Can anyone recommend a laptop for around the £400 mark, may stretch to £500 if it's really worth it.

What sort of specs should I be looking for as an absoute minimum? I'll be using it for internet, gaming, Photoshop etc.

Gaming on a laptop might be interesting, depending on the kind of games you want to play.

Dell Outlet Home & Home Office - Refurbished Computers - Refurbished PC - Refurbished Computer is always worth a look

Chris

www.tier1online.com

I recommend the IBM's, they look old and dated but dont let that fool you! I have a T41 and its by far the best laptop i have ever owned!

I recommend the IBM's, they look old and dated but dont let that fool you! I have a T41 and its by far the best laptop i have ever owned!

I have a company () T42P and it's been the worst laptop I've ever owned. It's on its third system board, 2nd hard drive, 2nd network card, 2nd keyboard, 2nd screen and when I find time I'll get them to replace the flakey CD-RW. My T21 was more reliable, but even that had a failed screen and hard drive. I think the last faultless laptop I had was the 770

I'm sure all brands have their problems, but for quite a concentrated sample I'm surprised at the number of people hitting similar problems. When mine is replaced, it will be interesting to see how Lenovo fair!

Chris

Not serious gaming really, just something to occupy me occasionally when I'm bored! I do a fair bit of video capture and editing too so iee1394 is required, as is a card reader.

I have a company () T42P and it's been the worst laptop I've ever owned. It's on its third system board, 2nd hard drive, 2nd network card, 2nd keyboard, 2nd screen and when I find time I'll get them to replace the flakey CD-RW. My T21 was more reliable, but even that had a failed screen and hard drive. I think the last faultless laptop I had was the 770

I'm sure all brands have their problems, but for quite a concentrated sample I'm surprised at the number of people hitting similar problems. When mine is replaced, it will be interesting to see how Lenovo fair!

Chris

Wow, unlucky!! Mine has been brilliant, never had a thing wrong with it. Its light, slim, easy to use and not bogged down with silly features. Battery life is good, plenty of RAM and a half decent cpu. My only criticism is the HD could be a bit bigger. And the barebones of the thing are rock solid mine has had some real abuse. Compared with things like Acer, HP, Compaq etc that are made from awful cheap plastic that creeks and moans, and filled with complete ****e and normally have 256Mb of RAM... who ever thought that was a good idea?

I've got one of these

HP Compaq Business Notebook nx6325 - Turion 64 X2 TL-60 2 GHz - 15" TFT : Read reviews and compare prices at Ciao.co.uk

Picked it up on Ebuyer for £580 with £100 cash back.

It's great, high res screen, dual core, 1Gb standard, DVD burner, bluetooth, wifi. Years warranty on everything including the battery and free Vista to not install.

Might not suit your gaming though, gfx chip is limited and the screen is a standard 15" not a widescreen.

ive had a toshiba for nearly a year now and its been very good. never let me down, decent battery life and inbuilt wifi.

not a fan of dell tbh, swmbo has had several and theyve never quite been as good as my tosh. used to like sony but the last one i had was noisy and got very very hot while on your lap!

Dell = hell.

Fine as long as nothing goes wrong. Can be a **** of a company to buy from too if they don't have parts. Worth looking at but caveat emptor!

Can anyone recommend a laptop for around the £400 mark, may stretch to £500 if it's really worth it.

What sort of specs should I be looking for as an absoute minimum? I'll be using it for internet, gaming, Photoshop etc.

To be brutally honest, if you're gaming and doing video editing on it, double your budget and you'll get a laptop that will do it fairly well. For something that will do it REALLY well, you're looking at £1500

You won't be able to play much on a £400 machine, you will be in the realms of Celeron's and you need to be in the Core 2 Duo area with 2Gb RAM and a nice big HDD.

Toshiba, HP, Compaq or if you don't mind a switch and depending what games you want, Apple Macbook.

I’ve had,

2 Advents----Both return for a refund as they kept hanging and were generally pants

1 Toshiba----Brilliant, never missed a beat. Now 3 years old, with shiney keys and a bit extra RAM

1 Sony AR41S-----Blew its motherboard up after a month (£1750 Laptop!!!!) VERY VERY disappointed. Especially as it’s the new Santa Rosa chip and doesn’t seem much quicker than my 1.8 Tosh Centrino.

Toshiba is by far the most reliable to my eyes.

well so far I've found from tesco online a Gateway Gateway MX8716b 17"

Its got the following spec -

Audio Features Yes

Bluetooth No

Brand Gateway

Card Reader 4 in 1

Features of Product High performance with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Easy productivity with Vista ™ 17” widescreen Ultrabright™ display

Firewire Yes

Graphics Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950

Hard Drive Size 120Gb

Hard Drive Type SATA

Memory Size 2Gb

Memory Type 2x1Gb DDR

Number of USB Ports 4

Operating System Windows Vista™ Home Premium

Optical Drive DVD Dual Layer Rewriter

Output VGA

Processor Intel Core 2 Duo Centrino

Processor Cache 2MB L2

Processor Model Number T5300

Processor Speed 1.73 GHz

Product Depth 26.4 cm

Product Height 3.6 cm

Product Weight 3.1Kg

Product Width 35.6 cm

Remote Control Included No

Screen Features Ultrabright WXGA TFT

Screen Size 17"

TV Tuner None

Wi-Fi 802.11g

Wired Networking Port Yes

How does that look at £549?

The laptop i'm using now is a Gateway from tesco and not had any trouble at all with it.

I'm not actually bothered about games really as I've got a PS3, X-Box 360, PSP etc etc!!

The only thing letting that spec down is the graphics card - see previous comments w.r.t gaming on low-end laptops

ALDI UK: bargains, special buys,sales promotion articles

This might be worth a look too

and free Vista to not install.

Can you still get that? I thought the "free Vista" offer might have expired by now?

The gfx chip in the low-end stuff CANNOT handle any recent gaming duties at playable rates/acceptable quality. The Intel GMA950 (or the update version X3100) aren't suitable for gaming at all.

AS for makes/models.......have a look at Asus.

I've got a W3 series.

3 years old. Been half way round the world twice with it.....I've only replaced the hard drive and that was down the desire for something bigger.

Still like new.

Have a look at PC Nextday's laptops:

PC Nextday

The Zoostorm Advanced home have an Radeon X1600 which I have on my own laptop - Running Rome: Total War @ 1440x900 with all the eye candy on!

I got one of these a month ago

Buy ACER AS5633/5710-102 | 15" widescreen laptop - Laptops | Comet

It's been fine so far and I think its pretty good value. Got it in the local store aswell so no waiting around for it

Well in the end I went, err, slightly over budget and got -

Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2GHz (x2), 800MHz FSB, 4MB L2 Cache

2GB DDR2 RAM

1GB Intel Turbo Memory

250GB Hard Disk

HD DVD Drive with DVDRW (plays High Definition films, writes normal DVDs / CDs)

Graphics: 256MB dedicated RAM - NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS with 1GB of TurboCache memory - superb for playing the latest games!

Vista Home Premium

Built-in Webcam

HDMI port with HDCP (for connecting to a HD TV)

5-in-1 card reader

I have a ps3 with blu-ray, so now I have HD DVD covered as well.

Sounds well over budget

I should have known I would!!

Can you still get that? I thought the "free Vista" offer might have expired by now?

I got it a earlier in the year. Took months for the upgrade to arrive.