The screen (or Graphics card) of my 3½/4 year old Laptop has bust and now it's out of warranty, I think there's no point in repairing it. So I am in the market for a 15" Laptop for a budget of £500. I will use it mostly for surfing the net and watch the occasional DVD. A decent sized hard drive would be nice and good battery life (over 2 hours per charge).

So what do you recommend I buy?

Get on Dell Outlet and get yourself a Dell XPS.

But for surfing and DVD you could just get an Inpriron i3 for around £300ish from there:

•Inspiron 15R - N5010

•One Intel Core i3-380M (2.53Ghz,3M,Dual Core)

•Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium

•2 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz (1 DIMMs)

•320 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)

•Optical Drive : 8X DVD+/-RW Drive

•Display 15.6in HD (1366X768) WLED with TrueLife

•ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650, 128-Bit, 1GB, DDR3 64Mx16x8pcs

•English Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64 Bit)

•Back Up Media Not Included

•Wireless : Europe Dell Bluetooth 365 Card

•Wireless : Dell Wireless 1501 (802.11 b/g/n 1x1) Mini Card

•LCD Back Cover : Mars Black

£324.68

edit - just looked and there are no XPS's on there at the min....

http://www.dell.com/uk/dfh/p/?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&~ck=bt&redirect=1

Try refurbished units from PCWorld, i got a brilliant Acer 2 years ago for £200 under book price an my son got a 17" screen Acer for £200 under book price. But they have plenty of other brands and a really good choice for good prices.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/refurbished-laptops/703_7366_70436_xx_xx/xx-criteria.html

Refurb, pc world and acer in same sentence. That's a disaster waiting to happen!

Some from there are ok, but there are some horror stories about refurbished laptops and dsg group.

Also forgot to mention before to avoid celerons in a laptop as it will kill the battery.

Edited 25 November, 201114 yr by jrw

£500 will buy you a lot at the moment as sales are struggling on Laptops and the likes of comet and PC world cant shift them.

You should be able to get a powerful 17" for that money.

For £500 you could go for an iPad.

They no longer need a PC to 'activate' them anymore :no:

For £500 you could go for an iPad.

They no longer need a PC to 'activate' them anymore :no:

Hmmm.

An Ipad, has a small screen, no CD/DVD drive, no keyboard, probably poor battery life and an operating system I'm not used to, plus apple don't do flash. So that's a definite NO from me.

Edited 26 November, 201114 yr by Jim H

Hmmm.

An Ipad, has a small screen, no CD/DVD drive, no keyboard, probably poor battery life and an operating system I'm not used to, plus apple don't do flash. So that's a definite NO from me.

Go on the Sony UK website and custom spec one , they are as competative price as any on pc w currys etc , and you get a 2 year guarantee

Bestbuy is having a closing down sale on monday, if you can pay a bit more you should check out Macbooks, the quailty is excellant and great to use

Edited 26 November, 201114 yr by tony2311

For £500 you could go for an iPad.

They no longer need a PC to 'activate' them anymore :no:

Swimbo has one of those and there is no way I would have one as my main PC, IMHO its just a gimmicky gadget

Refurb, pc world and acer in same sentence. That's a disaster waiting to happen!

Some from there are ok, but there are some horror stories about refurbished laptops and dsg group.

Also forgot to mention before to avoid celerons in a laptop as it will kill the battery.

Well sir, i can personally vouch for all my purchases from PCWorld particularly regarding refurbished Acer laptops. I can only assume that you have no personal experience with which to refute my personal recommendation, my family have had Toshiba, and HP previously and we have found the 2 most reliable laptops we have owned are the 2 Refurbished Acer laptops that i purchased from PCWorld. Not only are they reliable , they were both better specced than any other laptops of comparable price (either refurbished or new) and extremely good value for money . Both the Acer laptops that we have purchased are now well over 2 years and 18 months old with no problems whatsoever.

The screen (or Graphics card) of my 3½/4 year old Laptop has bust and now it's out of warranty, I think there's no point in repairing it. So I am in the market for a 15" Laptop for a budget of £500. I will use it mostly for surfing the net and watch the occasional DVD. A decent sized hard drive would be nice and good battery life (over 2 hours per charge).

So what do you recommend I buy?

The only problem with Acer is, the motherboards are cheap and nasty. They fail so quickly. In a laptop, when the motherboard dies, you may as well write off the laptop. I would want something to last a bit longer than they usually do. They tend to have cd failures too. The cd drive works (as in opens & closes), but cannot be seen by the OS.

Stick with the big guns when buying laptops. Laptops are 35% More likely to fail than a PC is. Due to size and being bumped about.

Just have a search for best laptops on google. One that come up time and again is the Toshiba NB520-10U. £250 and good sound and video and excellent battery life. It all depends on what you have planned for the system.

I personally hate laptops. PC's all the way for me!

Happy Buying

Edited 26 November, 201114 yr by Deneo

My ACER from PC World lasted less than 24 hours! I turned on a few times, then got stuck at the splash screen and failed to POST! Anyway, as long as your's is working then

Don't John Lewis do decent warranties compared to most other firms?

