Laptop recommendations

[chrispyvrs]

Hi guys and girls,

On my iphone now but my current Sony vaio laptop is on it's last legs. Problems with the Internet connection, it's slow, and I think I need a new one. Ideally don't want to spend more than £400 but could if I had to and stretch to £475-500 but as I said I'd rather not.

Has anyone got any links, advice and recommendations for a new laptop.

It's only going to be used for Internet browsing, football manager haha. Apart from that the occasional word document and presentation but that's about it.

Thanks

Chris

[mbames]

Slow internet connection, or a slow laptop? If the former, then buying a new laptop isn't likely to help. How old is the current laptop? Maybe reinstalling Windows, etc would give it a new lease of life. I can recommend an SSD for speeding things up too. Really helped my old Pentium D machine.

What results do you get from www.speedtest.net?

[chrispyvrs]

It's the laptop that's slow not the Internet!

Perfect on Xbox, phone, and the other laptops in the house.

[littleade]

Have you done the usual clean up stuff on your laptop- the clearout via internet options of your temp files, cookies, histrory etc followed by getting rid of any unused programs and old files on the laptop and a defrag of your hard drive? That sometimes helps

Cheers

[LGM]

My girlfiend bought a laptop yesterday from Currys, pritty decent spec aswell although it is an Ultrabook so doesnt have a disk drive. Its an i3 1.9Ghz, 6GB RAM and a 750GB hard drive.

HP Pavilion 14-b130sa, cost her £400 which i think is a bargain.

http://www.currys.co...t.html#longDesc

[gallego1968]

I bought my daughter a Dell Inspiron 15R and it is a great laptop and fully recommended.

[mannyo]

There is probably nothing wrong with your current laptop, backup everything you need to an external drive and reinstall windows. Works wonders, even for 5 year old plus computers.

if the laptop was good when you got it, it should still be as good now once windows is reinstalled. Laptops don't just get slower, usual cause is endlessly installing more and more software, then when you remove it remnants are left behind which take up space and in some cases are still loaded by windows even though the rest of the piece of software has gone.

[Auric Goldfinger]

You have an iPhone so you must get a Mac Book Pro or an Air

[Robjon]

I agree with Littleade and Mannyo - there is probably nothing wrong with your current laptop.

Just out of interest, does your laptop run Windows XP or older? As I understand it, XP does not defrag the hard drive by default and you have to instruct it to do so.

I recently restored the performance of my sister's laptop just by defragging the hard drive, clearing the browsing history, then downloading and running Malwarebytes.

[Aspman]

Dell outlet and get an i3 or i5 with as much memory and disk space as you can find.

I picked up an Inspironr15 n5110 i5 with 4Gb ram and 650Gb hd + 1Gb independent Nvidea graphics for about £470. They had free delivery at the time when I looked.

Don't forget about Quido etc where ever you look you can get some decent money back.

Also you'll see the odd bargain on UKHotDeals.co.uk

[clicky]

Dell Outlet

Inspiron 15R

i5-3230M

6Gb ram

1Tb Hd

2Gb ATI graphics

£416 delivered same warranty as new.

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dfh&cs=ukdfh1&puid=8a3fa651

If you go through Quidco you might get 6% back on that too (not sure since it's the outlet).

[ScoobyChris]

Another recommendation for Dell/Dell outlet and Quidco. Got my laptop (think it might be a 15R too with i5, 6Gb RAM, 512Gb disk) this time last year and bought at a time when there was free delivery and cashback running at Quidco. Only thing I didn't have a choice of was the colour which turns out to be a metallic red - still, at least I'll never lose it in the house Solidly built and had no problems with it, but for the price I paid, it's still been excellent value for money if it breaks after a couple of years

Just make sure they don't send it via UK Mail (after seeing Dispatches on C4 last night).

Chris

Edited 30 April, 2013 by ScoobyChris

[Harvey1978]

After asking the same question a few weeks ago and then thinking laptop or tablet, I got this today http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-g6-2244sa-15-6-laptop-ruby-red-17419992-pdt.html. It seemed to be a better spec than similarly priced laptops and having owned an hp before I'm quite confident it will last.

[Aspman]

HP are decent. I still have and use an ancient HP laptop.

You might struggle with games on that laptop but everything else will be fine.