£200ish notebooks, what's top vfm?

[0iD]

Looking for a £200ish notebook for general study duties. Nothing too taxing, just office apps. Seen a Toshiba NB250 for the money, but is there anything better?

[jim]

Looking for a £200ish notebook for general study duties. Nothing too taxing, just office apps. Seen a Toshiba NB250 for the money, but is there anything better?

Guy pointed me towards some IBM Thinkpads, refurbs, for exactly that price.

http://www.bigpockets.co.uk/cat.php?...aptops&nav=227

The one I picked up was £225, 1.83GHz Intel C2D (bear in mind, no 64 bit), 1400x1050 14" screen, 4GB RAM, 40GB SATA drive, fingerprint reader and the all-powerful pink nipple for cursor moving.

It's in great condition, no damage found and battery seems good. Just whacked Windows 7 on it and it's working like a charm.

Okay, it's a refurb, but I'd much rather have a thinkpad than a budget netbook - great build quality, should last years. Depends on preference, but I think my dad will be much better off with this in the long run. Credit to Guy of course.

[malfunction]

I haven't bought a refurb from bigpockets but I can attest to the build quality and ruggedness of Thinkpads - I currently use a T60p for work (~3 years old now, about due for replacement) and had a T43p before that for ~3 years as well. The T43p was still going strong (battery included) when it was replaced with the T60p and the T60p is still going strong now. Both have / had travelled regularly (in planes, trains and automobiles). The battery for the T60p is - according to the IBM / Lenovo tool - still holding up to 94% of its max charge which is about 40-50% better than the similarly aged battery in my netbook.

[jim]

Yeah my stepdad has used hundresd over the years at work for training purposes - he's seen them battered to hell and still working like they were brand new, hence my interest in them.

Compared to how flimsy the netbooks are (based on my mum's Dell Mini 9 and my HP dm1) the Thinkpad is fairly impressive. Given how slow the Atom processors are in cheap netbooks as well, there's no great incentive to go for newer machines really, excluding battery life.

[Phage]

Did you see this thead ?
http://forums.hexus.net/current-barg...120-289-a.html

[0iD]

Yeah, but it's closer to £300 than £200 which is all I have to splash.

[alsenior]

another Thinkpad user my t60p is 4 years old and still works like a charm and works perfectly with windows 7. also the keyboard is to die for.

[Guy]

Thinkpads ftw. I still have a T43P going strong, as well as my current W500.

You just cant beat the touchpoint/mouse nipple thing.

I have ordered coming up 10 laptops from BigPockets. Never had any real problems. One machine had a faulty dvd/cd drive, but their CS was excellent, a new drive was shipped 24 hours after I reported it.

Personally I would always rather have a refurbed machine than a cheap new machine/netbook.

[Pob255]

I think for that price a refurb is your best bet, my main note of caution about refurbs is battery, even if the battery isn't too bad when you first get it, it may not be long before it starts losing charge.
The big problem with lithiumIon batteries is that they do have a shelf/working life after about 3 years they start to degrade and lose capacity rappidly, from my experience over the course of a month a battery can go from holding about 90% of it's original full charge life to about 20-10%
ie if new the battery could power the laptop for 2.5hours, then it'll go from about 2hrs 15min to about 20min over the course of a month.
Up until this rapid degrading happens there's little warning, replacing the battery can also be a problem, because the replacement battery are often manufactured at the same time as the laptop was and have just been sitting in some warehouse all this time, even when not in use the cells degrade.
This was the issue I had a few years back with a refurb HP laptop and the replacement battery I got, even though it was a offical HP battery lasted just a year before it too rapidly degraded.

Even with this note of caution, for £200 refurb/2nd hand is your best bet, £200 doesn't go far at all on new laptops.
Most new laptops under about £350 are not worth looking at, the build quality and processors don't cut it and at that cost netbooks, with their own compromises, are a better bet.