Advice on buying new laptop under €400?

Colemania

Hi all,

I don't know if I'm posting this in the right thread but here it goes. I am looking for a new budget laptop as the old one has encountered a few problems, lets just say....
My old laptop has 2gb Memory, 250gb Hard Drive and 2.0Ghz processor. It's an ASUS and in fairness for €380 it did the job fine for college and watching videos.

Now the thing is I've been looking at laptops in PC World and the like and they're mostly around the €500 range and to be honest, yes they're better than mine but not outstanding for that price. There were ones similar to them out last year with Windows 7 for much cheaper but they seem to be gone off the market.

I saw a great deal on the Bargain Alerts thread but it was from back in July: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Acer-Aspire-V5-Intel-Core-i3-14-inch-6GB-500GB-/360693842617?clk_rvr_id=503464714917

This model is exactly like something I'd be looking for. My main attributes in a new computer, a lot which are a given these days, are the following:

Between 12 and 14 inch screen if possible.
Windows 7 (very hard to get a laptop now with this but I do not like Windows 8 at all!)
4gb memory or more
500GB Hard drive or more
Reliable enough brand (i.e Acer, ASUS and the like are fine with me)


Basically I'm looking for the best laptop I can get with that budget. So if anyone has come across anything along these lines, please let me know.

Thanks in advance

Gone Drinking

Looks like a good deal alright.

I helped a friend buy a laptop recently for college. He needed it quickly and couldn't wait for online delivery so we went into PC world.

We picked up something similar to that spec, same processer, less memory (4Gb) and a similar size hard disk for 425.

Torqay

Gone Drinking wrote: »

Looks like a good deal alright.

Not reallty, the performance of that Core i3-2365M is very poor, worse than a current Celeron.

Colemania

:pac:

Torqay wrote: »

Not reallty, the performance if that Core i3-2365M is very poor, worse than a current Celeron.

To be honest I'd mainly be using it for browsing, watching videos, microsoft word and maybe the odd game of football manager (which requires a quick enough laptop to run)

I'm not expecting a laptop at that price to have a great graphics card or top of the range processor.

Torqay

Look at LaptopsDirect, the have a Fujitsu with a Core i3-3110M for €410. That processor is almost twice as fast and got much better graphics. Intel HD 4000 can handle footie manager quite well in low detail settings.

Colemania

Torqay wrote: »

Look at LaptopsDirect, the have a Fujitsu with a Core i3-3110M for €410. That processor is almost twice as fast and got much better graphics. Intel HD 4000 can handle footie manager quite well in low detail settings.

I actually bought my ASUS laptop from laptopsdirect almost 4 years ago. Great website I must say. Hmm Fujitsu you say....are they reliable? Haven't heard of much people with a Fujitsu laptop!

Torqay

I have seen a few of these Lifebooks in various configurations, they're as good as one may expect from a budget laptop. Nothing wrong with them, except for high-gloss surfaces everywhere, a real fingerprint magnet.

DECEiFER

The best deals for anything pretty much are to be found online with some rare exceptions, but there's always exceptions.

So bearing that in mind, I did a little window shopping for you. For under €400 you're quite limited so everything I found is under €500 and if you can manage to stretch to it, I'd say it's well worthwhile.

Keeping your needs at the heart of it all, I found a few models that could be worth a look, but even for just under €500, you can't expect much. Though your buck has more value online than it does in PC World and the like. I looked at mostly UK stores to see what they had to offer but Dabs came out in front and they have a .ie even though they're a UK company. The prices aren't too different between the .ie and the .com either, taking into account the conversion from £ to €. You can order from the .com if you like (the URL is the same, just change .ie to .com) and use Parcel Motel as your delivery option. Same goes with any UK store, even ones that deliver to Ireland, as the cost of delivery is often quite high - but not to the UK Parcel Motel address! I'd use it for Amazon among other UK-based e-tailers.

This is the best spec on paper that I could find:
http://www.dabs.ie/products/fujitsu-ah532-intel-core-i3-3110m-4gb-500gb-nvidia-gt620m-1gb-15-6--hdmi-usb3-windows-8-laptop-8X8Y.html?catid=15020&src=2

It has a GeForce 620M and a i3 3110M. That's plenty to handle your needs.

Also worth a look:
http://www.dabs.ie/products/asus-k55vd-sx909h-core-i3-2350m-6gb-500gb-nvidia-geforce-610m-2gb-dvd-15-6--windows-8-8XFM.html?refs=54580000&src=2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pavilion-14-b110sa-Sleekbook-i3-3227U-Processor/dp/B00BEV4780/ref=sr_1_21?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1383823973&sr=1-21
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Laptops/Laptops/Intel+Core+i3/Toshiba+Satellite+Pro+C50-A+15.6-inch+Notebook+?productId=57941

It's hard to know the spec of the hard drive used in any of these as it's often vague in that the capacity is only mentioned. If the drive is a 5,400 RPM spinner, I'd advise you to get a decent 7,200 spinner at the very least. A high-capacity SSD would be optimal but they cost a lot so I wouldn't be looking at any of them. You need not do it right away, it's just worth a mention, because it would likely make a difference to all-round performance even if you went for a 7,200 RPM disk over a 5,400 RPM.

Besides Amazon.co.uk, Aria.co.uk, and Dabs.ie/.com, I looked on Ebuyer.com, Overclockers.co.uk, and Scan.co.uk, but nothing good was there in your price range.

bajer101

http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/Fujistu_LIFEBOOK_A512_Core_i3_4GB_500GB_Windows_8.1_Laptop_in_Black__VFYA5120M7312GB/version.asp

Colemania

Everyone seems to be recommending that Fujitsu but there's just something about it i don't trust/like..... I remember back in the day when you had to collect tokens from tesco for schools to get a new Fujitsu computer for the school. Reason being they were cheap and quite useless.....

DECEiFER

Colemania wrote: »

Everyone seems to be recommending that Fujitsu but there's just something about it i don't trust/like..... I remember back in the day when you had to collect tokens from tesco for schools to get a new Fujitsu computer for the school. Reason being they were cheap and quite useless.....

Think of it this way. You have a huge computer network powered by Cisco devices running into the thousands...tens of thousands. Yet here some of us are at home running a crappy EPC3925 or EPC2425 device that somehow was made by the same company that is the market leader in networking across the globe.

I'm not saying that Fujitsu are good when you're willing to spend the money on their devices. I don't know them enough (aside from those shítty desktops that you refer to from back in the day) as I don't own or have ever owned anything by them.

The Acer you were looking at looks okay but the CPU is Sandy Bridge, last gen's tock* because its model begins with a 2 and the GPU is unclear as it doesn't mention what Intel HD model number it is. Core i CPUs beginning with 3xxx are Ivy Bridge (the Fujitsus), last gen's tick*. Overall, if you got the Acer, it would serve your needs for the time being. The thing is, the more you spend and/or the better the machine, the more time you have before you feel it's old and needs to be replaced. Money often buys that time, so the more you spend, the more time you've bought but special offers can give it to you for a lot less so keep an eye out for those, also.

* Intel releases CPUs in a tock-tick fashion for each architecture.

Sandy Bridge = tock (2011)
Ivy Bridge = tick (2012)
Haswell = tock (2013 - current gen)
Broadwell = tick (due in Q3 2014)
Skylake = tock (due in 2015)
Cannonlake = tick (due in 2016)
...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock