Want to buy my daughter a laptop that will do her for when she goes to university and that will also be suitable for her to play games on

I know very little about what’s needed and would be grateful for any suggestions

Have been looking at this one, but mainly because we have a cheaper Toshiba laptop which has always been reliable
http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/product/Qosmio-F50-12W/1066095/toshibaShop/true/

They are doing it with 200 quid cashback and can extend the warranty to three years for an extra £50 (not normally a fan of extended warranties, but thought that was pretty good)

Any others you can recommend please
Cheers

That’s a pretty high spec machine, but for £1k it bloody well should be!

To be honest, you can get 90% of the performance of that machine for less than half the price… Take a look at the following…

http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Computers/cat/Laptops

gaming laptops are usually bigger, heavier, louder and run hotter and cost much more due to the higher speced gfx cards they have. not really the ideal thing for a uni laptop imo.

just get her a fast compact machine, forget about gaming, too much distraction too.

Bought a Compaq for £450 from Computerworld. Dual Core stuff and 4GB of RAM.

Seems okay apart from bl00dy Vista

For that sort of money, Acer 8930g. It’s a DTR though, you wouldn’t want to carry it far. Blu-ray, 16:9 screen, 4Gb, full 1080p, 1Gb graphics.

errr, dare I say for that sort of money……Macbook?

Not a great gaming machine but reliable, well made, and won’t get viruses…..

If its for uni suggest no more than £400-500, minimum 2GB RAM (ideally 4MB) from any main brand will probably do. If not too expensive get pick up/on site warranty rather than return to mfg. Also worth looking for included deals on Microsoft Office as she will probably need at least Word and Excel. Definitely go Vista – it is now stable and far more functional than XP

I recently bought this:
Long battery life, light and portable.
http://www.saveonsamsung.com/Samsung_X460_453221.html

Why are you thinking ‘laptop’?

Get a laptop! Life is so much easier with one. Especially when she moves out of halls in her second year, as ehr room may not have internet ports etc. Plus she can take it to lectures, use it the lounge area, take it to the library and take it home.

Could get an apple macbook. She gets 15% off if she buys it off the university network, and £145 cashback on an ipod, so she could keep that or sell it aswell. Apparently if you buy a mac off the university network, the warrant is upped to 3 years free of charge, but still jsut a year phone support.

So she could get the white macbook for £644.00 or the new 13″ macbook pro for £772.80

Thinking laptop because she is going to commute to uni (going to LSE and didn’t fancy living in London) and wants to be able to do some stuff on the train journey

Thanks for the replies, had bit more of a look round now and sort of know what spec to look for
latest idea is this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-CS21ZQ-14-1-inch-Blu-ray-Premium/dp/B001RNNODO/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1246191108&sr=1-7

Seems to have all she wants and will hopefully do, what yer reckon?

She gets 15% off if she buys it off the university network

Tomzo; is this proper bona-fide info? I’m not doubting you, but I can’t access the Apple Store for Higher Ed, so have no way of seeing the prices.

Couple of years ago, myself and two flatmates all got kitted out with new Macs (Mac Pro for me, one iMac and a MacBook), at the HE discount, all because one of them was at uni! All they were fussed about, was that at least one person in the household was in full time HE.

A mate of mine works in a London Uniservity, so I’m assuming he’s entitled to a discount, too. I’m considering buying a new Mac lappy soon, so would be inertested to know the cheapest way of getting one, obviously!

Sorry for the Hi-jack, btw…

Seems to have all she wants and will hopefully do, what yer reckon?

That Sony will do everything admirably, but in fairness it’s still £800, and you can get similar performance for quite a bit less cash elsewhere!

It’s definately between 12%-15%, and the prices listed are the ones you’d see on the home site from uni. I beleive the % of discount does vary from model to model though.

check out here:
http://store.apple.com/uk_edu_77705

The uni discount is great, just need to be on their network when you order.

If she’d going to be commuting with it the key is to make sure you get a light one, and one that is tough.

you dont have to be on the uni network to order one, you can go into the apple store with student id, i was in their yesterday looking to buy a imac for my mum, its 12 or 13% off desktops, and 15% of laptops. and the rule is, in one year you can buy one desktop and 1 laptop

ian are you sure you get the full discount in store? Im certain you only get the 6% discount that you can get from the “any school or higher eductaion” website, when you buy instore, but not the largest 15% that you get from the “Higher Education/university store” online

No, you can; I know someone who took her student ID into Apple’s Regent St shop, and they gave her the full HiEd discount.

Think she may have had to have something confirming the course she was on and that, mind.

TBH; Apple are more inertested in shifting units; the more, the better. It’s actually pretty easy to get Educational discounts from them. We did ours by ‘phone, and at not time were we asked to provide any proof. And we bought 3 computers within one year, too.

All the sales staff need, is to have seen something confirming the person is a student/teacher blah blah. You could probbly just be a cleaner at a local college, and get a discount!

My mate at the uni is a technician, yet can access the Apple Hi Ed store through his work system, thus appearing as a ‘student or teacher’… 😉

Last year, I was offered a lower rate ed discount, simply because I’d bought a computer from them in the past. No proof of anything was spoken about at all.

I’ve just seen how much iPod Touch’s are going for on ebay. 😮

I may well be about to buy a new Mac Book and iPod Touch. The iPod will be going straight onto the Bay. Meaning I’ll be getting the Mac Book even cheaper! 😀

What’s she doing at uni?

You need to consider any software she may need before plunging into a mac. I know there’s maths packages I’ve used for uni for which mac versions are available but not quite as up-to-date. Many smaller programs I can imagine still won’t have a mac release.

She is doing Maths and Statistics.

All sorted now, she wanted the Toshiba and don’t blame her really, was very nice and owed her an 18th birthday present.

Got the 200 quid off and took the extra two years warranty for 53 quid, as I mentioned not keen on extended cover, but not too concerned for 50p a week

Bit jealous now although I wouldn’t know how to work all the different stuff

Cheers