Hi all,
Heading to uni soon, and Id like to get a laptop (will be my first one). Not a computer bod at all, so hopefully someone can give me some advice 🙂
Firstly, dont really know how much laptops go for, but looking in the £3-4-500 region (if thats feasible).

Laptop will be used for general work, very occasional and basic video editing, photo editing, watching videos/playing music, maybe the odd game (but not much if at all). Maybe some CAD too, but not too sure on that.

So- any recommendations?

Ta, Duane 🙂

Ha Ha Ha . .I'll get it in first Apple and if you are skint get one of the cheap white polycarb macbooks…

anyway no doubt 100 posters will be along soon to point out my heresy and that you can buy a compaq for 300 rips at Morrisons. Indeed you can but being fair the mac should do all you ask without little need to trouble any little grey cells giving you more time to go out doing student type things or biking…

but now I will leave you to read messages from the ones who disagree most strongly to anyone who gets around the endless chore of installing drivers and removing virii by avoiding windows like the plague.. unless they are followers of a certain little penguin

I had thought about a Mac, but, and I might be wrong here, but dont you have to pay a lot more for a Mac of the equivalent spec of a PC?

yes, generally you do. you do tend to get a lot of included software though.

have a look at dells – me, family and friends have had several and they've all been very very good. dell have an outlet area on their website with stuff going cheaper than new – might be worth a look in there, again, I know a few people with 'outlet' ones – indeed, mine was from them when they had their ebay outlet. basically half price on a work-station class laptop.

mac

if you go the apple route, wait until you have a .ac.uk email address and use the student discount.

for most of what your suggesting a mac would do, but if you want to do CAD the only packages worth knowing are, currently, windows only. Which would mean buying a copy of windows to go on the mac which gets pricey.

Something else to consider, Windows 7 will be out shortly and having used Vista and 7 on the SO's laptop i would wait till windows 7 is out. Vista is steaming pile of ****. I haven't had the pleasure of working with such a crap un-user friendly piece of **** since DOS was normal.

Something else CAD can be fairly demanding on the hardware so if you are sure it may make sense to spend a little more for something that can handle it.

No need to wait for Windows 7 to come out if you buy the right laptop you can get a free upgrade when it's released. Apple will cost you a lot more and not sure it's worth it for you want it for, that and loads of free software available for PCs.

For the money your talking I'd forget about the games side of it there's not going to be a one that will play newer games at a decent speed or at all for that price.

Both my kids have Dell Studio 15 laptops. A decent spec, including decent graphics, was about £500. My son plays games on his, including new ones, and the graphics have coped fine.

what sort of CAD will you be doing?

Macbook.

Rather than just telling you what brand to buy, here are a couple of pointers:

CAD and photo editing suggest that a bigger screen would be better for you ( not just the actual size, but the resolution – measured in xxxx * xxxx pixels ).

Recently developed games and laptops tend not to work too well together due to the graphics, and general, processing requirements. If you want to run a game developed a couple of years ago that's not too graphics intensive on a laptop that might well be fine.

A laptop will tend to have a lower actual speed for a given specification, due to using smaller, more power efficient components. That's the pay-off for it being portable.

Macs are fine, especially if you don't have too much grey matter, and don't need to run any specialist software. They are also as pointed out not very good on the bang for buck side of things.

In buying a laptop work out what you want first, then what you need/can afford. From there you can then start looking at different brands and models.
That said, the Dell outlet is a good place to buy a laptop if they have something that suits you. That's where 3 of my 4 laptops have come from.

"The only CAD packages don't run on Macs?" you'd better go tell the Sir Richard Rogers Partnership where they run a mac house so you think he must have been using etcha sketch to design all his award winning buildings then.

CAD should not be too processor intensive unless you start 3d rendering.

Those pointing to Dell's are quite right, seem good bargains as hardware goes. But you are limited to running Windows or Linux whilst the argument there is good free software out there from the likes of Google although partially true, none of these do reflect the Platinum quality of the Apple OS itself and the free Apple iLife applications that comes bundled with every mac for music making and play back, video editing, photographs.

From the quality of the interface, the effortless ability to load music pictures and videos onto the machine, then pull a song from your music library into a video project editing some video taken on a video cam or compact digital camera, add some photo stills, blend any amount of material you can find on the internet then add further soundtrack from your own compositions before exporting out to a very efficient build in dvd production application. There is nothing in the pc world with anything like it without blowing a few hundred quid on some lite versions of Adobe's software packages and even then they are still not as good.

The system relies on built in global open standards for file saving including mp4 for audio / video png for images and pdf, no need to get sold or freeware pdf writers as Microsoft will not bundle any software that it has its own software working in its own proprietary formats. Also you will not be needing to worry about anti-virus software or getting trojans and other filth removed at a later date, which taking a look at often friends who seem very cautious with pc's appear to an often suffer major frustration with owning windows based hardware through downtime caused by infections of some kind or other.

If you ever find you have to go to Autocad you can at a cost run windows on a mac laptop, but if you are proposing to do pro grade cad then even with windows you should be thinking of closer to a grand for a lap top.

What course are you doing?
I did Mech Eng at uni and you often needed to install programs for projects and stuff that were Windows only. So, I'd wouldn't rule out getting an Apple, but just do some research first & find out what you need.

