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miniyazz

miniyazz

miniyazz

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Joined
25 Dec 2008
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Sheffield/Norwich
Time to spend them :p

Let's say up to a grand to spend upgrading your second laptop. Less is good but decent is also good!

Intro:
Currently have an XPS 15 with bells and whistles (i7-2820QM, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD + 2nd HDD, 1080p screen etc) for my main one. This sits where it is and doesn't get moved.

Then we have my portable laptop for taking places around the house or elsewhere. I'm currently rocking an oldish Asus UL30A with a ULV 1.2GHz dual core, 13" 1366x768 screen and 7+hrs battery life that I've tried to beef out with 8GB RAM and 160GB SSD.. but it's unfortunately still slow as a dog due to the CPU, doesn't have enough storage and the screen's too low res.

So what I want is a replacement portable laptop. Priorities are a decent CPU (i5 or better would be nice), around a 13" screen with a decent res (ideally 1680x1050) and a decent battery life of 8+hrs, please! RAM and storage are not concerns as they're both easily upgraded, though ultimately I'll be putting in a 512GB SSD and 8GB RAM.


Any suggestions?

Cheers.
 
Don't think your requirements will happen for £1k.

The screen resolution in particular won't happen at that size. I don't know of any laptops that have that resolution, and very few exist that are 1920x1080 and 13-14". You'll need to go 15" or more, not just because of the technical restriction, but because 1080p at 13-14" will be way too small to read.

The only thing that comes close is the Macbook 13" Retina, but of course nothing in it is upgradable.
 
Would extending to 1600x900 resolution help here? That would probably be a decent enough upgrade and I think is a little more readily available.

I'm also not afraid of ebay and second hand generally!
 
miniyazz said:
Would extending to 1600x900 resolution help here? That would probably be a decent enough upgrade and I think is a little more readily available.

I'm also not afraid of ebay and second hand generally!
Click to expand...

1600x900 is very doable. Sony E or S series both come with everything you want sub £1k. Dell probably do a couple with that resolution and the Alienware m14 too.

The Sony S series come with an optional "sheet" battery, which extends it by quite a bit. Think it costs £100 though.
 
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The E series looked good right up until I hit the battery life - 3.5hrs with the 1600x900 screen just won't cut it unfortunately :p

The S series is looking like a decent contender though. The sheet battery looks pretty appealing.
The Dell XPS 14 Ultrabook is a possibility but the battery life might be a sticking point again. Advantage of Dell stuff is the Outlet which offers really quite good prices but if they haven't got the battery then it's a nonstarter!
 
Why not just get a the new Asus UX31A-R4005H, comes in i5/i7, 1080p IPS 13" screen, 128-256Gb SSD.

Can pick up the lower specced one with an external DVD drive for ~£870 or the top specced one for £1090 refurbed.
 
Not sure if you'll find one that will go 8hrs+ with the screen resolution you're after unfortunately.

Could try some of the ThinkPads, but again I don't think they'll reach 8hrs without cutting the resolution.
 
I think the combination of screen res and battery life is definitely going to be a problem, some of the older clevos have 1680x1050 panels in 13-15" sizes and can be picked up well within that budget but they won't give you even close to that battery life.
 
The Intel Smart Response Technology looks like an interesting one - some of the XPS 14 Ultrabooks have these 32 or 128GB mSSDs to accelerate the HDD. 128GB would be plenty for me to run the OS & programs leaving the HDD for extra storage instead of getting a 512GB SSD. Do you know if it can be disabled, leaving the mSSD as extra storage space? And whether it's fast enough for that to be effective? :p
 
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