I Want To Buy A Laptop - Please Advise!

[fry_lover]

Ok, i live in London, UK by the way

want a laptop, not too keen on 2nd hand, doesnt seem too much price difference anyway from what i see on e-bay!!!

BUDGET: £300-£370

NEEDS: Simply to do my college essays (Microsoft Word) - thats the main thing i want it for. I have a Dell PC with internet etc...

CURRENT OPTION
IDENTIFIED: Dell Inspiron, 1024MB Ram, 15.4" Monitor, 80GB Hard Drive, 56k Modem, £359

ALSO...........

I need Microsoft Word and i will be da**ed if i am going to pay £189 from Dell for this on top of the price of laptop, from my research i can simply buy something called "Microsoft Works Suit 2005" it's cheaper than the 2006 version and includes Word 2002 on it, seen it on e-bay for £14.99 and perhaps less. Can i use this on my new lap-top do you think???

What do you think, please advise on as many issues mentioned above as possible,

many thanks

 

[andywg]

Instead of Word, take a look at Open Office. It does pretty much everything word does, but is free. It can even save as a .doc file so you can use it on a M$ machine.

 

[fry_lover]

Instead of Word, take a look at Open Office. It does pretty much everything word does, but is free. It can even save as a .doc file so you can use it on a M$ machine.

Hi, yes i seen that on e-bay and wondered what it was, my issue would be, i got lots of Word stuff on disc that i need to finish off on my lab-top, if i got Open Office can i transfer work between Open Office and Word (if that even makes sense!)

Dumbo Question of the day: do laptops generally come with a floppy disk drive AND a CD Rom drive?

 

[dirtydog]

yeah id go with a new Dell and whack OpenOffice on it

 

[nmonks]

I wrote my PhD thesis on ClarisWorks 4 and regularly write magazine articles using a simple text editor. So there's no need to invest in MS Office for writing simple essays.

However, think long and hard about buying a "cheap" laptop. An laptop, whether Mac or PC, is a compromise compared with a desktop computer at the same price point. In other words, you're losing speed and versatility in favour of portability and compact size. Decide if this matters for you before spending the money. At the very low end of the market, new-but-cheap laptops often have pokey processors, poor graphics performance, no wireless networking, no modem/Ethernet, no CD or DVD writer, limited RAM slots, etc. Review the specifications of any such machine carefully.

Buying a refurbished high-end machine that's a couple of years old can make a lot of sense, especially if said "old" laptop has a warranty. So you can look at Cancom for example, where they have refurbished iBooks from £350 with a 12-month warranty. If you need a PC, I assume there are other companies offering similar deals. Apple, and presumably other manufacturers, also sell these "refurbs" themselves at a deep discount but with the same 12-month warranty, so it's basically a no-risk way to save a lot of money.

Cheers, Neale

 

[fry_lover]

i have narrowed it down to 3-choices and bear in mind £££ is an issue, so please take that into consideration, what offers the best deal please in peeps opinion

DELL - £399
pentium processor "dual-core?" 1.6GHZ
1024 MB RAM
Windows Vista Operating System
15.4" screen
60GB Hard-Drive
wireless modem
1 year warrenty

HEWLETT PACKARD - £299
intel celeron 1.4GHZ processor
512 MB Ram
Windows XP Operating system
15.4" screen
60 GB hard drive
56k dial up modem
1 year warranty

From E-Bay £153
DELL LATITUDE
Pentium 3 866 MHZ processor
256 MB Ram
Windows XP Operating system
14" screen
20 GB hard drive
"internal" modem, not sure what one
No warranty


i only really need it for college work, got broadband at home already, but at same time i dont want to end up with a load of cr*p

thanks for all your advice thus far, i am quite impulsive and want to buy one in next day or so (or order one).

 

[Allen]

Another freebie.

AbiWord.

http/www.abisource.com/

 

[nmonks]

I would have thought any low-end PC would run Vista with about as much pleasantness as a day trip to the Somme circa 1916.

Do also budget anti-virus software into your shopping list. Or you just wipe the hard drive and install a secure operating system like OS X or Linux.

Cheers, Neale

 

[fry_lover]

Neale quite happy to stick with Windows XP

what do you think of the Hewlett Packard deal, bearing in mind i basically i want something for college?

thanks again

 

[Bloo]

Do also budget anti-virus software into your shopping list. Or you just wipe the hard drive and install a secure operating system like OS X or Linux.

Cheers, Neale

On that note, the free edition of AVG (which you can get on download.com) is really tops. And surpassed e-Trust in my opinion (as it picked up on things that e-Trust didnt').

For the rest I'm with Neale - a older second hand good brand is better than a new cheap one (or can be).

But if you're really absolutely only going to use Word (or similar) it doens't matter. Just go cheap and cheerful.

Edit: out of your 3 choices above, my vote would go for the HP.

 

[Arfie]

Seriously, if all you will do is a bit of word processing, go with the cheapest option, so long as you trust the eBay seller.

If you get a new computer do not get one with vista unless you get over 1gb RAM, I have one with 1GB and it's slow, you'd be better with a slower machine and XP or an even slower one with Windows98.

Much as it pains me (and probably him ) to agree with Andywg, Open Office is a great option, it will open existing word docs and will save as word docs too I have to use MS Office at work, but use Open Office at home and the 2 swap over fine

I'd also agree with Bloo, get AVG Free antivirus and Zonealarm Free firewall to protect it for surfing on t'internet.

Arfie

 

[dirtydog]

laptops are often much less reliable than desktops too (especially ones with an apple on top!)

the motherboard is most important in terms of upgradability and will be your limiting factor. cheap new machines really skimp in this area usually.

 

[nmonks]

laptops are often much less reliable than desktops too (especially ones with an apple on top!)

Based on...? None of mine have ever been unreliable, and any problems have been fixed under the warranty. I still use one from 1997 (a PowerBook 3400) on a regular basis for printing and certain online tasks. Anyway, the spectrum of PC manufacturers from the very good ones to the utterly crap ones covers a much wider range than Apple does all by itself. So simply dissing Apple as "especially" bad is silly. No, they aren't the very best, but they're well above average, even according to PC World! To be fair, part of that is that they don't build for the very low end of the market, which is where the least reliable PCs are.

the motherboard is most important in terms of upgradability and will be your limiting factor. cheap new machines really skimp in this area usually.

Agreed, but if you're at the bottom end of the market, looking for upgrading options is largely irrelevant. I'd argue that most upgrades (exceptions being hard drive and RAM) don't make a lot of economic sense anyway. You'd do yourself a bigger favour wiping Windows from the hard drive and installing a lean flavour of Linux. At a stroke, you'd have more disk space, less RAM demand, better performance, and orders of magnitude more stability and security. I don't really understand why people with PC hardware bother with Windows -- Linux seems altogether so much better!

Cheers, Neale

 

[dirtydog]

Agreed that Apple are better than a whole host of PC manufacturers but I find that thier VFM is not that great. My views are based on all the machines that I look after at work (Apple and PC) and most Apples do not last much over 3 years and the reliability of the PC's tends to be much better even more so comparing with macbooks which TBH have been terrible so far.

Its true that most upgrades are irrelavent for lots of users but trying to add a second hard disk and expansion cards on certain cheaper models can be like trying to get blood out of a stone. In fact as long as you can upgrade ram and hard disk like you say Id recommend buy a machine with the best CPU you can afford. Linux is great, PCLinux would be a great move for loads of people if they knew about it

 

[WILDER]

HEWLETT PACKARD - £299
There crap paid over a 1,000 pounds years back and it only lasted one year three months, and it was slow and useless.