I am looking to buy a budget laptop for surfing, Word etc., and took a look at the usual shops, but I come to the conclusion that “nowadays” all laptops are more or less the same – I mean, some are more powerful than others, but all the brands offer more or less the same quality of product, and the days when you would choose IBM over some Chinese brand are past.

Or am I wrong?

You’re not that wrong if price is your main criteria for choosing a laptop, that said, some companies have a better rep than others. Lenovo seems to get good press, I’m sure that ther’ll be someone come along and tell you what brands are better avoided and another person to say that Lenovo is one of them 😉

IBM is Chinese now (Lenovo). And still imho one of the best. And indeed what I’m about to order tonight (mainly cos they’ll sell me a UK k/b, multilingual s/w, to mainland EU, at zero extra cost).
I reckon they’re all the same, some a bit more plasticky, some a bit more thin alu.
Most are made by a Chinese contractor anyway, and several branded ones even made by the same Chinese contractor as all the really cheap generic rebadged ones.

At the lower end there is not much in it. Little differences like card readers, number of usb ports and battery life probably makes a bigger difference. That and size/weight.

No they are not all the same. Screen quality varies quite a bit for example. Batteries too plus the internal components like hard drives. As others have posted IBM sold it’s laptop business to the Chinese 10 years ago and the Chinese make very high quality computers as well as cheap stuff.

I have a Sony Vaio, the wife’s similar spec’d and price Lenevo puts it to shame in build quality, weight and performance. I can’t wait for mine to die.

i don’t rate the sonys either. years ago everyone would have said by a toshiba, but i’m typing this on one, and it’s frankly not a patch on the dell i had 2 years ago. dell really are on top of it IMO, and their backup is excellent too.

It comes down to two things imo – build quality, and the annoyance of the bundled software.

If you only want to surf and write the odd doc then DEFINITELY look at a Chromebook. The user experience beats a Windows laptop on every count*, and they only cost £200.

* in the things Chromebook can do, which is surfing and documents and actually quite a lot of other stuff. The most common reason for Chromebook not being suitable is wanting to store music on it.

Rated my old Sony. But that was when they had magnesium cases. Then WiFi became essential, and they all had to go back to plastic, cos the wifi range was pants.
Battery on that lasted 8 years. Compare that to 1 year for all of my Macbook batteries (instant death), 6 months for Dell (instant death), and 5-6 years on the Asus (still going, but just dropping down to 90-95% capacity now).
Physical build quality of the Sony, Asus, and Apple were similar, just the macbook was shinier (and I expect that on a lappy costing 4x the price). Physical build quality of Dell was dire. Bendy lid, flimsy plastic, and weighs a ton.

Going for the Lenovo, also cos it’s one of the last few with a lid on the bottom to allow HDD/SSD and RAM to be swapped. Everything is a guitar pick job now to upgrade, so spec it wisely at purchase.

I was gonna say look at Chromebooks.

But I’ve regretted going too cheap on Laptops in the past TBH, as they were so slow and frustrating to use.

Picked up a Vaio ultrabook direct from Sony’s outlet site a while ago and it’s a thing of beauty (apart from the confusing windows 8).

Screens vary a lot, for me it’s the ergonomics that make or break them though, I ordered a nicely specced one a while back- can’t remember the make offhand, and everything about it was right except for the keyboard and mousepad, which were orrible and just ruined the entire thing for me. It’s like a bike, if the contact points are bad it’ll feel bad.

Trying some in shops is worthwhile imo.

But I’ve regretted going too cheap on Laptops in the past TBH, as they were so slow and frustrating to use.

Yeah but Chromebook’s different – an order of magnitude faster than this i7 workstation I’m on now, and cost an order of magnitude less 🙂

Dell are well specced but the build quality compared to lenovo is pants, my 1yr work old dell is cracked already, my 7yr work old lenovo got given to the new grad when I upgraded, and is still going strong, if it wasn’t for me needing more oomph from the processor i’d still be on the lenovo.

The lenovo was 3x the price of the dell mind.

Yeah but Chromebook’s different

Sorry I should have made it more clear I was on about cheap laptops, I’ve not tried a Chromebook so wouldn’t like to comment. They do look promising tbh.

Really is instant on. It comes on before you can even get your fingers onto the keyboard. Also very light, and doesn’t get at all warm in use, so very comfortable for lap use.

I’m buying it for someone who really is totally and utterly clueless as regards all things “IT”, so I am wary of buying a Chromebook in case she needs to ask someone for help – I guess it is more likely that her “helper” would have some Windoze knowledge ….

Can’t put iTunes on a chromebook though 🙁

I find the biggest difference is in build quality rather than speed.

My own Lenovo (and prior to that, Sony Vaio) and work Acer S3 are metal bricks, with great screens and lovely keyboards and just have a feel of better quality in every little aspect.

The other two work laptops that colleagues were just issued with are plastic Samsung things, with wobbly keyboards and fexible case.

HP ZBook here courtesy of work, appears particularly well made. Still sits on a windows platform though 👿

I’m buying it for someone who really is totally and utterly clueless as regards all things “IT”, so I am wary of buying a Chromebook in case she needs to ask someone for help

They almost certainly won’t, it’s that simple. If they ask you for help you could Google it anyway.

emsz – itunes is not supported, but Google Play music is, and you can migrate your music over apparently:

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/3217385?hl=en-GB

Oh, and my dell power supply has just started making a crackly electric noise. In short, dell are cheap for a reason 🙁

Can’t put iTunes on a chromebook though

Good. Dreadful piece of software, and I actually quite like apple stuff in general!

