple of years ago for about $500.

My kids all have Acer netbooks, courtesy of Dad and his Mrs.
They really enjoy using them.

Acer. Highly recommended. (And, no, I don't work for Acer nor do I have anything to do with them. Just a very happy customer.)

[peterh337]

A used top-end Lenovo is the best. I have bought loads of them for the firm and family etc. Zero failures.

£600 should get you a good one.

Google for "refurbished Lenovo" etc.

[Tinstaafl]

I recently replaced my old 2001 Toshiba laptop with a used Lenovo. The Toshiba was a Frankenputer I assembled from the working parts of mine, my wife's same-model-as-mine & a parts carcass from eBay. Turns out there was a graphics card/m'board soldering fault across the model series that affected many of them. Both of ours suffered the fault at different times - hences the parts carcass for that and other issues until there were only enough working parts to make a single working machine.

Still, 9 years is pretty good going.

I chose a used Lenovo W500 because there doesn't seem to be any laptops sold new today that have 15.4" matte WUXGA (1920x1200) screens. Damn near everything is glossy and, at most, 1920x1080 resolution ie 16:9 aspect ratio instead of 16:10. My old laptop was 15.0" UXGA (1600x1200) and damned if I wanted to lose a couple of hundred pixels of resolution to suit the HD aspect ratio marketing idiots. I do mostly documents & web browsing, not movie watching so bugger that loss for a joke! Nor do I like glossy screens. I couldn't give a rat's arse about ultra-vivid colours vs 'normal' colours. I care more about seeing what's displayed on the screen and not the lights behind me.

I rather like this W500! Both a trackpad & trackpoint, 3 USB 2.0 slots + another 4 on the mini docking bay, SD/memory card slot, Cardbus *and* Express card slots, Bluetooth 3.0 & -N Wifi, a camera and the usual array of input/output ports including. It has an Intel 2.8GHz Core 2 Duoprocessor which is more than powerful enough for me as well as two graphics engines: a low power draw Intel mobile graphics chip+ a higher performance ATI FireGL graphics card. Choose graphics performance or battery life as needed (I can get 5 hours or more out of it if I need to. Even more if I bought the optional optical drive bay battery pack).

If Lenovo was still making these I'd have bought one new. Unfortunately it's been superseded by the W510 or 520 with a HD resolution screen. If Jayne's desktop replacement 17" behemoth dies while getting another one of these still makes sense then I think she'll end up with a W500 too.