Laptop Advice

BaronVonDuncs · 2 May 2015 at 06:40

Been planning to buy my Mum a new laptop for her birthday but not really sure what would be a good option for her.

Mostly she uses it for general internet browsing, occasional MS office docs, occasional movie or TV show watching, storing her camera photo's etc. So she is not really too hard on it, its not going to be used for heavy multimedia tasks or gaming.

I was thinking about the Lenovo Z70 so far, or perhaps a Dell 17 5000. Anyone got any other ideas?, my budget is in the £700-800 range.

slipperydave · 2 May 2015 at 07:40

A certain (loss-heavy) supermarket have some Acer Aspires for under £300 that would suit your mother's needs. Why you're budgeting £700-800 is beyond me.

BaronVonDuncs · 2 May 2015 at 08:03

Its my Mum and I love her so I don't want to cheap out!

Mind you I may be overestimating but I wanted her to have a machine with capacity a bit beyond her basic needs. I will look at the Acer though. Thanks.

BaronVonDuncs · 3 May 2015 at 09:55

Ok so it seems I just want to overspend on my Mum! Anybody else got any ideas?

BaronVonDuncs · 25 May 2015 at 22:19

Well in the end I went for a bit of a hybrid. I picked up a second hand Lenovo T440p and dropped in a i7 4800MQ, 16 GB of RAM, a 250GB SSD, a 1TB second HDD and a 1080p screen. It all works pretty well and Mum is well pleased with it. Its nice and fast for her and whilst it worked out expensive enough I think it was cheaper than buying a new one at that spec.

Only complaint I have is that the 4800MQ seems to run quite hot and under serious stress testing it was into the 90 degree range. On the other hand Mum isn't likely to put it under that much stress and under normal load it seems happy at 40-50 degrees. But I have already redone the thermal paste a few times to see if different ones would be much different and so far no real change with the Prolimatech PK-1 being the best one so far.