Which laptop brand to buy?

leecs1980

leecs1980

leecs1980

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I'm in the market for a new laptop but I am unsure which brand I should look for. I'm concerned with how well they are built, reliability, whether the manufacturer offers decent support, how they deal with warranty issues, how easy and if it's relatively cheap to get hold of parts?

Any help would be really appreciated. I've not bought one for about 4 to 5 years so my knowledge has become limited.
 
How much do you have to spend? Any brand sub £400 will be cheap and plasticky, more liable to break if knocked or dropped, up the budget and you get a better built chassis that will take more wear and tear. Parts prices are dependant on age, for example a 15.6 led screen now that is current is circa £30-£40, an older generation screen can be £50-£200 depending on size purely because it's made in limited numbers.

I would just get the best laptop you can afford. Service times and support quality is dependent on which way the wind blows.
 
Had my Dell XPS for 3 years, not really had anything go wrong to be honest (hdd went in the first week but that was it).

I think it's mainly how you look after them to be honest!
 
I'd avoid Acer... But other than that you get what you pay for. Pay £500 and you're probably going to get something "good enough", pay £1k and you're likely to get something well built and likely to last longer/take more abuse.
 
beermonster said:
Any brand sub £400 will be cheap and plasticky
Click to expand...

There are in fact a thinkpads that comes in under £400, you won't however get the massive hard-drives and oodles or ram from lenovo at that price but they're far from flimsy. Truth is they're probably the only well constructed notebooks you'll get for that pice. Quality unfortunately costs.

With the £50 off atm you can get one with an i5 under £400 if you were willing to sacrifice storage and ram this week.
 
choice of HP Probooks and Lenovo Thinkpads if you want build and reliability. Otherwise mainstream bang for buck acer/samsung/toshiba



HP ProBook 4535s Part Number: A1F22EA#ABU

Stock Code: W077219

AMD A6-3400M Quad Core Processor, 15.6" HD Screen, Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 640GB HDD, DVD Rewriter, Dedicated AMD 1GB Radeon 6520G Graphics, HDMI, Bluetooth 3, USB 3, Integrated SRS Premium Sound System, a brushed aluminum finish and a magnesium-reinforced ABS chassis, Up To 5 Hour Battery Life, DV6 A1F22EA#ABU

£50 off with code 4535s = total of £399
 
Interesting... I don't know how the Probooks stack up against the elite books but if they are anywhere near as good (massive price difference so...) then they may very well be pretty high quality.
 
HP - Sucks. I have seen far too many of them in the bin. 2 of my own

Acer - Actually surprisingly reliable but fairly flimsy. I suppose knowing this made meextra careful.

Currently own a Samsung R60 and its fairly robust, but the battery is poo

Also currently own a Fujistu V5535 which is a dire pile of overheating junk however its in the exact same condition as the first day and its 5 years old now, so robust.

If I had to chose a Laptop to actually pay for rather than "Obtain" then Id opt for a Dell.

My sons have a Dell D400 thats a P2/400 and its still in perfect working order... Its just held together with sellotape thats all.
 
Dell Latitude of some flavour.

You can pick up a Dell 6420 for under £600 at the outlet which includes 1600x900 res 14inch screen, 2.6GHz Core i5, 4Gb ram, discrete gfx, and a 250Gb+ HDD. Absolute bargain if you ask me.

I currently use a Latitude D620 which i bought 2nd hand off the bay and it's lasted me about 3 years on top of whatever previous ownership it had. Still in perfect nick, quiet, reliable. I'll upgrade to a newer Latitude at some point, but this is still serving its purpose perfectly well :)
 
Hmmm... I'm surprised Asus haven't been mentioned yet.

I did some research on this a few weeks ago and found Asus to be among the better make.

From what I gathered (top of my head):
Top: Apple, Sony - but costs more
Good: Asus, Lenovo, Dell
Rest: HP, Acer...

Not sure where Samsung and others fit into the above list.

So I went and purchased an Asus X53E (i5 2430m, 6gb, 750gb) last week for £400 from FlyingSpaceObject - it's currently selling for £450 with worse spec at the mo.

Let's hope I made a good choice...
 
Thanks for the replies. On top of this I have taken advice from a laptop repair specialist at work and he has suggested Dell, Acer or Samsung.

On this information, I'm swaying towards a Dell Inspiron 15R. I had an idea of bumping the memory up to 8Gb as they only come with 4Gb as standard. I know it will probably affect my warranty if I do so, which is leaving me torn as to whether I do it or not. Can anyone comment on how picky Dell are with warranty queries i.e. will they refuse to work on it if I've added some memory?
 
Just bought two Lenovo Thinkpad Edge for work at £400. There pretty decent though there is quite a bit of bloatware on there.
 
shadesofgrey said:
Alienware laptop user here, no complaints at all and the customer service has been very, very good to me
Click to expand...

Had you sent it back when you changed any parts? I know that if you have you've probably changed it back to the original spec. My main concern is if they noticed that you'd had the unit open and changed bits.
 
You are allowed to open it up and change things without it affecting your warrenty, ram/hard drive etc. There are no warrenty void stickers around either the cpu and the gpu and they have no problem with you reseating/upgrading these and using different TIM.

Same with the whole screen. But if you were to try and swap the lcd within the lid that will void the warrenty and they will know if you have tried.

That pretty much covers what you can do without voiding warrenty, but you would have to put it back to original spec if you were to send it back.

Pretty good really. Plus all those things are easy to get to and do.
 
Will the Dell 15R take 8GB though?
Its not classed as a high spec Laptop these days ( Go figure ) and so what actual benefit would you gain from using 8GB over 4GB? - apart from a dropped battery life?

Anyway, I have to admit that Dells are among the best quality Laptops I have seen.

I myself, or rather my family have a mixed bag.

Samsung - ATI Chipset - running linux just fine but 3D is non existent
ESystems - SIS - Running XP cos its only got a gig but its actually very nice feel to the keyboard
Fujitsu - Running Win7 - Too early to comment cos its only a few months old
HP - I have 3 of these and 2 are dead and one only works if you press down on it.

And from what I have seen HP are perhaps the worst of them all.

I used to also own ACER and they are crap too!

All my laptops re in the low to mid range however... I have never spent over £150 on any laptop and I have never bought one new.
 
id recommend dell laptops, they are good quality reliable and good customer service, i drop my xps 17 and knackered the power socket, phoned dell and they came out to my house 2 days later at a cost of 17 quid.
Dell do regular deals on xps 15/17 you can get a bargain.

ive also upgraded the ram and screen to a 1080p, as it was cheaper then the dell build.
 
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