Are you budgeting for a printer as well? I would have thought you'd need one at some point – and I'd also get an external hard drive. No need to spend more on a 'portable' laptop specific one. Just get a mains powered one – you get a lot more memory for your money. And you can back up your files on it regularly. This will save the major panics when you have a problem, as you have a nicely backed up copy on another drive.
Friend of mine almost lost his final yr project the day before handing it in, as his laptop keeled over – so some kind of back up device is a good idea.

Have a look at Ebuyer. They always seem to have a good deal on HP laptops with some Ebuyer specific high spec ones (i.e. more memory or bigger battery)

Friend of mine almost lost his final yr project the day before handing it in, as his laptop keeled over – so some kind of back up device is a good idea.

My laptop died the day before my dissertation presentation! Backups are a very, very good idea as they allowed me to shove my work onto a mates laptop and use that instead!

I'm running a Dell Studio 1550 with gfx upgrade that plays modern(ish) games pretty well and was under 500 squids for a non-outlet one. Had some issues with the drivers under vista but an upgrade to seven fixed that outright.

As stumpy says ask the deparment some questions before buying anything as a lot of software is windows only and whilst you can probably get a mac equivalent the teaching will probably be done on the windows one.

edit: also check to see if you get a msdnaa license (and what it covers – e.g. I can get windows but not office) through the uni…then you don't have to worry about buying upgrades for windows etc.. as you'll get it free although you usually have to wait for longer before the operating systems are available to you.

Dell laptop. got mine on the desk here now, it's er 5 to6 years old 1.4ghz and 1 gb ram and still running windows 7 sweet as a nut.

HP/compaq/acer = dire shite…. really poor build.

also get the biggest pen drive you can afford 32gb are 40 ish now.. VERY useful at uni for documents and moving data and keeping important backups of dissertations, i lost mine in a power strike on the local power grid. i used syncbackup and got a copy off the pen drive that was a session old (lost about 500 words) saved my ass!!

Dell – no. Too much annoying crap installed on there and bad customer service. And bad build quality.

Go for toshiba – easily disablable junk software on it, or there's HP – I haven't had to disable anythign on this one and it's quite nice. And the build quality's good!

If you can spend £500 definitely do. £300 laptops are very crappy and cheapy by comparison to £500 ones. And if you have the choice go small – so much nicer to handle and carry about – only go big if you really have a need.

Macs are great, but pricey and you can forget games. I'd be using one if it weren't for the requirement to play games.

LOL think you have dell and HP mixed up..
bad customer service ? i deal personally with over 200 laptops and dell are excellent whenever we have an issue. often sending out HDD's even when the laptops have back to base warentees.

toshiba are good too i would agree.

HP/compaq are the WORST for installed crap, inc norton, adsl suppliers, free (but you need to buy it later) software.

Dell – no. Too much annoying crap installed on there and bad customer service. And bad build quality.

Dont know about their laptops to be fair, but I have a Precision T3400 here as my desktop at work and it's about the best built computer I've ever seen. The case alone must weigh in at about 5kg, drive slots are well thoughts out, whole thing is still running smoothly after 18 months continuous use and abuse and it's nigh-silent.

With VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop, you can install and run Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac, so you can get the best of both worlds.

Dell – no. Too much annoying crap installed on there and bad customer service. And bad build quality.

not my experience in any of the ones my friends and family have (must know of 10 currently used dells, laptop and workstation desktop). no one i know has had to use their support, but at a sales stage they couldn't have been more helpful or informative.

any installed sw is easily removed, and there's the vostro range which is aimed at business and doesn't have any waffle installed anyway (look under the 'for business' bit of the website, remove the 3yr on site warranty and add vat and bob's your uncle 🙂

HP/compaq are the WORST for installed crap, inc norton, adsl suppliers, free (but you need to buy it later) software.

Well, I'm on an HP laptop now. The only intrusive crap that popped up was the mediasmart toolbar which was easily disabled by clicking on it (ie not with msconfig). There's also HP health check which I thought I'd give a try rather than disable straight away. There's mediasmart stuff which I am gonna keep cos it helps use the tv/blu ray player etc, but nothin pop-uppy. Oh, it does have Norton yes but I thought they all had some such on them to start with.

In contrast, my wife's 4 year old dell had this stupid thing that kept playing an annoying noise and popping up telling me somethign was wrong when it wasn't – and I could not get rid of it. Later, dells were being shipped with what ammounted to spyware on them from what I read – very troublesome.

Oh yeah, and the Vaio P series my wife just got is a right pain. It comes with Google toolbar on it which is a pain (and unneccessary when you have windows sidebar) especially when it hammers the machien indexing and whatnot. I had no end of trouble trying to get it working nicely since it has less power to waste on this junk.

My Dad's dell is quite ropey (ie slow) and the battery only lasted a year. The screen isn't great and the touchpad has weird sensitivity issues.

So my fave laptops so far have been Toshiba first and HP second. In case you were wondering I got this HP because it was a great spec for a good reduced price.

nice to hear a good experience of HP systems. we run HP and dell servers here.. no issues but i would never run a hp/compaq laptop even with a re-install of windows.

Duane personally i would go to somewhere to feel the units. get your mitts on a laptop or 3 and feel the quality.

agree though tosh are good quality but they are getting more and more crap on them. my GF's (golfchicks duane) 1525 is bloomin excellent she only paid 325 quid for it.. yer it's a bit cheapy plastic but it's good VFM.