Allo peeps,

I've been tasked with finding a suitable laptop online for some mates but to be honest i'm more of a mac geek and tend to have a panic attack if come within 5ft of a windows machine, despite my protestations they will not stretch their budget to a macbook pro despite dribbling over mine all the time so i'm after some advice on what to recommend.

Preferably 15" or larger screen, decent graphics card, 4gb ram, 500gb ish HD, will be used mostly for browsing web, online media, watching films, music, occasional games but nothing too fancy or resource hungry and no so called business use – they've got an HD tv so i guess one with a suitable port to connect the two.

Dunno what else to ask for really?…….bit out of my depth with this one but they have even less of a clue than i do so any help from on here would be appreciated.

Cheers!

Second hand Mac Book Pro?

Sorry…

Actually, that might not be quite as daft as it sounds; the iPad thingy is about to launch over here, so I'd reckon it's possible a few folk might be looking to sell their MBPs to fund an iPad purchase. I could be completely wrong, but worth a punt, possibly? It's just an idea.

Yeah….I tried that one on them but they're a bit snobby bout 2nd hand stuff unfortunately, otherwise that'd be the obvious solution.

When my Mac pro died and was being looked at in the repair shop I asked the bloke about windows laptops and he said if you want similar build quality of a Mac buy a Sony Vaio and make sure it's got windows 7. I opted to get a basic MacBook instead as I really didn't want to go back to windows.

yeah the vaios are good laptops. They do a fair few and you will get a good one for £700- 800

Cheers…i'll start looking at them online….

When my Mac pro died

How the hell did you 'kill' it? 😯

new sony vaio e-series would fit the bill – plus come with a blu-ray disc (in your budget)

Talkmada my logic board died 🙁 £900 for a new one 😯

£900?????
😯 😯 😯

Gulp…

(Goes to check up on MP, give it a stroke, makes sure it's ok…)

I'm looking at the sony vaio vpceb1soe/wi at the moment – looks good and all reviews seem to praise it, at that price they could afford an external monitor to use with it. I use the Acer 24" Led S243HL with my Macbook and it's a fantastic monitor – it'd be a good match for the sony.

Ahhh…stress over…If they go for it that is.

Cheers!

Don't get a Toshiba, their customer care stinks

Grands worth of nine month old laptop needed new Hard drive, Motherboard and Keyboard
Took them a month to repair under warranty and then sent it back with a different OS, Vista Business instead of my Home Premium

When I complained that it wouldn't activate (obviously because I had the wrong product key) offered me a recovery disc for 30 quid
Mentioned it might be nice for free as a goodwill gesture and got told basically to f*** off

What a load of old tosh

NOT a dell.

Just bought an Acer, having run one as a company laptop for 5 years, very happy with it (4810TZ).

Got a Dell laptop. Good.
Got and Acer Laptop. Better.
Got a Vaio laptop betterer.
Got a Macbook (£579 refurb) Betterist.

I have just ordered an Acer Aspire – 4gig ram, 500gig HD, dual core processor from eBuyer – £400 inc. VAT. It would do everything your friend would require (I am a Mac person normally but couldn't justify the money for something to be used to store music/pictures on and to browse the 'net.)

Cheers all, I sent them a link to ebuyer for the aforementioned sony / acer monitor and that's the deal they're going for, lets hope their toddler doesn't spill juice over this laptop……