Clueless about laptops--need some guidance

Saul · 26 Dec 2009 at 00:30

Hey all,
Merry Christmas! Just collected all of my Xmas money together, and I've got about £470 to spend on a laptop. I've been looking at Acer Aspire 7535G, but I'm worried about build quality and a cheap feel to it. I don't want a £500 laptop which looks like a glossy £100 one, if you get what I mean.

A good screen, nice keyboard, and mid/high performance is what I'm looking for with my budget. I'm also wondering if anybody has any first hand experiences either with Acer or with other brands?

Thanks in advance!

Bubo · 26 Dec 2009 at 10:28

I'm not an expert on laptops either but I've just got my self a 7539G and I can't fault it for the money. One review I read gave it a good score but said it had an average screen, but it looks perfectly ok to me. My previous laptop was a Fujitsu Siemens 400 quid job with intergrated graphics and it is better than that screenwise, black levels especially. Mine is the 15.6" model btw. I also like the layout of the thing and its useful to have a separate keypad on the keyboard. The touchpad is also much better than the old laptop, could easily use it for normal windows stuff rather than a mouse. The only slight problem is the top of the case which is a fingerprint magnet. The keyboard keys are a bit different to other laptops I've used but is fine for my purposes, that's the one thing you might like to go to a shop to try for yourself.

Saul · 26 Dec 2009 at 12:18

Let me just clear my specifications up a bit:
Couldn't care less about weight
Either 15" or 17"
Well-known brand
Less than £500

At the moment I'm looking at:
Acer Aspire 5738G vs. Acer Aspire 7535G
Core2Duo T6600 vs. AMD Turion X2 ZM-82

Which would be better? My guess is the Intel, but the specs I've been looking at on the internet all differ! i.e. some having ATI/nVidia graphics cards, some having T6400, others T6600. It's all a bit confusing.

Bubo · 26 Dec 2009 at 18:25

What you want depends mainly on whether you want to play games on it to any decent standard. Check out http://www.notebookcheck.com/ to give yourself a better idea what the various gpu chipsets are capable of, beware though some of the reviews seem a bit suspect though by and large it gives you a good idea. Once you've decided what portion of your budget is going towards the gpu you can fit the rest of the laptop around it. Cpu-wise I would also stick with Intel though that is purely because of wanting to stick with what I know based on desktop core duo's performance compared to equivalent desktop AMD. From my digging round before buying mine, £500 is the absoulte minimum you need to spend if you want a vaguely decent games capable laptop. I spent a bit more to get a 240M nvidia gpu, £674 to be precise, to me its worth the little extra to get a machine which is likely to be able to cope with decent 3D games at native rez at medium settings. From what I can gather the 130M chipset is not far behind. Can't help with ATI, but checkout that review site for a better comparison.