My ACER from PC World lasted less than 24 hours! I turned on a few times, then got stuck at the splash screen and failed to POST! Anyway, as long as your's is working then

Don't John Lewis do decent warranties compared to most other firms?

Motherboard failure. They buy them in bulk and so, so cheap

Typing this on an Acer, got another Acer here. SWMBO has an Acer netbook. Some of our reps at work have Acer.

No problems, whatsoever!

Everyone has their opinions, that is what is great about a site like this. I personally wouldn't touch one. I've seen so many failures of Acers, in my line of work and with family and friends.. Many businesses buy them, as they are cheap. But I wouldn't ever advise someone to buy one. That is just my opinion.

Anyway, I hope you make a good choice and enjoy your laptop Jim H!

Edited 26 November, 201114 yr by Deneo

My dad's Acer's been fine aswell!

I would recommend them

Hmmm.

An Ipad, has a small screen, no CD/DVD drive, no keyboard, probably poor battery life and an operating system I'm not used to, plus apple don't do flash. So that's a definite NO from me.

10.1 inches is not really that small anymore

You don't need a CD/DVD drive :no:

There is a virtual keyboard, and if you like 'tinkling the keys' you can connect a wireless keyboard

Up to 10 hours use is far from poor

iOS 5 is actually easier than Windows watever

You don't need flash and 99.5% of websites now use HTML5 with apple supports.

Pop into your local PC World and have a play on one and see what you think.

Stick an extra £500 to your £500 and get a Mac Book Pro

Apple, it's the way forward....

Sent from my Mac Book Pro

I bought an ACER Timeline X 14" recently, stuck an extra 3 gb of RAM in it and it flies. Reasonably well built, USB3, HDMI and all the usual bits an bobs. The battery life however, is superb. They quote up to 8 hours and I have streamed a video for over 4 hours from it with no problem. I would check out the 15" version, the only caveat I have is the screen is very average, but so are most reasonably priced laptops these days. Oh it runs very cool too

10.1 inches is not really that small anymore

You don't need a CD/DVD drive :no:

There is a virtual keyboard, and if you like 'tinkling the keys' you can connect a wireless keyboard

Up to 10 hours use is far from poor

iOS 5 is actually easier than Windows watever

You don't need flash and 99.5% of websites now use HTML5 with apple supports.

Pop into your local PC World and have a play on one and see what you think.

Sent from my iPad

Well sir, i can personally vouch for all my purchases from PCWorld particularly regarding refurbished Acer laptops. I can only assume that you have no personal experience with which to refute my personal recommendation, my family have had Toshiba, and HP previously and we have found the 2 most reliable laptops we have owned are the 2 Refurbished Acer laptops that i purchased from PCWorld. Not only are they reliable , they were both better specced than any other laptops of comparable price (either refurbished or new) and extremely good value for money . Both the Acer laptops that we have purchased are now well over 2 years and 18 months old with no problems whatsoever.

Plenty of experience with all makes of laptop actually. I work for a council where the schools are free to buy their own equipment. They went through a spate of acer due to them being about half the price of the dell, hp, lenovo equivalent that we supplied. Within 18 months (over about a 4 year period that they were buying them) I would say 90% of them failed with motherboard failure.

The only make I would recommend is dell or Toshiba. And overall on price you can't beat the dell outlet. I have probably bought about 15 for friends and family over 18 months with no problem.

As for warranty, it is irrelevant as the sales of goods act covers you for up to 6 years and have successfully claimed on it with an 18month old dell laptop I had to fix from a friend of a friend. Just phoned up and asked them if they were aware of the soga and the next day it was collected. Thumbs up for dell.

Order of reliability from around 10000 laptops at work over the last 6 years:

Dell

Toshiba

Hp

Fujitsu

Acer

I have had a Toshiba (caught fire) a Sony Blu Ray Monster (killed 2 motherboards) and an HP Envy 17 as well as 2 Acers. So far the HP is still fine (although it gets seriously hot, a known issue) and both Acers, although cheap, are both still cheerful.

People treat things differently - i look after my stuff so have never had a problem with anything. Others don't and have bad experiences which people like to share on the internet.

I think Schools and offices are a good range of people to test the reliability. Acer are well well below any of the other makes that we support at work.... On that basis i wouldn't recommend them. Some people have been lucky with Acer's but the general consensus is that they are poor - just google it for more examples. My friends dad bought one from PC World and had 2 replacements within one month before demanding a refund and getting one off Dell Outlet. That was about 3 years ago and the Dell is still going strong (just upgraded memory and put Win 7 on it for him).

All I can say is I look after my gear carefully, but it gets a hammering with work stuff and hobby stuff I do on them. The processor will be working for many hours at a stretch and pretty hard, so I suspect cooling is my main issue. Although I use a laptop stand, they still end up hot. I think the Acer screen quality is the poorest of any laptop I have owned in terms of image quality (not including 2 x Advents I once had, but were returned to PC World as they were truly rubbish), but they do seem unbreakable and I have chucked them in a bag and dragged them abroad on a few occasions, so I know they are fairly robust physically. . Yes they are not a patch on my HP for build or screen quality, but for their price they are great imho.