Spec me a thin and light laptop

Hi chaps,

Not bought a new laptop for years so looking for some advice. A friend is looking for a laptop. Following requirements:

- £700 budget
- long battery life (ideally haswell cpu)
- SSD / hybrid / mSATA mini SSD & big HDD. Needs 500GB+ total space.
- 11-14" screen
- 4GB RAM +
- no interest in gaming so no need for dedicated graphics
- touch screen if possible but not hard requirement

This is to be a main, 'do everything' machine so has to be light enough to carry around but also have enough storage space to be her main itunes library etc.

Also she is not the kind of person who buys these kinds of things all the time. The build quality should be good enough that it will last a good long time. I expect she will still be using it 3-4 years from now.

Any advice would be great. I've been looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad U430p which looks promising.

I ended up answering the question myself. For anyone who is interested here is my response with various options:

Lenovo IdeaPad U430p (£650) -

4th generation i5 CPU
10 hour battery life
8GB RAM
14" screen
500GB hybrid hard drive (includes 8GB of SSD cache for big speed boost)
1.71 kg

Lenovo IdeaPad U330 Touch (£699) - this one is £50 more expensive but has a touch screen. It also has only 4GB of RAM but I think that is enough. You won't notice the difference with 8GB.

4th generation i5 CPU
10 hour battery life
4GB RAM
14" touch screen
500GB hybrid hard drive (includes 8GB of SSD cache for big speed boost)
1.7 kg

Dell XPS 12 - Dell Official Refurbished (£614) - this looks like a really good deal. The XPS 12 is normally more like £1000. It comes with an SSD rather than normal hard drive. It would be blazingly fast but much smaller than a traditional drive. You might need to use an external drive to keep music / movies etc if you have a lot. You might also decide that the screen is a bit on the small side. It has a unique screen flip feature so that the laptop can be used as a tablet if you like.

4th generation i5 CPU
9 hour battery life
4GB RAM
12" full HD touch screen
128GB SSD
1.54 kg

Asus Zenbook UX32A (£650) - this looks like a really good option. The CPU is one generation out of date so the sacrifice is the relatively short battery life. But otherwise it looks great. Really thin and light (the lightest of all of these options) and has a cool looking backlit keyboard.

3rd generation i7 CPU
5 hour battery life
4GB RAM
13.3" screen
500GB hard drive
24GB mini SSD used to boost speed
1.45 kg

HP Pavilion b005sa Refurbished (£350) - thought I would throw in a seriously budget option just in case. Again the CPU is one generation out of date but it was a seriously low power version when it was released so you still get a good battery life.

3rd generation i3 CPU
8 hour battery life
4GB RAM
14" screen
750GB hard drive
32GB mini SSD used to boost speed
1.8 kg

Anyone with any further suggestions that would be great

I recently got the latest Asus Zenbook Prime:
240GB SSD
i7
IPS display (1280x1080)
Win8
Absolutely love it so far! Can't fault the thing. Lightning fast, great battery life, screen is amazing

Cheers for the recommendation!

I think that would be my choice if I were her.

Clipsey said:

I recently got the latest Asus Zenbook Prime:
240GB SSD
i7
IPS display (1280x1080)
Win8
Absolutely love it so far! Can't fault the thing. Lightning fast, great battery life, screen is amazing

Click to expand...

How much did that set you back and where did you purchase it if you don't mind? Thanks

Has anyone (in the UK) actually got the Lenovo U430/knows someone who does and where you/they got it? If I were to get a laptop, it is literally perfect and I think it looks phenomenal in red. Sorry to jack thread a bit, I was just curious about the U430 because I can't seem to find it anywhere. My input would be the Lenovo Yoga 11s (my friend just got one and it is a seriously nice piece of kit) but it doesn't meet all of your requirements so sorry