Edit – I bought a cheapish (£500) Dell laptop discounted from their outlet store last year and regret it on a nearly daily basis. Windows 8 does my head in, but the quality of the laptop isn’t great. The screen is avergae and the battery life isn’t good at all. It started up quickly when new but is now pretty slow, but I think that’s more a Window 8 issue.

Dell are well specced but the build quality compared to lenovo is pants, my 1yr work old dell is cracked already, my 7yr work old lenovo got given to the new grad when I upgraded, and is still going strong, if it wasn’t for me needing more oomph from the processor i’d still be on the lenovo.

The lenovo was 3x the price of the dell mind

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. I have expensive dell kit at work (probably 3x the price of your lenovo…it aint cheap) and you could literally hit nails on the head with it and it’d take it like a boss.

t all the brands offer more or less the same quality of product

Very much no. With the exception of cheap laptops are all more or less crappy 😉

Having said that, my sister has a cheap lenovo ultrabook (about 5-600) and it’s impressively sturdy for the money.

@sobriety – I unplugged mine from the power sockets in the conference table at work once. Sparks and a flash several inches long, and tripped the breaker for that whole section of the building!
Dell PSU, not plugged in to the lappy, just the mains adapter in to the mains.

If it wasn’t for the specific s/w I want/need, I’d be getting a Chromebook. If they had a bit more than 16gig, I’d be getting one of them anyway to dual boot.

Wating for my laptop to arrive from these guys.

For just under £500 managed to get a spec with just what I wanted, no bundled s/w and W7 rather than W8 – we use them for our work laptops/PCs and haven’t had any problems

If they had a bit more than 16gig, I’d be getting one of them anyway to dual boot

I think you can get >16Gb ones, but you cannot dual boot afaik. It’s locked down, but maybe you can properly hack it…

EDIT

320Gb Acer Chromebook. The smaller ones are also upgradeable apparently.

Also You can not only dual boot but you can install Linux and use a hotkey to chroot between the environments, so you can switch without even having to reboot! EVEN MORE AWESOME!

EVEN MORE AWESOME!

You wrongle.

I know about the chroot and dual boot options. Either way I’d be well past half full on the SSD by the time it’s all set up, leaving barely enough to image a camera SD card in an emergency.

Even if they started putting in 32 or 64gig M-Sata card in by default, I’d have one. And I don’t like the idea of guitar pick surgery to swap to a larger SSD.

edit: If ipads and nexuses and other “cloud” devices can have 64gig local storage for music/vids then chromebooks really ought to have that too imho.

For typical user, though, doing mostly email, surfing and maybe some google docs, they are ace. Oh and remote desktop work too.

Either way I’d be well past half full on the SSD by the time it’s all set up

Just get the 320Gb hd version then.

Or.. wouldn’t it be theoretically possible to copy ChromeOS over onto some other laptop..?

Can put ChromiumOS on any laptop. Might stick that on the eeePC again when the Lenovo turns up. Boot times were something like 20sec from power switch to usable, but then the bios is very much a PC type, and not optimised like chrome devices.
If that 320gig was an SSD, even just a 64Gig, I’d be clicking the buy button right now (edit: even though it costs 100 euros more here to get one from a store rather than google play store, in order to get the UK keyboard)

ChromiumOS isn’t quite the same though. It’s just normal Linux with Chromium on it, made to look a bit like Chrome. It comes with a fair bit of standard Linux app dross afaik, which I think defeats the object of trying to mimic Chrome.

Chromebook Pixel is available with 64Gb SSD.

Not cheap tho 🙂

They’re close enough. Both are chrome-looking gui on top of a Linux base. ChromiumOS obviously comes with a few developer bits+bobs, with terminal being the first you’d touch. ChromeOS has a whole handful of non-free binary things to support specific chromebook etc. hardware, secure boot etc.
Wouldn’t say it comes with Linux dross. not like a proper linux install anyway.

If you can get ChromeOS on a standard laptop, then I expect it’ll need to be hacked with bits from ChromiumOS to get it to boot (and remove the naughty non-free Google bits).

All of that is pretty pointless for most people. Certainly for those wondering what budget laptop to buy. Fine for hackers that have an old laptop going spare and to mess about on.

My plan is to build ChromiumOS on my Vaio P series, and possibly fit an SSD. If I can shoe-horn it into the InstantOn feature it should be pretty damn close to a Chromebook, but 1/3 the size, and also bootable into Windows 7 or Lubuntu for work 🙂

If you only want to surf and write the odd doc then DEFINITELY look at a Chromebook

+1

I have a Chromebook and love it. It had a slightly dicky keyboard and I got a replacement from Argos. I logged in and within minutes I was back where I left off on the old device. It’s orders of magnitude easier than moving local files from one machine to another.

Sure the build and screen quality is not that great, but it was only £180. If you want a device that helps you get things done without worrying about the hardware you’re doing it on, Chromebooks are well worth a look.

As a subscriber to Spotify the lack of local music (e.g. iTunes) is of no concern at all to me.

I’ve just bought a cheap laptop from PCWorld – £280 for a Compaq. Seems ok to me, in fact things happen at the speed of light compared to my old laptop (which may be something like 8 years old!).
Windows 8 is, err, interesting…

My £2.6k (work) Dell Precision is a behemoth of a machine.
Has packed up a few times though, & now the battery refuses to charge.

I’d be somewhat annoyed if it were my own money. 😐

Windows 8 is, err, interesting…

Try Classic shell, it removes the “interestingness” of windows 8 replacing it with boring old Vista, XP, 7 or whatever OS interface you like.