Laptop recommendation

ROSS_TPO · 6 Mar 2015 at 23:30

Hi there,

I hope someone has help with a recommendation. I'm looking for a laptop for my girlfriend. She needs it for going online, listening to podcasts/music and editing drawings at 600dpi (she uses Lexmark Photo Editor...for some reason).

We bought this last week :

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-ProBoo...217?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item2c9259bf39

But have just sent it back as it struggled to do two things at once. She couldn't listen to anything while editing her drawings. And kept freezing when she went online.

Budget is £450 max and it needs to have Windows 7 as she doesn't want/doesn't like Windows 8.

mrbazmondo · 7 Mar 2015 at 02:33

Was the harddrive busy when it was struggling? Probably doing windows updates. Get one with an SSD. Laptops without SSDs are such a literal waste of time these days.

Rroff · 7 Mar 2015 at 02:49

ROSS_TPO said:
But have just sent it back as it struggled to do two things at once. She couldn't listen to anything while editing her drawings. And kept freezing when she went online.

Did it come bundled with mcafee or norton? loads of Windows 8 tablets/laptops I've had to force stop and remove these - out the box they just sit there for ages using up most of the CPU and a good slab of disc IO for hours before settling down and even then hit performance pretty bad - no idea what companies think they are doing bundling these.

PooKer · 7 Mar 2015 at 09:13

I see the issue with that one from ebay:
AMD A8-7100 Quad Core (1.8GHz, 2MB Cache, AMD Turbo Up To 3GHz)

I cannot stand AMD CPU laptops.
This one ticks all the boxes for you.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-ProBoo...905?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item27f92e49e9

ROSS_TPO · 7 Mar 2015 at 09:17

mrbazmondo said:
Was the harddrive busy when it was struggling? Probably doing windows updates. Get one with an SSD. Laptops without SSDs are such a literal waste of time these days.

I spent hours doing the Windows updates when I got the laptop so I would hope it wasn't still doing updates in the background. It might have been but after a week, you'd expect it to be completed.

Rroff said:
Did it come bundled with mcafee or norton? loads of Windows 8 tablets/laptops I've had to force stop and remove these - out the box they just sit there for ages using up most of the CPU and a good slab of disc IO for hours before settling down and even then hit performance pretty bad - no idea what companies think they are doing bundling these.

Surprising there was no pre-installed anti-virus. I put Microsoft Security Essentials on. I believe it has minimal impact on the CPU?

ROSS_TPO · 7 Mar 2015 at 09:21

PooKer said:
I see the issue with that one from ebay:
AMD A8-7100 Quad Core (1.8GHz, 2MB Cache, AMD Turbo Up To 3GHz)

I cannot stand AMD CPU laptops.
This one ticks all the boxes for you.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-ProBoo...905?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item27f92e49e9

Thanks for that. 128GB SSD isn't enough though - I should have said. I need at least 500GB storage.

What are your views on HP in general? This is the first HP that I've bought and I'm obviously pretty disappointed. Had Toshiba and Dell laptops in the past and they were fine, did a job.

The 6 year old Toshiba that we put into retirement was actually better than the brand new HP that we just sent back.

PooKer · 7 Mar 2015 at 09:46

Personally I like them. I'd avoid Compaq (the budget version of the HP). You'll always get the odd one that has a fault. I find the current Toshiba's to be a little weak in terms of the plastics used. Where as the Dell's and HP (especially the business range) seem more solid. Lenovo are a hard one to judge. I've liked some of the designs. But they've been let down by touchpads (at least the ones I've tried). The whole pushing the whole pad down to click then the mouse moves to something totally different made me pull my hair out.

Would using a USB3 drive on the side of the SSD work?

If you can find a little more in the budget something like this:
http://www.medion.com/gb/shop/multimedia-laptops-medion-akoya-p6647-laptop-md98895-30017684a1.html

I've got a Medion and while I still can't say what the build quality will be like long term it is German. It maybe a little more bulky that you'd want in terms of a laptop. I expect you can degraded to Windows 7 (or maybe try out 10 preview as you'll get a free upgrade to that anyway).