The wife needs a new laptop..............advice needed.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Hi there, this is the wife! As the thread title says, I need a new PC as my old one finally gave out. But as a replacement I would like to buy a laptop with decent processing power.

I will use it for:
-messing around on the internet
-work (big spreadsheets, I'm an accountant)
-doing the church accounts using a specialist package that only runs on Windows.

Grateful for any advice as to what would be a decent spec' machine to get.

Thanks.

[Barrister]

Hi there, this is the wife! As the thread title says, I need a new PC as my old one finally gave out. But as a replacement I would like to buy a laptop with decent processing power.

I will use it for:
-messing around on the internet
-work (big spreadsheets, I'm an accountant)
-doing the church accounts using a specialist package that only runs on Windows.

Grateful for any advice as to what would be a decent spec' machine to get.

Thanks.

What kind of price range you looking at?

And more importantly, will your husband or son ever be borrowing this laptop to play games?

And nice to see you post on Languish S!  You should do it more often!

[Richard Hakluyt]

Hi BB, it's Pete here. We wouldn't be using her machine at all, I'm kind of amazed that we need/want yet another computer...........but there it is.

Pricewise there is the difficulty of comparison between prices here and prices in Canada or the USA, but certainly £500 is not a problem. There have been a couple of underpowered and slow laptops in the past, chiefly we want to avoid that.

[Barrister]

Hi BB, it's Pete here. We wouldn't be using her machine at all, I'm kind of amazed that we need/want yet another computer...........but there it is.

Pricewise there is the difficulty of comparison between prices here and prices in Canada or the USA, but certainly £500 is not a problem. There have been a couple of underpowered and slow laptops in the past, chiefly we want to avoid that.

aye - you have to look directly at UK retailers.  500 may not be all that much for a laptop though I suspect.  It may be rather slow if she's dealing with very large spreadsheets.

She should probably look online, and look specifically for business class machines.  I'll see if I can find anything myself.

[Ed Anger]

I don't know about UK prices, but the dual core laptops with 2-4GB of Ram are below 500 here now. I bought a Compaq one a year and half ago, and it seemed snappy.

Hell, I just looked and HP had quad cores for 600 pounds. The triple core Athlon is 449.

[DontSayBanana]

I don't know about UK prices, but the dual core laptops with 2-4GB of Ram are below 500 here now. I bought a Compaq one a year and half ago, and it seemed snappy.

Snagged a Toshiba Satellite with an Athlon P360 and 4GB of RAM for about 475, myself.

[Grey Fox]

http://www.dell.com/uk/p/popular-laptop-deals?~ck=mn

Anything there but the low ends should do all you want without much trouble.

[viper37]

Acer has decent laptops.
Look at the AS5741-334G50M (i3) or Aspire AS5742-5464G50Mnkk (i5) for your price range.
http://www.acer.co.uk/ac/en/GB/content/compare/LX.PSV02.102-LX.R4F02.031

These are 15" laptop.  If you spend a lot of time on it, I would recommend payinf more for a 17" laptop.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Sounds like a mid-range computer from a reliable manufacturer will do the job. It never pays to underestimate how much computing power is required to simply run windows, which may have been the error in the past. My personal machines are gaming machines of course, so there has never been any problem with running lesser applications 

[DontSayBanana]

Good point.  Avoid the whole "Vista computer with 512MB of RAM and integrated video" debacle.  Never ceases to amaze me how badly OEMs will undercut system requirements for the OS that they put on the computer in the first place.

[Richard Hakluyt]

She went for a shiny Acer in the end. Similar to the 5742 that viper posted, but with 6Gb of ram, a larger HD and a nVidia GT-540m graphics card. She also bought a folding bicycle to take with her on train trips, a Brompton, for £1000........

She'll be cadging petty cash off me for the next few months now 

Anyway, the high-powered laptop is a delight to work with. The keyboard is a full one, with the number pad to the right, this apparently helps productivity a lot for bean-counting types as she can touchtype with that pad.

[mongers]

She went for a shiny Acer in the end. Similar to the 5742 that viper posted, but with 6Gb of ram, a larger HD and a nVidia GT-540m graphics card. She also bought a folding bicycle to take with her on train trips, a Brompton, for £1000........

She'll be cadging petty cash off me for the next few months now 

Anyway, the high-powered laptop is a delight to work with. The keyboard is a full one, with the number pad to the right, this apparently helps productivity a lot for bean-counting types as she can touchtype with that pad.

Yes, folding bikes are a marvellous idea, they save no end of money.