Decent Laptop?

SmashedHombre

Memberus Anonymous & Legendus
Joined
Mar 29, 2004
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What's some of the best laptops for under £400? Not for moi, but it will probably be used for casual gaming and mostly studenty stuff. Also why are Sony Vaio's so expensive? Looking at their specs I can't really understand it :confused:

Probably a case of the cheaper the better so second hand / refurbished laptops welcome.
 
SmashedHombre said:
What's some of the best laptops for under £400? Not for moi, but it will probably be used for casual gaming and mostly studenty stuff. Also why are Sony Vaio's so expensive? Looking at their specs I can't really understand it :confused:

Probably a case of the cheaper the better so second hand / refurbished laptops welcome.
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I've bought a new laptop (well, had bought for me for Christmas) and for under £400 it will be difficult to find one with a dedicated graphics card (from new, this is). I didn't do loads of market research, but what I did do showed that most laptops under £400 all had integrated graphics cards, which are apparently awful for gaming (and I was told to avoid them).

As for 2nd hand/refurbished ones, I can't help you, but I assume you could find a bargain out there
 
Urbanned said:
I've bought a new laptop (well, had bought for me for Christmas) and for under £400 it will be difficult to find one with a dedicated graphics card (from new, this is). I didn't do loads of market research, but what I did do showed that most laptops under £400 all had integrated graphics cards, which are apparently awful for gaming (and I was told to avoid them).

As for 2nd hand/refurbished ones, I can't help you, but I assume you could find a bargain out there
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Aren't dedicated gaming cards in laptops often entry level and not great? If you get a semi-decent CPU with 4-6GB Ram I always thought you would get a fairly similar performance graphics wise as a lot of dedicated graphics card. Unless you're buying a laptop with a specifically good graphics card or gaming laptop.

Can you replace the graphics cards on laptops that don't have integrated / shared memory graphics?
 
SmashedHombre said:
What's some of the best laptops for under £400? Not for moi, but it will probably be used for casual gaming and mostly studenty stuff. Also why are Sony Vaio's so expensive? Looking at their specs I can't really understand it :confused:

Probably a case of the cheaper the better so second hand / refurbished laptops welcome.
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I had very good experience with Dell Inspirons. Though I mainly use an Asus netbook now when I'm not using a desktop.
 
SmashedHombre said:
Aren't dedicated gaming cards in laptops often entry level and not great? If you get a semi-decent CPU with 4-6GB Ram I always thought you would get a fairly similar performance graphics wise as a lot of dedicated graphics card. Unless you're buying a laptop with a specifically good graphics card or gaming laptop.

Can you replace the graphics cards on laptops that don't have integrated / shared memory graphics?
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I honestly can't help you there, I was just told by several people to avoid integrated graphics, so I just did that. As for replacing them, again I can't be certain, but I've heard it is possible, but obviously more difficult, and it depends on the type of laptop.

For interest, this is the laptop I got, and it had the best graphics card in the whole of the PC World range (excluding the laptops priced around £1200+, of course). Every laptop priced under £400 there had an integrated graphics card. However with their sales, the prices will have changed.

Sorry I can't be more help!
 
Hijacking a thread rather than starting a new one.

Anyone tell me how good this laptop is? Or recommend a different one? Will be used for some gaming, internet browsing, fecking about with downloads etc.

Affordable laptops | IdeaPad Y series | buy online | Lenovo Australia

Main specs:

2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM Processor ( 2.2GHz 1333MHz 6MB )

NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M 2GB graphics

8 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz RAM

15.6 " HD Glare with integrated camera 1366x768

500GB 5400 hard drive

Blu-ray /DVD Combo

6 Cell Lithium-Ion battery


Any advice is much appreciated, I'm rubbish with this sort of thing.
 
It's very good. Dedicated graphics card and core i7 means you'll be able to run pretty much any game on it and it will do you fine for years. Lenovo make outstanding laptops to be honest
 
Gee Male said:
Hijacking a thread rather than starting a new one.

Anyone tell me how good this laptop is? Or recommend a different one? Will be used for some gaming, internet browsing, fecking about with downloads etc.

Affordable laptops | IdeaPad Y series | buy online | Lenovo Australia

Main specs:

2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM Processor ( 2.2GHz 1333MHz 6MB )

NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M 2GB graphics

8 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz RAM

15.6 " HD Glare with integrated camera 1366x768

500GB 5400 hard drive

Blu-ray /DVD Combo

6 Cell Lithium-Ion battery


Any advice is much appreciated, I'm rubbish with this sort of thing.
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That looks like a stunning laptop!
 
SmashedHombre said:
It's very good. Dedicated graphics card and core i7 means you'll be able to run pretty much any game on it and it will do you fine for years. Lenovo make outstanding laptops to be honest
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Lenovo makes outstanding Thinkpads. I've seen a few complaints about their other lines (along the lines of "I can't believe this is the same feckin company that makes Thinkpads; EDIT: that complaint might have been customer service related), but if you try to get the same specs on a Thinkpad it will cost you a shit ton of money.

Gee Male, the specs look great on that except for the 5400rpm hard drive. If you get sick of that hard drive, back your stuff up and swap it out for a SSD. Hard drive prices are still high from the Thailand floods so you might as well just make the jump to SSD, though it will be a bit pricey.
 
Thanks for the feedback JV.

