New Laptop Advice

[RedFox]

Hi

My current laptop seems to be showing signs of fail.

Its about 5 years old and struggling to boot up.

I need for business as well as social so thinking of replacing.

I dont do any games or stuff.

Any thoughts on a good replacement up to £600 or so?

Cheers

[Ironside]

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/computing/laptops/laptops/acer-aspire-e5-571-15-6-laptop-black-10136282-pdt.html

£500 can't  see you needing to spend that much though

[Ironside]

I personally like a larger screen on my laptop
17.3' http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/1589946.htm


£440

[Longines]

Whatever you buy make sure it has a SSD hard drive.

[Ironside]

is a ssd drive that important in work laptop?

[muckthenuts]

is a ssd drive that important in work laptop?

Nah i don't think so. They're great of course but not a necessity. If it was a work laptop i'd rather keep a bit of money in my pocket and go for the regular hard drive.

[Marky147]

If it was for work and pleasure, I'd cough for an SSD.

[tikay]

SSD?

Explain what it is, & why we do or don't need it, please.

[Longines]

The traditional hard drive is mechanical - platters, moving heads and other gubbins. Slow, fragile, noisy, create heat.

SSDs are blindingly fast, robust, run cool and use less power - all pretty useful in a any laptop but especially a work laptop that travels.

Just replaced the HDD in a 3 year old Dell laptop with a £70 256GB SSD and it flies. First tried formatting and reinstalling Windows on the old HDD and it still wasn't that quick.

[the sicilian]

SSD?

Explain what it is, & why we do or don't need it, please.

Solid State Drive... has no moving parts.. very reliable much faster.. lits flash memory..like a big usb key

we sstick them in a lot of client machine now the price has become sensible

[tikay]

The traditional hard drive is mechanical - platters, moving heads and other gubbins. Slow, fragile, noisy, create heat.

SSDs are blindingly fast, robust, run cool and use less power - all pretty useful in a any laptop but especially a work laptop that travels.

Just replaced the HDD in a 3 year old Dell laptop with a £70 256GB SSD and it flies. First tried formatting and reinstalling Windows on the old HDD and it still wasn't that quick.

Now I got you.


When you use words like that, people like Tom & Karabiner understand.


gubbins


✔️

[TightEnd]

how much are you paying extra for a laptop with SSD compared to not?

best recommendations - budget - medium range and high spec?

thanks

[Longines]

You're paying more than the sum of the parts currently as the consumer market is price driven (SSDs are more expensive) plus the traditional HDDs win out on size comparisons - most laptops are now coming with 1000GB HDDs so it's tough to get Joe Public to think that a 128GB or 256GB would be better.

Will have a look for recommendations at the weekend.

[RED-DOG]

SSD?

Explain what it is, & why we do or don't need it, please.

Solid State Drive... has no moving parts.. very reliable much faster.. lits flash memory..like a big usb key

we sstick them in a lot of client machine now the price has become sensible

Boo!

I would not have told him.

[EvilPie]

If your laptop's a half decent spec I'd seriously suggest just swapping out the hard drive for an SSD.

I bought a 1TB Samsung SSD for about £350 because my laptop had gotten a bit slow. From switching on to being able to use outlook was about 3 minutes and I just can't wait that long.

Swapped the drive and it's down to about 25 seconds and is basically like having a new laptop but without the hassle of having to back stuff up. I would happily have forked out £1k+ for a new laptop like the one I now have.

There's probably nothing wrong with your processor, DVD Drive, graphics card, keyboard, track pad, chassis etc. A bit of extra RAM never hurts if you've got less than 4GB but that's about £35 for a matched pair of 4GB upgrades. If you buy a new laptop you're buying all this perfectly good stuff again.

They usually come with (or you can purchase) a cloning kit so you literally make an exact copy of your existing drive. Once it's copied you swap them over and switch on and away you go. Depending on how deep your hard drive's buried (some of them require keyboard removal!!) you could have it done in a couple of hours.