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Help buying laptop

George Farmer

George Farmer

Founder
UKAPS Team
Joined
30 Jun 2007
Messages
7,098
Location
Cambridgeshire
Hi all,

A bit of an odd request.... A friend of a friend is after a new laptop but is quite specific about the specs for whatever reason.

Here's the spec list, literally copied and pasted from their email.

Operating system needs to be Windows XP Professional or Windows 7 Professional 32 bit NOT 64 bit
DVD RW drive
Wireless and LAN
USB ports
At least Intel Core 2 Duo Processor....NOT AMD
At least 160 GB HDD
At least 2 GB RAM

Can anyone point me in the right direction, please? I've tried Google but it's a min field and I figured there's a wealth of PC experience out there who are in a much better position than I. :)

Cheers,
George
 
Have a look on ebuyer and places like pc world. Pc world is seen to be quite expensive but their laptops are of good quality :) Ebuyer however is very cheap, its like amazon for laptops. There are masses of them and you also have the tick boxes on the side to select exactly what you want :) Plus, ebuyer has new items on everyday ;) Good luck finding a laptop! :thumbup:
 
Hi George,

I always ask people how much do they want to spend, the spec you have quoted is quite low, the chances of getting XP these days are virtually nil.

I would suggest a visit to PC World for a hands on, or for online laptops direct have used these myself. Toshiba, HP Compaq or Dell, my son bought himself an Acer, must admit one of the better Acer's......don't but Packard Bell, Lenovo, Samsung's I have mixed feelings, although we have some in school that are 8 years old and still going, but great for 4 year old's to learn on.

Not sure why they would want W7 32 only, 64bit Windows will run 32bit software.

If you find something they post the info....can only say yeah or nay.....good luck.
 
I would look at a HP laptop, they normally come with Windows 7 pre-installed but most of them are packaged with Win XP downgrade discs, all the rest of the spec is also standard these days if not more RAM and a larger hard drive will be included.

Ebuyer is a good a very place to look and they offer a very good service - any more info George then don't hesitate to contact me :thumbup:
 
Sentral said:
I would tell them to go to an Apple store :)
Click to expand...
George without a budget its almost impossible to recommend a good laptop. just a few things about the spec listed.

windows xp you won't get any more - at least not on a new laptop its unsupported end of life.
why 32 bit only is there any technical reason as 64 bit is massively superior especially for ram handling which brings us to the next point.
Most laptops these days ship with a minimium of 4 gb ram (although you can still find some at 3gb) and the min processor these days is a core i3.

Smallest hd these days is 320gb all laptops come with both ethernet and wifi + dvd drive and usb ports so they're no issue.

Main question I would be interested in tbh from their point of view is what warranty do I get since laptops are all much of a muchness these days
 
Screen size in quite relative to the spec you are asking for:
For example I bought a laptop with a similar/better spec to this around 5 years ago for around £300, these day you could by that laptop second hand for around £150 it was a great little computer, for reference it was a siemens fujitsu pi2515. Am looking at selling it now actually but there is something wrong with the power cable and has to be kept quite still in order to charge so im sure your not inserted. On the other hand if you were to be buying a netbook your requested spec would not seem so out of date, as these generally compromise on size over performance. My best advice would be to find a cheap second hand laptop on ebay and get yourself a good deal.
 
Another place that is well worth looking is the Dell Outlet. They sell all the refurbished and customer returned laptops at heavily discounted prices. The stock gets updated daily, and they're pretty much the best value laptops in the UK, as far as I know.
 
Hi George,

A few things here that would be worth clarifying, since when people lay out exact specs but don't know enough to select a machine themselves, all sorts of alarm bells ring in my head as to whether they actually understand enough to realise what they are specifying.

- Why 32bit only? Win 7 64 is fully capable of running 32 bit programs, and will enable >4Gb RAM support
- Why W7 Professional? W7 Pro is a world apart from XP Pro. I would hazard a guess that unless your friend's friend needs a specific specialist feature in Pro, they'll be better off with Home Premium.
- HDD, RAM, connectivity requests will be fulfilled by default
- I can understand the preference for Intel, since they currently dominate the mobile market sector

A budget and a clear understanding of what the machine will be used for would be extremely helpful in speccing something.

I'm a big fan of buying from the Dell Outlet, since you can get some real bargains if you're willing to spend 5 minutes a day on the site for a few days - the stock changes regularly but you can get some excellent machines for significant reductions on there, and Dell machines tend to be excellent.

Other good brands would be Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, HP. Avoid generic **** like "Medion" and other generic brands sold by PC World, they're a false economy.

I hope that's of some help, post back if you've got any more questions George.
 
mi casa said:
Get a mac book pro you will never look back..:)
Click to expand...
Second your opinion mate as I am a mac man myself, not really in the same price range although you can buy some windows laptops that will (with a little encouragement) run OSX... Personally I built a Quadcore 5Ghz MAC PRO in an G5 case from PC components that runs OSX and Windows for around £500.
 
Dell outlet is a good place.

Also look at the lenovos, the x61 and x200 are nice.

Windows 7 Pro is superb, a completely different OS than XP, and 64 bit can address more memory and also run 32bit programs.


___________________________
Luis
@ghostsword
 
Dell outlet is a good place.

Also look at the lenovos, the x61 and x200 are nice.

Windows 7 Pro is superb, a completely different OS than XP, and 64 bit can address more memory and also run 32bit programs.


___________________________
Luis
@ghostsword
 
Hey George, what would the person be doing on the laptop? Regular internet surfing plus some productivity apps? Photo-editing? The specifications (and budget) is based on this. For regular internet surfing, anything with Windows 7 Home Premium, 2GB of RAM and an Intel Pentium processor is good enough. For photo-editing, I'd look at an Intel Core i5 with 4GB of RAM and Win7 Pro 64-bit.
 
Id recommend the i5 but saying that people still managed to do photo editing a few years ago on machines with 2gb ram and slower processor.

flygja said:
Hey George, what would the person be doing on the laptop? Regular internet surfing plus some productivity apps? Photo-editing? The specifications (and budget) is based on this. For regular internet surfing, anything with Windows 7 Home Premium, 2GB of RAM and an Intel Pentium processor is good enough. For photo-editing, I'd look at an Intel Core i5 with 4GB of RAM and Win7 Pro 64-bit.
Click to expand...
 
Wow, thanks for all the feedback! If only planted tank threads got so many replies so quickly!! :lol:

The laptop is for a friend who is taking it to Uganda. He travels out there regularly to help out small businesses.

The request was from a Ugandan chap who passed it to my friend. My friend is a great businessman but tends to ask my advice for technical issues. But... I don't know much about PCs (Mac user for the last 5 years) but did realise the specs were a bit odd, hence my original post.

Thanks for all the help.

George
 
If for Africa then the requirements are different. The biggest suppliers of kit in Africa are Toshibas, Dell and IBM, so he should stick to those brands. Why? Easy to find replacement parts for. Also, easy to service, and upgrade.

I would steer clear of Sony's, Apple, Asus, and such stuff, and go for laptops that are more corporate, as many parts would be found.
 
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