Best Asus laptop for £350 tops?

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Soldato
Joined
10 Jun 2010
Posts
5,158
Location
Scotland
Looking for an Asus laptop. Preferably with a mobile sandy bridge i3.

must be 15.4"

£350 max.

What's the best model and the best price.

Uses will be web browsing and general use.
 
Moeks said:
Why does it have to be Asus ?
Click to expand...

There very good reliability wise and I also like there designs and the company itself.

If it was going to be any other. It would be a Toshiba, very reliable and good quality, although their designs aren't for everyone (not me) or a Sony Vaio, although they are a little pricey and slightly over budget. Can't find an i3 Sony for £350.

Not really willing to go any other brand. They're all far too unreliable. Acer & HP for e.g. I wouldn't take one for free.
 
Or Asus for that matter, they are all much of a muchness really. It also very much depends on which model range you are talking about. The HP Elitebooks are very reliable I imagine the Probooks are too.
 
Unfortunately this isn't the case guys. I used to be a self employed I.T techie for three years. Over those 3 years, 80% of the laptops I received were HP & Acer. A very small amount were Asus and Toshiba. You could argue they aren't as popular.

However an insurance company square trade published results a couple of years back on their laptops claims. HP were most likely to fail with a much higher percentage rate over Asus and Toshiba.

I always encountered a tonne of dead Acers... refused to power on, completely dead.

HP always had the silly GPU overheating issue where it needed reballed... carried across a good few model ranges and refreshes. Not to mention their terrible access to the CPU heatsink which required you to strip the laptop completely down to the motherboard under panel to access it and clean the dust which inevitably built up in it causing cut outs.

Toshiba also use much more expensive screens than the others. Double the price for a replacement, I presume this is why they are a tad more expensive than others.

http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

If I had just read that article without actually having experienced the results first hand. I would have been skeptical. Take from my info and that article what you will.
 
Arha yea, I was an IT techie too, my experiences however don't really have any particular brand failing much more than any other, most of the issues I encountered were with Dell actually, but that's easily explained by the fact that most of the machines I dealt with were Dell, as that's what most of our clients tended to use, many of them used HP business machines too and Lenovo was fairly popular, Toshiba, Acer and Sony much less so and I don't think I ever saw an Asus at work, although I have seen a few that friends and family own.

It's no good at all saying something like you did, because you will always get people with just as much experience and just as many good stories who have had different experiences.
 
Iirc most of the manufacturers on that list were a bit peeved at it. Companies in the market of selling after sales warrantys tend to have a vested interest in having as few controls as possible, as small a sample groups as possible (including omitting exactly what the sample groups was - if any) and generally producing as worrying a figure as possible. Lenovo were particularly vocal about this which is understandable when their pretty bomb proof thinkpads in this "study" turned out to be less reliable than the cheapest dell consumer notebooks.

Anyway, acer tend to use squidgy keyboards which is a good indication of build quality and hp do tend to be less reliable than the others (in my experience - but there's just more of them around tbh), but then they give you far more for your money and they heating problem has been fixed on the newer g series laptops. The battery release doubles as a panel release exposing both the ram and fan for easy cleaning on some models so basically, do your research.

Secondly there's a big difference between the cheaply built consumer lines and the sturdy business lines every manufacturer makes e.g. thinkpad vastly superior to ideapad.

Third why does it have to be asus and i3? If you look enough you can find entry level thinkpad for £350-370 which as probably the most reliable thing in your price range. Also intel loves to talk about it's massive compute and encoding advantages over amd, but very few people are doing either of these things on a laptop which makes the intel premium pricing mute. An A6-3400m* for example gets a far higher wei score than an i3 (probably the only time wei has been any use) and is smoother for day to day use than the i3. It comes down to this if you aren't crunching massive spreadsheets/transcoding then you won't notice the intel advantages you've paied for, however more people will notice the smoother execution, improved graphics and battery life of the a6 - plus it's cheaper.

I do want to say look for refurbs as I've had good luck with them in the past, but all I can currently see are acers and hps...

*be aware most reviews were pre release with unoptimized bios/drivers which were all fixed months ago. Try one if you can. I've not seen a singe person who hasn't been surprised buy how well they perform.
 
Moeks said:
It's no good at all saying something like you did, because you will always get people with just as much experience and just as many good stories who have had different experiences.
Click to expand...

I was only sharing my real life experience. If you don't want to listen or don't believe me for whatever reason... fair enough.

