Travel / General laptop for £800-1000

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
9,505
Hi all,

I'm looking for a travel laptop for the next year or two. I have a crappy £200 Lenovo thing for general use and a Macbook pro for work (bootcamped running windows) but I think I need to treat myself.

A bit of photo and video editing but nothing too dramatic. Typically just browsing, movies.

Requirements:
  • Budget up £1000
  • 13/14 maybe 15" or 17" (I only tend to use laptops sat in rooms - never on planes or such so I could go for something a little larger)
  • Not gamer thick, not macbook air thin. Gimme native HDMI ports and such
  • Has some cool features. I saw some gaming laptop with two M.2 slots and one full SSD slots! However...they were gaming laptops.
  • A little bit of a gamer........but I don't like gaming on small screens so capability would be nice but not that fussed

Don't care about:
  • Weight
So far i'm all over the place and looking at everything
  • Asus zephyrus g GA502DA. 16GB RAM. This class seems to win a lot of awards
  • Dell XPS
  • Acer Nitro 5. Chunk Boi but looks like it has some grunt for the price
  • These Acer Swift 7 Ultra-Thin Touchscreen Laptop - Does have me tempted but no natie port but could be hard for £1k (do I NEED this slim though? no)
  • Surface laptop 3
  • Spectre 360
Am I missing any gems?
 
Associate
Joined
23 Feb 2009
Posts
2,395
Location
Bournemouth
I can't help you as i can't recommend you a non gaming laptop because i don't know what is out on the market at the moment but..

I have a acer nitro 5 gaming laptop Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptop | AN515-43 | Black part # NH.Q5XEK.008 to be exact,

I can tell you this, as i own that laptop, it would be a bit too thick or bulky but i don't mind but for you this could be a issue.

Me being me, i would recommend laptops designed for battery life i think that would be a better route as long as the processor has enough power as well as prehaps a integrated gpu or dedicated gpu to allow you to game on the lowest graphic setting.

Google is your friend, i would search laptops with best battery life, battery life will be or should be top on what you want from a laptop.

Dan.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
9,505
Thanks for the reply, currently looking at google, youtube and other places.

There's so much selection laptop wise it's hard. Double hard given my requirements of everything!
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Apr 2012
Posts
6,605
Location
Rannoch
I had a Spectre 360. It ran hot and the fan noise was annoying, the fan came on when the machine was idling.

I also had an XPS 13, lovely little machine and very quiet unless it’s being taxed. It’s quiet when watching movies which is a deal breaker for me. I tend to use my iPad Pro to watch films as it’s silent :D

You could also get an Inspiron 13/15. Decent machine and the 4K screen model is nice.
 
Soldato
Joined
29 Jun 2004
Posts
2,651
I've been running an early first gen Spectre x360 since 2015, which has done plenty of travelling since purchase and is still going strong. The cooling fan can get slightly noisy (it's more like a loud rustle) but find that it only runs when the machine is running a virus scan on the disk otherwise it is completely silent in normal use.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
9,505
I've been running an early first gen Spectre x360 since 2015, which has done plenty of travelling since purchase and is still going strong. The cooling fan can get slightly noisy (it's more like a loud rustle) but find that it only runs when the machine is running a virus scan on the disk otherwise it is completely silent in normal use.

I'm looking at these more and more. Seem quite nice looking, functional, 'different' and performant.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
9,505
I don't need to buy until March so hopefully by then more vendors will have released 2020 laptops and everything in general drops in price - including refurbs
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,686
Location
Sussex
I've had two surface pro's and now moved to an XPS13. Whilst I enjoyed the surface pro's I felt I always needed to use the keyboard, as a "touch only" pc it just doesn't work well and you often struggle to to the most basic of things in windows 10 with no keyboard attached, its ok when browsing or watching a video but try and copy a link or right click something and you'll soon start to look for your keyboard. That and I scratched both of there screens, one worse than the other. The second one also started to fail to connect to the keyboard after a dropped it from the sofa one day.

Because of this for the same kind of money I went for an XPS13 and its really really nice, small and compact with a real premium feel to it, lovely screen and decent keyboard. Screen is protected whenever you stop using it as you close the keyboard and you don't need a protector to save that screen. It is silent in normal use and has very good battery life, when you put a game on it the fans spin up it does a decent job of playing the kind of games you'd expect to play on a non gaming laptop.
 
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