spec me a ~£500 laptop

Dist

Dist

Dist

Soldato
Joined
1 Jun 2005
Posts
5,152
Location
Kent
Some of you may know from my post a couple months back that the OU is giving me a PC grant that im going to spend on a laptop, since I didnt realize it would take this long, and i will have a bit mroe moeny available then expected i thought it best to create a new thread.

My needs for the laptop are;
wireless (im using wrt54gl for my wireless network)
big enough HDD should i decide to setup a duel boot xp/linux
powerfull enough to view video across the network from my pc(less then 640x480, i wont be streaming HD)
no gaming (so no need for a powerfull gfx card)

Personaly i like the look of the lenovo r61 series, it looks like its a nicely built laptop and not some cheap plastic rubish, and i see i can get a docking station for it which i can attach a ethernet cable to for faster lan access as well as battery recharging (this may push me up to about £650 to include a docking station, but i think that should be ok).

Ive read some good things about the thinkpads, but i haven't been able to find any specific reviews (up to date ones) about the r61's, and there is quite a few models of r61s im not sure which to go for.

Anyone here know much about the r61 laptops, or advice if i should be looking at a different make?
 
I challenge you to find a new laptop without wireless.
Big enough HDD for dual boot? well that depends what else you install, lets face it.. XP/Linux aint going to fill a 40gb drive..
Powerful enough to view video across network .. cant imagine this being very difficult for most modern day laptops either.. I imagine even an asus eee will do this.

Docking station with faster ethernet access??? Again like the wireless, you will find most laptops have ethernet ports as standard.. they are a pretty standard thing.
 
The reason for wanting a docking station is so that i can simply clip the laptop in and its done, or just unclip it or whatever and can take it away, i dont want to have to fiddle about pluging/unpluging cables all the time.

I have no laptop experience so i realy dont know what sort of things come as standard or not, all i know is some laptops may come with a solid state drive like the EEE pc which would be a bit too small space for me.
 
hardly any laptops have SSD really, The docking station is the only thing I cant really advice with, but otherwise I think any £300 laptop would have done you
 
no1 else has anything to say then on my choice of an r61 as a laptop? i cant realy decide between the NA04TUK model and the NG18TUK model (i cant see the others for sale anywhere, other then the lower end models, or from online sites i dont know/trust).

The NG18TUK is £469, 1.5ghz core 2 duo, 15.4'' screen, 2.99kg, 120gb hdd, 35.3mm x 358.5mm x 260mm

The NA04TUK on the other hand is £632 (so i will proberly have to ignore a docking station), but is 2.0ghz core 2 duo, 14.1'' screen (same res though), 2.37kg, 160gb hdd, ultranav, 30.6mm x 335.5mm x 237mm

so the more expensive model is 0.5ghz faster, 1.3'' smaller screen, 0.62kg lighter, 40gb more hdd space, smaller size and also has a touchpad as well as a trackpoint thing which is quite nice, and a fingerprint reader.

Not having ever used a laptop for any real length of time, can anyone please tell me if the differences will be noticible. Not knowing much about battery lengths, im guessing the faster cpus power drain will be countered by the smaller screen, so the battery life im guessing is similar, but will its smaller profile and weight be noticible? 2.99kg and 2.37 kg sounds like quite a big difference, but for all i know, 2.99 is light enough that i wont notice a then weight anyway.
 
clockspeeds are automatically reduced when the laptop is idle or not being used strenuously, which helps with power saving.
Screen probably wont affect much either, I would take the slightly larger screen.
.5ghz, you wont notice the difference, you're not particulaly utilizing the cpus with what you said you were doing, nevermind both cores.

Hard-drive space, well you havnt said you will use a lot of storage.. lets face it the average user doesnt need a 120gb drive, unless they are downloading films etc, but then its wiser to archive them on external drives which are cheaper per GB etc..

Get the cheaper one, dont fall into the trap that loads of consumers do fall into and buy an overspec because they think they need it.. at the end of the day its probably overkill you getting dualcore.. dont forget with the new c2ds the mhz rating isnt directly comparable to older generation CPUs, 1.5ghz will actually run things a lot faster than your old 1.5
 
the laptop will have to last me at least 3 years, proberly 4 or 5, which is why i thought the extra .5ghz and extra hdd space may make some big difference, maybe not now, but years down the line it may be required to run the programs of the future.
 
I think Lenovo is not a bad choice. People used to love the IBM laptops and that's what Lenovo are based on.

I would go for a 15.4" widescreen laptop, anything less is too small and annoying for me, anything larger and the laptop gets to bulky.

I don't see why you'd need the docking station. If you can use a wireless network all you'd ever need to plug in is the power cable. If you don't have wireless, then ok it's the ethernet cable too but no biggie.

