https://www.ebuyer.com/861447-hp-250-g6-i5-laptop-4wu13es-4wu13es-abu

https://www.ebuyer.com/843947-lenovo-v130-laptop-81hn00hvuk

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8657431

A month ago I was looking at a new laptop on ebuyer. Many of the i3/i5 machines I was looking at ebuyer customer services confirmed that the ram was non-expandable as the 4gb was soldered in (?)

There’s loads of laptops that come with 4GB soldered to the board, but there’s still a slot for an additional card. Admittedly most spec sheets are terrible don’t make it very clear.

That’s good to hear. I did see it on some high end business machines. I7’s that come with 4gb expandable to 32.

@Earl

Yeah, those are all examples of terrible spec sheets.

The first two have 4GB soldered to the board, but have an empty slot so possibly 20GB Maximum, but a more realistic 8GB would be an easy job. This is becoming more an more standard these days, especially with smaller units.

The last is a standard 4GB in a slot so a maximum of whatever the board will accept, probably 16GB as it’s a bit older I think.

None of that info comes from your links, they’re crap, HP site is no better, I had to hunt around to be sure.

That’s good to hear. I did see it on some high end business machines. I7’s that come with 4gb expandable to 32.

That can often be wrong too, sellers take the theoretical maximum from the slot and double it, without taking into account the fact you can’t remove the on-board.

I’ve seen my Laptop sold as “4GB only” and “32GB Maximum” but neither is true. The maximum is actually 20GB – 16GB in the slot (the maximum the board will take for a single card) and the on-board 4GB. really, the optimum is 8GB for reasons my old-school workmate always tells me, but I forget. Lots do still come with 2 slots though.

We manage about 3500 end users at the moment, I don’t have anyone who actually needs a 16GB laptop, let alone a 32GB, the ones we manage as status symbols really, they want the best XPS John Lewis sells for streaming Netflix on their boat, or because they’re so important they need an i7 to run Outlook. The ‘power users’ we have all use desktops because they’re better in every way, apart from the obvious moving about thing.

Got my daughter an HP Omen for school / gaming. Separate graphics card, 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, 8GB ram, £800 from PC World. Looks cool with a funky lit keyboard thats customisable, great display.

Thinking of binning my mac for one as swaying back towards Windows 10 again.

Well, after too much research and three browsing sessions instore, this was my list in order of preference ready for Black Friday ‘deals’.

1) Dell XPS, 13.3″, £1200, 13.3″, i5 8250U, ports galore including thunderbolt, 11hr battery and the smallest. Not likely to be discounted by anything that will put it close to the other options.

2) HP Envy, 13.3″, £850, i5 8250U, no thunderbolt but does have a USB-C and a Displayport (confusingly this is exactly the same as USB-C but with a different logo and function) 14hr battery life, and low end dedicated Nvidia graphics.  Speakers appear much better than the Ideapad and Yoga.  Only a few mm’s bigger than the XPS.

3) Lenovo Ideapad 530S, £850, 14″, i7-8550U, good range of ports but suspect it cannot do dual external monitors as its only display output appears to be HDMI.  Poor 8hr battery life.

4) Lenovo Yoga 720, £800, 13.3″, i5 8250U, decent range of ports including displayport and thunderbolt but no SD slot, 10hr battery, smaller 128gb SSD drive than the rest, rubbish speakers.

I have swayed towards all four of these laptops but settled on the HP Envy, then I noticed HP had the Envy on their own website for ‘black friday week’ at £699, (£686 with a discount from my employers ‘perks’ website).  Made a note of it but then noticed the stock was going down daily and decided to go in today and get PC World to price match it before it went out of stock.  Whilst waiting I noticed the model number was different but couldn’t see any difference in spec so crossed my fingers they wouldn’t notice.  However, we didn’t even get that far, apparently PC World only price match with certain retailers which is a pretty poor show!  They would not offer any movement on the price.

Walked out, phoned the insurance company and they agreed to cancel the gift voucher and give me cash instead, knocking 9% (£70) off the value due to discounts they get with suppliers.  Did a quick bit of maths based on the current prices, rather than topping up £100 instore, I top up £8 at HP and order direct.  So I placed my order earier, and just now decided to try and find the difference in models.  Turns out its a newer processor, faster with a slightly smaller cache, but overall is a better performer than the one in PC World.  Not that I will ever notice…

(i5-8265U v i5-8250U if anyone is interested)

arrghhh I’ve tried to fix that formatting four times now, and I’m on my crunchy old chromebook so limited methods to reformat the text in notepad or something!

(i5-8265U v i5-8250U if anyone is interested)

OOhh … faster CPU. 😀

My Acer is still good and I think I have found my Skype login etc so will try Cortana … colleague (IT bloke) told me Cortana was a waste of space … 😀

Don’t know about Cortana, but whilst I was waiting for the sales person who could not price match, I noticed Microsoft claiming how much faster/battery efficient their Edge browser is, compared to firefox and chrome.  I think it said 98% longer battery life when watching streaming video compared to firefox and/or chrome which is a pretty big claim, anyone switched to Edge and have any thoughts?

… anyone switched to Edge and have any thoughts?

Yes, Edge is fast but I am used to Firefox so will stick to that for a while but will keep a note on battery life saving if I am travelling as Firefox can be very hungry.

Amazon have Microsoft surface pro 6 with keyboard for £749. Don’t know if that’s any help tho.

Asus UX331UN £749 at John Lewis – 8th gen i5 / 8 GB / 256 GB SSD / NVidia graphics / USB-C / light and skinny as in an aluminium case / fingerprint reader / pen compatible 13 inch HD screen apparently

14 inch i3 / 4GB / 256 GB SSD / on board graphics for £529 / £549.

We’ve had a HP Envy 17″ laptop for a few years. Big machine, but is gaming capble as it has an i7 and a GTX video card.

Upgraded with to 16GB Ram (from 12) and whacked in a 1TB SSD (has 2 drive bays so the HD went in as number 2)

Seriously quick even now it’s about 4 years old. Doesn’t play games quite as fast as my son’s Gaming machine, but the GFX card is older.  We also have a HP Pavilion 15″ – standard bit of kit, but we upgraded with SSD and to 8GB. Quick.

We also got a second hand HP Spectre XT, really small, thin and light, but you can’t upgrade the RAM as it’s just 4GB. That said, it’s an ideal college laptop – again SSD drive as standard.