Regarding the customer service comments, I don't think that will be an issue as I will be ordering the laptop through work and if I need to use their customer service after getting it I'll go through our work contacts. I work for a huge company that uses them as our main laptop and monitor supplier so we have some pretty strong contacts in the company and should be OK for customer service.

On the hard drive, again forgive my ignorance but is there a noticeable difference between the 5400rpm hard drive and an SSD? If so, how would your average user like me notice the difference?

I should add that I have two external hard drives already so space is not an issue for me.

Again, I appreciate the feedback, very helpful for someone like me that can't even understand your average reviews online these days!
 
Okay if this is through work you'll be fine.

Basically when your processor is as fast as the i7 quad cores are and the video card is as good as yours and there's as much ram as you have there, other things start becoming the bottleneck. In this case it's how fast can you read the data off the hard drive. This is limited by how fast the hard drive spins. The faster it spins, the more data goes flying pass the head in the same amount of time meaning faster data reads. I believe the same holds true for writing data to the drive.

So there's a noticeable difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives. This goes for any operation that requires you to read data from the hard drive: opening programs, opening files, programs that constantly read from and write files to the hard drive, loading the operating system from startup, copying files to and from the drive, etc. It doesn't necessarily make your programs run faster once they're already loaded (except in the case where files are constantly being read from and written to the drive) but everything else is a bit snappier.

The jump from 7200rpm to an SSD is definitely noticeable as well. Now instead of a mechanical disk spinning, you have pure electronics, which is much faster. It basically makes your entire hard drive almost as fast as RAM. So imagine loading up Microsoft Word as quickly as you would unminimize it from your taskbar. Everything that requires reads and writes to the hard drive is lightning quick. If you've ever run an operating system off of a live USB, that's the sort of speed you can expect. Also because there's no moving parts, there's much less chance of a mechanical failure with something getting jarred loose (like when you drop your laptop). Also no need for defragmenting or indexing (in fact they hurt the life of your drive).

The main drawback is price/GB which is going down, but only barely reaching the level where people feel comfortable making the investment. You'll most likely end up with a much smaller drive (around 128 GB) but you said you have external drives, so it doesn't matter as much. As of right now, that's the ideal setup. Use the SSD for your OS and other things that would actually benefit. Use regular hard drives for large files like movies and games that don't necessarily need a huge speed boost (once they're loaded, they're in RAM so they still run quickly).

So to answer your question, there's a noticeable difference between 5400 and 7200 and a noticeable difference between 7200 and SSD speeds. The difference between 5400 and SSD speeds is incredibly significant. I'm not sure how much the upgrade would cost for you, but I haven't heard anyone that has made the jump claim that it wasn't worth it. It'd be a bit of a hassle to buy one and swap it out for the 5400 (you'll have to reinstall your OS, and that stuff no longer comes with recovery disks so you'll have to make one of those first and then make the swap).
 
Thanks for taking the time to write that JV, explains it perfectly in simple terms. I really appreciate it.

It looks like an SSD is out of my price range for the moment, but I'll try to get the hard drive upgraded to 7200rpm if I can. Other than that, I might just take the plunge on it.

Thanks again.
 
Thing is that spinning hard drives are still expensive right now because a lot of the factories that made them in Thailand flooded recently. So the price gap between the hard drives and solid state drives is smaller than normal now.

If anything I'd suggest that you try out a machine (friend's or at a computer store or something) so you'll actually be able to experience the difference. There's videos on youtube as well of people timing their bootups and other things.
 
JV/Others,

Have owned a MBP for over 3 years now, but looking to get a windows-run PC for work-related reasons. Want it to handle quite a lot of things going on at the same time, 15''-17'' screen. Got no clue about what the good brands are, so hoping you can point me towards some good options. Firm going to foot the bill so can pay up - to a sensible point!
 
jveezy said:
Quite a lot of things? It actually depends on the types of things you're doing at work. Excel? Statistics? Video editing? Solid modeling? Writing reports?
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Excel, power point, bloomberg (and some few other trading systems). No video editing or modeling, but there'll probably be numerous things open. Just want something quick with the multi-tasking aspect.

Cina said:
Price range?
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Around GBP1500 I'd say.
 
McLovin said:
Excel and power points mostly. Nothing too hardcore i.e. video editing or modeling, but there'll probably be numerous things open. Just want something quick with the multi-tasking aspect.

Around GBP1500 I'd say.
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Well with that budget you could get something ridiculously overpowered, but something along the lines of a Lenovo Thinkpad 420 with at least 4GB of RAM would be good enough. Just make sure you have enough RAM to satisfy your multitasking needs. Will cost you somewhere between $800-$1200 depending on a few options here and there, though I don't know if those prices convert properly. The video card upgrade probably isn't worth the money. Just stay with integrated graphics. i5 is probably good enough (you can't even get an i7 quad core on the t420 anyways) and get an SSD or not depending on personal preference if you want program loading to be a bit snappier.
 
1500? You could buy anything with that, christ.

Basically what jveezy said, you really cannot go wrong with a Lenovo Thinkpad.
 
You can get refurbed alienwares with warranty for around £500-£900.

I'm looking at Medion Erazer laptops at the moment.

MEDIONshop UK: Gaming

Get great spec gaming pcs for between £600-£1000, alot cheaper than most other brands. Been looking around and doesn't seem to much is compromised due to the price. Getting great reviews.
 
Remember playing around on Medion gaming laptop in Novotech once and they had a lot of keyboard flex.
 
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