Paddy’s recurring laptop thread

[Paddy]

As I am sure some of you will remember, I tried to purchase a Acer Ferrari Turion WMLi laptop a few months ago with disastrous results. The time has come again when I have had the go ahead from the boss (wife) to go shopping.

With a baby on the way, I can’t justify spending £1K+ on a laptop, so I am looking to spend ideally no more than £600.

My needs are modest. I would use it primarily for work related tasks, so all I need is MS Office. My only must have requirements are a nice display that is easy on they eyes and ‘relative’ portability.

However, it would be nice to have Bluetooth/WiFi, DVDRW, at least 80GB HD, CF/SD card reader, reasonable battery life, and a graphics card that would let me do some gaming – perhaps a bit of counterstrike for when I am away.

Can anyone recommend specific models that I should consider?

[Paddy]

The Asus A7G looks nice, but I am sure it will be out of my price range...

[ZokesPro]

How did that whole situation turn out anyways?

There are some very inexpensive Acer models near your price range.

[Paddy]

yeah all sorted. It took a few weeks, but the bank gave me a full refund as promised.
I don't think they would do it a second time though!

Ideally, i'd by a laptop with the best graphics chip available as they are effectivly non-upgradable. From reading around the Asus A7G is the only model to offer the X1600...

ah crap late for work!...

[agallag]

There are some fairly nice Compaq (HP) laptops that are available with AMD 64 bit chips, and they're quite cheap ($1000-$1300 canadian, divide by 2 for GBP). They mostly have integrated ATI graphics (Radeon Xpress 200M IGP), which is supposed to be decent, but not fantastic. A friend of mine has an older one that's been quite reliable for him. The V2400 series and the R4100 series both look pretty good.

[lecter]

I got one of those laptops for my dad, a Compaq with AMD Thurion64 and Radeon Xpress 200M...been performing fine so far, with a couple of added bonuses (JBL speakers, multi-card reader, TV-Out) compared to some of its competitors.

[Paddy]

cheers lads.
Ideally, I'd like to find a cheap laptop at ~£500 and then a higher end one with a Radeon Mobility X700+ and compare the specs/price

[Paddy]

Right, I've had a look around and I'm going to wait for the A7G to hit the market and then see what happens to the prices of its competitors. Hopefully it should be out in a few weeks.

[Paddy]

What do you think of this?

Its nothing like what i was expecting, but it is cheap!
What are your thoughts?

[Fat Tone]

Cheap, but not a desktop replacement, imo.

[Paddy]

no it is not indeed.
It just looked like a good deal.
I am still waiting for more information on the Asus A7G, I hope if nothing else it will bring down the price of the Acer 4005WMLi

[dbdg]

Bad: WinXP home and 256MB Ram
Good: Cheap.

I recently purchased one of these for ~£500 with 512MB and XP Pro.

[Taz]

There's this Fuji laptop that's probably around the spec your looking for but it's ~£800. Not sure whether I'd buy a Fuji laptop though as they used to have to go back to Germany for warranty repairs, hopefully this has changed now This Acer is in your budget and has a pretty decent spec

[Paddy]

Cheers for the pointers. The Fuji laptop looks ok, but only 2.2 hours battery life! Thats terrible! The acer looks ok, but only has a X600 card... has anyone used one of these?

[az]

The Dell inspiron 6000 can be had with all the options you want, except really fast graphics. This last one is used as a major selling point for more expensive laptops, I don't think you'll have much luck with it. If you get the Dell, the 1680x1050 display option is relatively cheap and that display is amongst the best laptop displays out there today. It is quite quiet, has a runtime of up to three hours for office tasks (4 hours with the optional high capacity accu, which is the same size as the ordinary one, I think), card reader, wifi, dvd burner, etc. Graphics are i810, too slow for modern games, but faster than many other integrated graphics solutions, certainly in this price range.

It's a bit on the heavy side and thicker than most modern laptops, though.