We’re about to ditch our old family PC and replace it with a new laptop.

Any particular recommendations or ideas ? Makes, models or retailers worth looking at?

(Probably looking to spend £600-£800)

🙄

What do you want it to do? If it’s for everything apart from gaming on, it’s too much money, if you’re gaming on it buy a desktop.

£350 will get you a 2nd gen i5 with 4gb of ram and a decent sized hard drive, and pretty decent onboard graphics- will struggle with modern games and beast everything else. Worth trying beforehand if you can to see if you get on with the keys and pad layout (but if it’s a desktop replacement I guess you’ll be using a seperate mouse?). Above that point lives rapidly diminishing returns- you can go with bigger screens etc for a bit more but you lose portability and ask more of the gpu.

We live in the exciting dawn of onboard graphics that don’t suck but lots of companies will try and charge you extra for an entrey-level standalone card that does little for you.

IMO of course 😉

I recently bought a new laptop. Below your budget, but anyway…

I ended up getting a 17.3″ Acer laptop from Acer direct. I think it’s a 5750. It’s an i5 with 4gb of RAM (hmmm, might be 6) and a 750 FB hdd. It cost £530 but has since gone up to £550.

I got it as I wanted a larger, hi-res screen than the standard 15.6″ screens for photo editing and possibly Solidworks.

I’m very please with it so far – there was some crap software on there that I uninstalled, demo stuff like Norton backup & McAfee AV. I installed Microsoft Security Essentials and it seems really good so far.

Acer direct were good to deal with & sent it out quickly. I’ve only had it about a month, so can’t really comment on reliability. It’s also pretty large because of that screen.

Most important things to decide what you want it for & try to decide on a spec. Otherwise you will go rind and round in circles looking at dozens of laptops that are very similar…

Hopefully now someone will be along to rubbish everything I’ve written & kick off a few more ideas for you.

Oh…one last thing. It isn’t in the description, but the laptop I got has 1 usb 3 port.

This is it…
http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer%5FAspire%5F7750%5FCore%5Fi5%5FLaptop%5FLX%2ERN802%2E025/version.asp?PID=384

£500 will get you all the laptop you need unless you are a gamer/graphics person/video editor/etc. Plenty for general home use. I got mine from saveonlaptops who have good prices and quick delivery.

13″ macbook pro with educational discount

you wont look back,

will also retain about 40% of its value after 2 years,

im after a new one for editing etc…. dunno what laptop to buy mac or pc 🙁

Perfect, thanks for the help. Quite like the look of that Acer!

It’s very difficult to make specific recommendations without something to go on. It’s like going “I need a bike, what’s good?”

Are you looking for a desktop replacement or something small and light to spod from whilst watching the telly? Is it for gaming, office work, video editing, web surfing, photoshoppery, what?

Generic advice would be “go for a well known brand, get as much RAM as you can” – above and beyond that, who knows.

Poke a few in a retail shop before you buy anything, then you don’t end up with a horrific keyboard or a poor quality screen, things that won’t show up by looking at a spec sheet.

13″ macbook pro with educational discount
you wont look back,
will also retain about 40% of its value after 2 years,

More like about 65-70% after 2 years, and 50-60% after 3. They hold their value very well.

im after a new one for editing etc…. dunno what laptop to buy mac or pc

If you can stomach the extra initial cost, for doing creative things such as video editing, photography and music, Macs still hold their own not least because of some fairly good software that comes bundled in for free, but also cos they’re still kind of de facto standard issue when it comes to professionals in their respective fields. Not to say anything can’t be done on a PC, far from it, but Macs still have an advantage.

Macs also have a better, more robust OS too, and aren’t subject to the millions of viruses that Windows PC’s are.

But they do cost more… Try one, you’ll quickly form an opinion for yourself whether you think they’re worth the extra or not…

dirtyrider – Member

13″ macbook pro with educational discount

For whatever it’ll be worth, I just bought an MSI with a higher spec across the board than the 13″ Pro, for under a third of the price (2/5ths of the education discount price)

If you are looking to pay £600-800, then get a £500 laptop, and replace the hard drive with an SSD ( solid state drive ) it’ll use less power ( so longer battery running time ), and speed the laptop up nicely.