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200 something or other with a Core 2 Duo T7000 processor. It's a good machine and pretty responsive. It has crashed once on Windows update but that was more a Windows Vista issue and the recovery disk got it going again, I've now switched update off. The Toshiba Satellite Pro range is worth looking at, try and get a Core 2 Duo T5000+ processor if possible.

Also good in your price range are the HP DV series, e.g.

HP DV6710
HP laptop featuring an AMD Turion 64 x2 Dual Core processor, 2GB RAM,
250GB storage and a 15" widescreen display.
AMD Turion 64 x2 Dual Core Processor model number TL60

The AMD Turion 64 x2 is a pretty good processor too, only thing missing from the HP laptop is Bluetooth.

Avoid - Acer, cheap and cheerful, bad support

Sony - Installed bloatware and Sony Proprietary software lets them down.

Hope this helps.

Radderfire
 
Also, if you're going for Vista, make sure you get 2GB of RAM if you want your laptop to fly. Vista Business has advantages over Vista Home Premium if you need to remote connect to other machines.

Rgds

Radderfire
 
radderfire said:
Also, if you're going for Vista, make sure you get 2GB of RAM if you want your laptop to fly. Vista Business has advantages over Vista Home Premium if you need to remote connect to other machines.

Rgds

Radderfire
Click to expand...

For me, vista on a laptop provides little advantages over XP. And if i can get used to linux, and get that to do what i want, like streaming videos/music and open office, then i may end up just using linux all the time.

So i dont have anything agaisnt vista, but ill be more expensive for me to go for it, not just for the more expensive OS, but due to the 2gb that everyone recomends.
 
Does it have to be lennovo?

Dell has some very nice deals atm with its Vostro 1000/1500 business models. I'm talking about £300 for a dual core AMD turion, 15.4" screen, 2Gb RAM and 120Gb HDD and Vista home premium here. So with £500 to spare you'll be able to spec a very powerful vostro.
 
it doesnt have to be lenovo, i was just drawn to them because they look like smart, powerfull laptops with a good reputation, not a plastic toy. I havnt realy looked a great deal into dells because out of the ones ive seen pictures of i would have to say they are closer to a plastic toy then a smart laptop from what ive seen, but i will check them out anyway, if i can find a decent store that sells them that is as their own site is WAY overpriced.
 
.5ghz and slightly larger HDD doesnt mean it will last years longer.. at all.
Hard-drives are easily swappable and are fairly inexpensive, and in a few years time storage will be a lot larger than now.

Dont buy it so its future proof, buy for what you need. If your needs then change over the next few years you have got the flexibility to buy again. Its hardly difficult migrating between machines now with user profiles etc and easy backup solutions
 
I've just been checking out the dell XPS range, as well as a few of their other models, and i think im not going to choose a dell laptop, the xps m1530 i think it is has the 15.4'' screen that would be nice, but i would be wasting money on the graphics card it comes with when i simply dont need that sort of gfx power in a laptop, i have a great gaming pc for gaming.

The toshiba ones i personaly dont like the look of, its just not the sort of thing im in to, and the silver on it makes it look cheap to me. The HP laptops i looked at on the other hand dont look that bad, full black looks much more smart then a mix of black/silver. Also HP have the advantage of up untill 29th feb they are doing a cashback offer (£30-£50 cashback on the range ive been looking at).

The realy annoying thing is, just like the lenovo thinkpads, im having trouble finding reviews on the specific models im looking at, most google links that come up are links to sites selling stuff, instead of reviews.

So i think its come down to HP vs Lenovo. I'll have to look through a load of the HP models within my price range and try compare them to the lenovo r61s and see which comes out better value for money, and which has the best customer reviews (if i can find any).

As most people seem to be against me bothering with a docking station, ill just focus on getting a decent laptop and pray to the gods that plug/upluging cables wont make me want to throw the laptop out a window a year or 2 from now.
 
Dist said:
been looking at).

The realy annoying thing is, just like the lenovo thinkpads, im having trouble finding reviews on the specific models im looking at, most google links that come up are links to sites selling stuff, instead of reviews.

So i think its come down to HP vs Lenovo. I'll have to look through a load of the HP models within my price range and try compare them to the lenovo r61s and see which comes out better value for money, and which has the best customer reviews (if i can find any).
Click to expand...

Have you tried here http://forum.notebookreview.com/
 
dell offer a variety of models, the vostros are immensely popular, iv got one and love it, you can get them with intel GMA graphics in them.. its a case of looking around for the most obvious places that sell them as obviously companys like OcUK only have a tiny amount of configurations.
 
well ive decided on the xp m1530, the lowest spec from dell is £549, so a little bit higher then i would have wanted, and although im not to keen on the silver keyboard, i just cant stop reading everywhere about how great it is. Its thinner and lighter then the thinkpad i was looking at, and it will still do what i want to do. Hopefully im making the right choice, because ive never used a dell machine before, and never ordered from dell.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom