Best Laptop for Under £500

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Advent laptop I linked to has a Q9000 quad core and a Mobility HD4670 GDDR3 for around £570.

The notebook on Ebuyer I linked to has a Mobility HD4570 and is well under £500 and the other one I linked to has a Mobility HD5650.

[douglasb]

Im in the exact same position, after a £500ish laptop to take to uni (again because I dont want to take my desktop)

Was wondering what everyone thinks of these...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-Sate...4321605&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pavilion-dv6...7&sr=1-1-spell

I'm not especially bothered about gaming as most of the time i'm going to be busy with sport if im not working, although the ability to game would be a plus point (HP would be better in this respect?)

I think at the moment im leaning towards the HP as its more powerfull for much the same price as the toshiba but that could change...

cheers

[marshalex]

you can pick up an inspiron 15R from dell with 4gb ram, dedicated graphics (ati 5450) and a core i3 for £530 delivered from dell (discounts available with things like quidco as well). select the base inspiron 15R and then add the premium pack.

[chrestomanci]

If it where me going to Uni (again), then I would not chose either of those laptops because they are fairly large and heavy, and are unlikely to have a long battery life.

When I went to Uni (in the mid 90's), I took a laptop, and used it to take lecture notes. It weighed me down and the bag put a grove in my shoulder. I also had trouble keeping enough battery charge to last a full day, and sometimes spent lunchtimes camped by one of the few power points in the library, just so I had enough charge for the afternoon.

Now, 15 years later, the latest crop of students have access to netbooks that weigh the same as a couple of cans of soft drink, and have 12 hour batteries, all with about 100x the performance I had at about a quarter of the cost, and yet you insist on taking huge desktop replacement monsters with you just so that you can suffer all the same problems I did. </rant>

Seriously:

Ask yourself, will you be taking your laptop with you to lectures, tutorials, the library etc, or is it going to stay in your room, and just be used for writing essays, or gaming. If it is going to stay in your room, then by all means, take a desktop replacement monster, (though I would recommend a SFF system).

If you plan to take your laptop out and about with you, then it needs to be as small and as light as possible. It will live in your shoulder bag for the next three years, so it needs to be comfortable to carry. Don't spend a fortune on it as it might get stolen. I also suggest that if you can afford it, you keep a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse back at your digs so that long essays are more comfortable. I would also add a spare battery, because if you use your laptop intensively, then the original battery will wear out, and loose most of it's useful capacity, and you may not be able to get a replacement. (My 3 year old laptop now only has 38% of it's original battery capacity).

Backups! Backups! Backups!

Did I mention backups? Make sure you have a backup of everything important (Not just your pr0n collection). I suggest an external hard drive with some sort of script to sync it with your laptop every day. This is especially important for your USB pen drive, because most people loose one every few months.

For really important files like term papers & assignments that count towards your final mark, the best advice is to email them to yourself using a webmail account like gmail. The reason for this is that in the unlikely event that the police raid your student house, because of house-mate's collection of cannabis plants on his window sill, they will take away all your computers AND your backups, and keep them as evidence for months, so you need to store important stuff where no one can deprive you of them. The same would apply if your house burnt down.

[redddraggon]

When I went to Uni (in the mid 90's), I took a laptop, and used it to take lecture notes. It weighed me down and the bag put a grove in my shoulder. I also had trouble keeping enough battery charge to last a full day, and sometimes spent lunchtimes camped by one of the few power points in the library, just so I had enough charge for the afternoon.

No ones takes laptops into lectures these days. I have certainly never felt the need to.