We're looking for a new laptop to replace our Dell which is falling to bits! It will be used for web browsing, very basic photo editing plus word/excel etc so I don't think we need anything too flashy. Is there anything in particular to look out for or avoid - such as specific processors?
From a quick flick around we quite liked the look of this Samsung:
Any good?
Thanks
Slightly over budget, but this is a fantastic laptop for the money. Slim, excellent battery life. We have an older version of same range.
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/5083417/Trail/searchtext%3EACER.htm
Thanks - it looks good, but a bit more than I want to spend.
If you are near a Currys/PCWorld clearance place they have an extra 30% of their cheap refurb laptops.
Wife got a Toshiba widescreen Pentium thingy with 4gb Ram 500gb HDD Windows 7 for £320 at weekend. Blooody huuuge but is essentially a home pc for her given she has a wee dinky long battery life Dell thingy from work.
Screen seems pretty good too.
Acer go some good laptops at that price point too. Ours has been faultless in it's first year.
We got an Acer for £400 which has been OK but the fan packed up and was repaired under warranty and it periodically shuts down due to over heating. Charger socket has now broken too so off to be repaired. 22 months old.
With such straight-forward usage, you'd have to try pretty hard to get get a laptop which won't do what you want spec-wise.
I'd suggest therefore that what will separate out the models for you at that price point are things like screen and keyboard quality, and the only way you'll check this is first-hand. Go to a PC World with a large display section and go type on a few, see what feels good to you.
Standard laptop-buying advice applies as ever. Avoid happy shopper brands and stick with known names. HP/Compaq, Toshiba, Lenovo, Dell etc are all good. I've not had a lot of experience with Samsung, which would suggest to me that they're "alright" (if they were particularly good or particularly bad then I'd have had more dealings with them).
i picked up a Compaq CQ10 netbook in tesco yesterday for £139. if all your doing is browsing and cropping the odd photo, it might be all you need