Help deciding and recommendations

[joe.lel]

Right

The Wife has killed the net book, and with the insurance money we have £400 to spend, this is the maximum!!!!!

I would like to go back to a laptop as I miss the cdrom etc and phoenix on a netbook is a little on the small side.

Any recommendations?? Ideally want to go into a shop and by it as part of Christmas festivities etc.

Will be using it for the following...

Simple picture editing
HD movie playing from the sony bloggie
Playing phoenix.

these are probably the 3 most memory, and graphic intensive things I will be using it for.

Any recommendations??

Cheers

Joe

[joe.lel]

Think i have narrowed it to 3

HP G62-b26SA - White at cheap prices | PC World

Buy PACKARD BELL TM81-RB-023UK | 15.6" WIDESCREEN LAPTOP - Laptops | Comet

Buy Acer Aspire 5741A 320GB 15.6in Laptop. at Argos.co.uk - Your Online Shop for .

[joe.lel]

Thanks!!

[Boggy]

Your welcome.

[Dedcalm]

Last 3 laptops I ordered are well over your budget but then it was company machines current model is a Sony Vaio i3 with 4GB, wasnt that much over your budget (450ish) thinking about it... laptopsdirect.co.uk I think I got it from in the end.

[Vanquish]

Decide on a spec based upon what your using it for. If you want to run pheonix you will need a very minimum spec of:

1 GHz Pentium or AMD Athlon
Geforce 4200 / ATI 9600 with 128 MB memory
100% DirectX compatible soundcard
256 MB RAM
750 MB free disk space
CD/DVD (for install)
USB 1.1/2.0 port

I'd say to make sure you get a decent frame rate on Pheonix you should be looking for a 1.8 - 2.2GHz processor, minimum 128-256MB graphics memory and 1 - 2GB RAM. Most modern laptop processors are running around the 2GHz mark but worth checking the spec to make sure. Toshiba and Acer do quite a good range of reasonably priced laptops with decent spec's for around £400. I've been using a Hewlett Packard for two years now and still going strong, runs the sim well.

[joe.lel]

Cheers, I think the ACER wins at the moment!!

CPU and Memory:

Intel Core i3 350M.
2.26GHz processor speed.
3GB DDR3 RAM memory.
320GB SATA hard drive.
Display features:

15.6in display.
Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.
DVD optical drives:

Dual layer.
Graphics:

Intel with HD graphics card.

Will probably wait till the boxing day sales as well. LOL

[R1stu]

ACER = Always Crap Ever Repairing!

[joe.lel]

ACER = Always Crap Ever Repairing!

Well thanks for suggesting an alternative, and your positive input to the thread!!! LOL

[mattydred]

i paid £70 for my acer 2200 travel mate a couple of years ago. never had any problems with it and it runs better than the pc upstairs.

i think acer won out of 4 different laptops on the gadget show

[Ewan]

Sorry but I must agree about Acer being rubbish, pretty much everyone I know that has had one has had reliability problems with the expection of two people.

HP not bad but I would reccomend looking at what toshiba have in your price range, have been using one I bought at about that price point for about 2.5 years and it has never played up.

[trident3]

HP's UK website has quite a few laptops "on sale".... cheaper than pcworld, and with a 2-year warrenty. I bought my current laptop directly from HP, ordered it at 3:30pm on a Tuesday and it arrived at 10am the next day

[Gaza07]

Tesco direct do laptops at good prices and if you know some one who works at any tesco any tesco not just direct, They can get you 10% off

[Dedcalm]

A mate of mine used to work for a firm Acer use to repair laptops - seems to be big business but then Acer are one of the largest (if not the largest) laptop manufacturer. There will always be people who have problems with any manufacturer - My Dell's have always been good - have 2 old D610's running XP still (backup for work and 1 for kids) and they are still going strong! My Sony is also very nice if a little large - keyboard was different from the norm laptop type but is nice to use (although I generally plug a full size keyboard and mouse in for use in the office (my main PC)