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[SMD]

Last bought one in 2009. I have no idea what's good and what's not and quite frankly it's mind numbing reading about SSD vs HDD etc.. My budget is £500 and there are hundreds at this price point. It will be mainly used for word processing, spreadsheets, internet and the odd videos.

Please help me!

[dbug]

Last bought one in 2009. I have no idea what's good and what's not and quite frankly it's mind numbing reading about SSD vs HDD etc.. My budget is £500 and there are hundreds at this price point. It will be mainly used for word processing, spreadsheets, internet and the odd videos.

Please help me!

Don't need to spend £500 to cover that mate - nothing too intensive there - £300 -£350 should cover that easily

[05omegav6]

Bought one of theses for £350...

http://m.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-pavilion-15-p078sa-15-6-intel-core-i3-laptop-349-currys-2065901?mforwarded=true

[TheBoy]

Should be able to get a decent brand, (not HP Pavilion, so Taxi Al  ), 4th gen i3, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb HDD for under £300 delivered. All be Windows 8 now though, which will piss you off.

120Gb decent brand SSD can be had for around £60 is performance is more important than storage capacity.

[D]

HP G3 i3 £316

HP G1 i5 £456

or

Lenovo i3 £ 300 after cashback

Lenovo i5 for £350 after cashback . This one looks like a steal at £350.

[05omegav6]

Happy enough thus far

Especially now Crapafee is vanished... Thanks Guffer

[AndyRoid]

Last bought one in 2009. I have no idea what's good and what's not and quite frankly it's mind numbing reading about SSD vs HDD etc.. My budget is £500 and there are hundreds at this price point. It will be mainly used for word processing, spreadsheets, internet and the odd videos.

Please help me!

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) as akin to playing a record to getting your data, and their average access times are around 9ms.
SSD is akin to playing a CD when getting data, you can do it much quicker as the controller knows directly where to go rather than look for it. Average access times are around 1ms, so your computer is a darned site quicker to you when you use it.

£500 would get you a stonking machine for what you want, I'd say your looking at around £350 - £400 in reality.
My own personal manufacturer preference is for Toshiba, probably followed by Asus for build quality, warranty, etc.

[SMD]

Thanks for replies. I was thinking £500 would get an average spec, but having started looking at websites, I'm bewildered by how much this market has changed since I last bought a laptop. I'm happy to pay more for some sort of 'future proofing' if such a thing exists, as I would want it to perform well in 5 years or so.

For £500 I could get Full HD, i5/7 processor, good battery life and SSD albeit only 128GB but I'm aware most of this would probably be wasted. Can all hard drives be upgraded to SSD (once the technology gets cheaper)?

[TheBoy]

Happy enough thus far

Especially now Crapafee is vanished... Thanks Guffer

Yeah, hope if serves you well . But Pavilions (both desktop and laptop) have a deserved, woeful reputation for reliability.

Virtually all manufacturer supplied builds are dire, but easily fixed

[TheBoy]

HP G3 i3 £316

One of my bro's bought that exact one just after xmas (when on offer for 299, which it often is).  Not a bad machine, if you can hack Windows 8 (which all laptops will have now)

[AndyRoid]

One of my bro's bought that exact one just after xmas (when on offer for 299, which it often is).  Not a bad machine, if you can hack Windows 8 (which all laptops will have now)

I've found quite a few manufacturers provide the Win 7 drivers in their support section still, so downgrading is quite an easy task even though they ship with Win 8/8.1

[TheBoy]

One of my bro's bought that exact one just after xmas (when on offer for 299, which it often is).  Not a bad machine, if you can hack Windows 8 (which all laptops will have now)

I've found quite a few manufacturers provide the Win 7 drivers in their support section still, so downgrading is quite an easy task even though they ship with Win 8/8.1

Many won't for the laptops they currently sell (in this part of the market). But as more business oriented ones often use the same video/audio/chipset/nic/blah blah blah, the drivers are normally available

[tanker12uk]

With £500.00 you could do a NASA launch if all you want is a work system £250 -300 will get you a stonker don't use pc world or the like on line services are better and god forbid my local Tesco is better than them
Spec wise it will be Windows 8.1 min memory 4Gb 6 or 8 is better hard drive anything over 250GB is fine office work will never file that cpu's in laptops there are some excellent quad core units out there at low speeds but a big punch but I'm an AMD man hate Intel so a multi core AMD chip with on chip graphics would be my choice

cheers
 

[TheBoy]

but I'm an AMD man hate Intel so a multi core AMD chip with on chip graphics would be my choice

I'd stick to Intel for real world performance and reliability. I could never recommend an AMD CPU equipped desktop, laptop or server  .  Not until they catch up...

[AndyRoid]

but I'm an AMD man hate Intel so a multi core AMD chip with on chip graphics would be my choice

I'd stick to Intel for real world performance and reliability. I could never recommend an AMD CPU equipped desktop, laptop or server  .  Not until they catch up...

+1 for that.

AMD did have a moderately good shout when they introduced the K7 processor for speed/performance against the P4 of the time, but Intel started pulling that back when they introduced the Northwood IMO. As for the heat generated by the K7, I lost my skin more than once to a heatsink that had made it to triple figures when I accidentally touched it.

Rhonda's old Satellite was an AMD/ATI combo (x2 @ 1.8GHz) and the official display driver would crash at the merest sign of having to do any work, so much so I ended up on the Microsoft WDDM driver instead (which was surprisingly rock solid).

If you want it to work as expected, It's Intel IMHO.