Been a while since I bought a laptop and I’m hopelessly out of touch, but need to move quite quickly as my own work lap-top just died on me. Last time I bought on line direct from Dell.

Intended use is work so, internet, Word PowerPoint, Excel and no doubt will also be used for Facebook etc, but no gaming likely.

For a budget of £350-400 am I best to buy something direct from eg Dell,or another or buy in a store?

Any particularly recommended good brands or definite ‘avoids’?

Thanks for the help 🙂

Consider John Lewis, they’re doing 3 year guarantees on a lot of laptops. Have a pretty big range in their larger stores.

Thought about that and will try and go into town and have a look tomorrow. Any thoughts on brands to favour or avoid? In past I have had ell and HP, but no idea if they are still in the running or if other brands are better VFM

Tons of choice, hard to choose really. Maybe look for the ones that have been heavily discounted, but then check the processors as they might be end of line and being replaced by something with significantly better battery life or something,

You’re nearly in Microsoft Surface territory there, very much worth a look.

Thanks, Molgrips, but by the time I add on the peripherals I would need the budget is stretching too far.

Digging around, the Lenovo Z50 from John Lewis seems to tick all the boxes:

http://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-z50-laptop-amd-a10-8gb-ram-1tb-15-6-/p2107441?colour=Black

Seems to be a few different versions with different CPUs in them, but the one I’m looking has an Quad-core AMD A10-7300, which I know is pretty basic – but its not the laptop equivalent of a BSO – is it?

Any opinions on this deal gratefully received!

OK, last Q. I found another one that fits the bill. Asus X555LA from PC world:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/asus-x555la-15-6-laptop-black-10135223-pdt.html

Differetn CPU (Intel i5 vs AMD10 in Lenovo)from the Lenovo I was looking at in John Lewis

Anyone got an opinion about Asus vs Lenovo?

Between those two I’d probably go for the Asus, although the £220 reduction is massive BS, that was never a £600 laptop (except for the two weeks it was priced as such to qualify for the discount tag). It has a better processor and a full HD screen.

Thanks, Bimbler 🙂

Who cares? For your intended use a BSO would be fine – there’s nothing particularly demanding on your list. For personal use my normal recommendation given that spec would be a refurb Lenovo from various sources and save your pennies (I’m typing on a £100 one from ebay which would do all you want just fine, though you’ll pay a bit more from a reseller with warranty) – things may be a bit different for work use, though I’m not sure why it should be, and the ones I’d recommend were originally sold for business use.

Personally I’d go for a Lenovo over an Asus due to my perception of the difference in build quality – though I may be out of date there, but I’d expect the keyboard at least to be better on the Lenovo. However over-riding that is that I’d never buy a laptop from PC World (see other current thread on here), whilst JL is one of the best places to buy from.

That’s also useful, thanks aracer. Will do a bit more research

Slight thread hijack. Also looking for laptop ideally no more than £350 but after a 13.3 screen and ssd. Don’t need too much, ideally 4gm ram and 64mb ssd but really struggling to find anything. Best so far is Asus tp300la on Ebuyer but it doesn’t have a ssd but otherwise looks good. Am I expecting too much at this price?

andymac – Member

SSD drives in laptops tend to bump up the prices. Tbh I reckon you’d be better buying a laptop of the desired specs and chucking a SSD in there yourself, 256GB drives can be had for about £50/60 quid these days.

Gonny stick one in mine at some point myself, the 5400rpm drives are the real bottle kneck in my system. Probably looking at a 500GB one myself.

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/compatible-upgrade-for/HP-Compaq/pavilion-15-p189sa

Thanks for the reply. I thought that might be the case. Annoyingly the Asus model below, the tp200 transformer, in UK spec comes with 2gb and 32gb ssd, but in USA has 4gb and 64gb ssd.

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/N0Z48ESABU-HP-ProBook-450-G2_1797453.html

And you still have £50 for an external HDD.

We were looking at the (better) HP’s, but bought a daft powerful Cube instead from them.