If no one spoke out ever for being in fear of someone with greater experience shooting them down. Would we ever learn or know anything?

I seen over 2000 laptops in three years and a fair whack as I said were HP & Acer. That's good enough for me to avoid them and steer clear. Another reason I like Asus is, they produce great motherboards and I've dealt with their customer support and it's very good, unlike HP & Acer when I never receiced a reply.
 
Azuse05 said:
Anyway, acer tend to use squidgy keyboards which is a good indication of build quality and hp do tend to be less reliable than the others (in my experience - but there's just more of them around tbh), but then they give you far more for your money and they heating problem has been fixed on the newer g series laptops. The battery release doubles as a panel release exposing both the ram and fan for easy cleaning on some models so basically, do your research.
Click to expand...

You seem quite angry at my post. You must have an HP :p

Anyway... Sorry if I upset you in anyway. Acer can use all the squidgy keyboards they like. It doesn't help the fact I seen a tonne of them fail completely. I couldn' care they made me coffee in the morning, if it breaks after a year I'm not interested.

I never said HP hadn't sorted the problem, I simply stated an issue they had for a long time. There is no excuse for a company to be producing a couple of generations of laptops that were inevitably going to fail. Perhaps I don't need to do research and you need to read my post a little more clearly. Good on them for fixing the issue, I still don't like the company! Batteries always needed replacing, motherboards would pop, overheating gpu's and hard to reach heatsinks. They can have fixed all the issues and I still wont care. It should never have been as bad and I wont be investing cash into a company with such practices.

With regards to Intel... I do encode! (home movies to iPad) Perhaps do your research before jumping to conclusions ;)
 
I didn't mean my post to sound like I was shooting you down, I wasn't really, I've just heard people say things like this on these forums so many times it gets tiresome. When really, I do not believe there to be a great deal of difference. I respect that you like Asus, so do I! ...but I am not convinced that there is a great deal of difference in the reliability of them as opposed to any other brand. I don't want some chap to start thinking that he shouldn't buy the HP he has seen for a nice price with the right spec because it's more likey to fail on him than an Asus machine, I really don't think so.

It was only really the cheap consumer grade HP's that were like that anyway, same for the Dell's. The business class machines with 3 year warranty's and magnesium alloy chassis and such are much, much better in terms of both design and build quality. I buy these kind of laptops for a reason. All the cheap plastic consumer ones are a bit crap imo and they are all much of a muchness, you get what you pay for though …mostly.
 
Moeks said:
I didn't mean my post to sound like I was shooting you down, I wasn't really, I've just heard people say things like this on these forums so many times it gets tiresome. When really, I do not believe there to be a great deal of difference. I respect that you like Asus, so do I! ...but I am not convinced that there is a great deal of difference in the reliability of them as opposed to any other brand. I don't want some chap to start thinking that he shouldn't buy the HP he has seen for a nice price with the right spec because it's more likey to fail on him than an Asus machine, I really don't think so.

It was only really the cheap consumer grade HP's that were like that anyway, same for the Dell's. The business class machines with 3 year warranty's and magnesium alloy chassis and such are much, much better in terms of both design and build quality. I buy these kind of laptops for a reason. All the cheap plastic consumer ones are a bit crap imo and they are all much of a muchness, you get what you pay for though …mostly.
Click to expand...

No problem at all. We will need to agree to disagree on the part about brands being much of a muchness.

However, I do definitely agree with you that you get what you pay for and higher up the scale, definitely gets you a much better laptop, not just in performance, but in reliability and design also.

The high end Dells are pretty cool and I do like them. Just a bit out the price range. Trying to get reliability and performance into a £400 or under budget isn't always easy.
 
You'll want to check out the HP Pavilion g6-1210sa 15.6" Laptop - Red, sold in a well known pc shop chain all over britain.

£349

Intel® Core™ i3-370M processor
Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Memory: 6GB
Hard drive: 640GB

Nifty deal, my cousin got the £399 one, which has a i5-2430M instead of the 370m, and it's a great piece of kit.
 
sehcure said:
You'll want to check out the HP Pavilion g6-1210sa 15.6" Laptop - Red, sold in a well known pc shop chain all over britain.

£349

Intel® Core™ i3-370M processor
Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Memory: 6GB
Hard drive: 640GB

Nifty deal, my cousin got the £399 one, which has a i5-2430M instead of the 370m, and it's a great piece of kit.
Click to expand...

Never read my previous posts lol :p

It does look visually quite nice I must say. It caught my eye when I was looking around.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom