Recommendations on a laptop please?

[simonpreston]

Shortly after xmas I'm going to start looking at getting a laptop for uni work. It's 2 priorities are battery life and portability (I have a 17" Core 2 Duo laptop with GeForce 8600 and it's a heavy, power hungry beast). It's not going to be used for anything too taxing; mostly light Java programming, html/javascript script writing, documents and idly browsing the internet. I need it to be able to fit in my bag with all my books, notes etc so I don't really want a screen larger than 12". Can be new or second hand.

£200 is probably my ideal limit, though may be able to stretch to £300 max.

I got a £25 Amazon voucher, so if poss, recommendations I can get from there... unless it's way cheaper elsewhere, then I can just use the voucher on books or something.

Cheers all.

[Pancake]

This is what you want really, very durable, very stable, much faster than a netbook, and its a Thinkpad

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-Thi...item3f114373cb

What more could you want?

Oh, and its still got warrenty left

[simonpreston]

Cheers. I won't have my student loan come in until Mid Jan so I can't scoop up anything now. I've also had a look at Dell Latitude 420 which also look like they may fit the bill quite well.

[Pancake]

They are usually a few kicking around on the bay, make sure you stick to dell Business stuff. There consumer laptops/desktops are cheap rubbish with terrible designs.

In fact, if you want anything good, stick to stuff made for businesses

[prehensile]

yeah it's an easy choice just check out the newegg ratings for the best netbooks, and get one on ebay or similar, an Asus or dell netbook from the last year should be pretty good, abit slow for opening browser windows depending on the one, hard drive size, multimedia performance for video and java and battery life, it's actually quite hard to make a bad buy if you research whats available for 20 minutes.

also note the x200 lenovo has no touchpad... 8D

[simonpreston]

I do research these sorts of things thoroughly and go through many articles/reviews and so on. But it never be a bad thing to get an informed users opinion as well.

[Pancake]

yeah it's an easy choice just check out the newegg ratings for the best netbooks, and get one on ebay or similar, an Asus or dell netbook from the last year should be pretty good, abit slow for opening browser windows depending on the one, hard drive size, multimedia performance for video and java and battery life, it's actually quite hard to make a bad buy if you research whats available for 20 minutes.

also note the x200 lenovo has no touchpad... 8D

It has ultranav though, its way better anyway.

And i would ignore reviews on newegg etc, 99% of the people who buy off places like that know absolutely jack shiz about anything and will usually buy cheap dell/acer crap anyway

[prehensile]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=9m54rKlErwA

this is the first ever laptop in video fron 1977

[prehensile]

It has ultranav though, its way better anyway.

And i would ignore reviews on newegg etc, 99% of the people who buy off places like that know absolutely jack shiz about anything and will usually buy cheap dell/acer crap anyway

newegg, amazon, and ebuyer reviews can contain very interesting insights into what you are buying, they tell you things like : bad keeb, sound, mic/headphone in the wrong place, no integrated mic/video, power jack flimsy, power adapter too hot, you can get alot of intersting details from that.

Acer and Dell actually make pretty good laptops for the most part, if your budget is for the cheap ones then that's that! in a survey of the laptops that last the longest from a few years ago, based on returns and whatnot, dell and acer were actually higher than IBM, i dunno where the figures were... and then fujitsu siemens, toshiba, sony, were way lower on the durability list, like number of years it lasts for. i think the survey was from 2007 /2008 or something, it seemed to be a pretty independant source, certainly worth looking at durability/servicing rankings for cars and laptops imho!

[Pancake]

Acer better than Lenovo/IBM

LOL

Ill leave or ill probs kick off, but you may want to stop reading rubbish reviews.

[simonpreston]

Found a Dell Latitude 430 for £88 delivered. There was no way I was going to turn that down, so snapped it up.
It has a sim card slot built in. Don't suppose anybody knows if it will happily take my 3 (uk) sim?