Articles - Laptop choices for under £500

[HEXUS]

How much should you pay for a laptop? Read on to find out.

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[staffsMike]

I think the only one there I could stomach dropping my own money on would be the Dell Studio 15, you can pick up similar specs with lesser CPU's for a little cheaper at dell.

You can also usually get a fairly decent spec Vostro Laptop using either special deals at the time (on the dell website, lots around during back to school) or current voucher codes which usually bring them down to £300 - £330 delivered.

[joshwa]

As long as it's got a core 2 duo, 2gb ram, Vista home premium, 80gb+ HD, DVDRW, and wireless then I'm happy. You can get these with 15.4" screen for about £330 - £350 (or less with special offers, voucher codes etc). Play have ones with this spec for around £350 (the Acer range), and Dell have the Vostro 1510 around this price as well - I managed to get one for £316!

You can get a similar spec AMD X2 for around £300 - but what I want to know is how these all perform and whether it's worth spending an extra £30 for core 2 duo? There seems to be too much choice at the moment regarding CPUs and not enough details when people are selling them, for example Tesco sometimes just list the CPU, eg T2390 - what does this mean? Why should I have to google to find out?

AMD Sempron
Celeron M540 (meaningless letters and numbers!)
Celeron 560
Celeron Dual Core
Pentium Dual Core T2370 (ditto)
Intel Core 2 Duo
AMD 64 X2 TK57 (ditto)
Turion 64 X2 T60

These are just some of the options from Dell, Tesco, Play. It's absolutely ridiculous and give no indication of performance! And are some of these chips the same as each other with different names? M540 with an M, and then Celeron 560 without an M, and AMD 64 X2 and Turion 64 X2 or are these actually different?!? No wonder people can't understand what they're buying!

Is an M540 10x better than a TK57, and is a T2390 41x better again, and is a T2390 4x better than an M540...??

And this is ignoring all the CPUs available in the netbooks.

PS - It gets worse - there's also the Turion X2 Ultra Dual Core XM-80, a Core 2 Duo P8400, Core 2 Duo U7600 (at 1.2ghz!?!), an Athlon X2 QL-60, a Pentium M773 (these examples from play.com), and Centrino.

[samcross]

Got to agree with the studio, if you're spending £350-£500 on a laptop Dell are generally the best bet, build quality and design are normally brilliant, and (normally) the spec is the best you can get for the price. But the customer service isn't always great.