Speccing a new laptop below £800

[Happy]

Hi,

I have been asked to find/spec a laptop for a friend. It'll be mainly used for school work/internet browsing and maybe very light occasional gaming. The budget is up to £800, but it strikes me that a pretty good machine could be got for a lot less. I have no idea about laptops and am not really sure what/who offers the best solutions nowadays.

It must have good battery life/250GB+ HD/4GB ram.

Any recommendations or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

 

[Tripp]

yes you are right, a much cheaper laptop can be had if that really is all that it wil be used for, £800 seems like overkill when one could be had for 500-600 (or cheaper if your happy with older tech)

ive just bought my first laptop so any thing i suggest is from third party reviews but I spent a lot of time looking at the acer 5740g before I decided to up my budget, it seems to have the best bang per buck at this price point but there are lots of other companies that provide similar specs for a similar price

If your friend really wants to spend £800 then i suggest you look at the sony E-series as ive read a lot of good things and you can spec a good system for that price or look at the dell studios and cutomise one of those, dell does seem to offer more for the money (be sure to use quidco and vouchers for more savings on dell) these options will come with a beefier GPU as i suspect "very, light occasional gaming" wont last long ;D

 

[neoboy]

£800 is an overkill for that sort of money.

Acer have a lot of well priced laptops in £600 region with decent graphic cards. Unfortunately I'd be hard pressed to fully recommend them taking into account that carry on I'm having with getting one repaired under warranty (approaching 3 months now and they actually appear to have lost my netbook in their repair centre now :/)

Frankly pretty much any laptop out there can do some office work and browse the net but some laptops worth researching are Samsung R series (580 upwards), HP Pavilion dv6 Series and Sony E series. First two can be had for under £600 and latter for a bit more + whatever modifications you want.

It's also may be worth checking Dell Outlet, I've seen quite a few i5 laptops on there going for well under £500.