Spec me a laptop, please?

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6 Jan 2008
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45
Hi All,

Been asked to recommend a laptop for use by my sister and 10yr old nephew. Budget is £400-£450. I suspect the nephew will want to play games on it, if not now certainly in the near future.

I'm always wary of laptops failing, (I used to repair them for a living and everyone I saw was broken, so perhaps my judgement is clouded!) so if one can be sourced from somewhere that has good backup support that would be an added bonus!

TIA

Steven.
 
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12 Apr 2012
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There is one on PC World (refurbished) Asus N55SF, nice specs, follow the link

** Do not link to competitors and their products **It shows not available now, but for last couple of days, every morning it becomes available, I have ordered 2, nice for gaming and entertainment.

thanks.
 
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1 Sep 2011
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For gaming its all about how much graphics card you can pack in.

At around your price the HD3000 graphics built into more recent Intel chips will run many games OKish on low settings: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-3000.37948.0.html

If you can find something with a separate graphics card in it though it will do much better on games, the Dell below has a 1 GB nVidia GeForce GT 525M Video Card; compare the fps rates for games: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-525M.43889.0.html

Eg; Dirt3: 57v97 on low, 26v41 on medium etc...

The price below is 10% off with a voucher code. Quidco can probably take it lower with a further 10% cash back.

On reliability; you of course get a 1 year warranty with all makes and can pay extra to extend that if you want. I've bought Dells for years and on occasions where they did go wrong, they've been good at putting things right.

£458.10 - Dell Inspiron N5110
Intel® Core™ i5-2450M Processor (2 cores, 4 threads, 3M Cache, 2.5 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.10 GHz, Intel® HD Graphics 3000)
4GB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [1x4096]
1 GB nVidia GeForce GT 525M Video Card
640GB (5,400rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
15.6" (1366X768) WLED with True-Life display
6-cell 48 WHr Lithium Ion battery
CD ROM/DVD ROM 8X DVD+/-RW Drive
Wireless 1702 802.11b/g/n + Bluetooth v3.0+HS Card
Integrated 1.0 Mega Pixel Widescreen HD (1280 x 720) camera
90W AC Adaptor
 
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18 Oct 2002
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Hants
I've just got a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 320. I've always been a fan of how well ThinkPads are put together and I'm also one of the rare fans of the Trackpoint. My Edge was £500 with i5-2450M, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD and a really nice 13" screen.
If you're not worried about portability the E520 is the 15" screen version and comes in abut £50 cheaper. If you're worried about the IGP being up to the job you can configure it with the dedicated AMD gfx instead.

The other nice touch I've discovered since buying it is that the mini PCIe slot supports mSATA SSDs so you can have SSD to boot from and keep the 2.5" drive for data. Also the Lenovo prices for RAM are scarey so add any extra RAM later.
 
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12 Apr 2012
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For school I bought a Samsung RV511, it isn't the best gaming computer in the world but it has i3 and is working great for me. It cost me around £350-£400 but I cannot remember where I got if from I'm afraid. The back gets easily scratched with the sort of bumpy surface but it hasn't been damaged yet. I would definitely recommend to anyone wanting a fairly cheap but powerful/reliable laptop.
 
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