Sub £200 laptop - is Lenovo B50 the best choice available?

[spoon_]

Can you guys think of a better choice for sub £200 laptop than Lenovo B50?

eBuyer stocks these for £169.98 after the cashback - http://www.ebuyer.com/645880-lenovo-...M7dhoCPnnw_wcB

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Remember it uses a dual core Atom CPU.

[spoon_]

Can you think of a better machine in similar price bracket i.e. £150-£200?

[kompukare]

Can you think of a better machine in similar price bracket i.e. £150-£200?

Yes, buy used!

Seriously, for this kind of price you should be able to pick up a used Lenovo Thinkpad T410, HP Elitebook 8440P, Dell Latidue E5410. Those are first gen i5/i7, that is Arrandale. If you want Sandy Bridge models (Thinpad T420 etc.) you'd probably pay a bit more although I have seen HP Probooks (not as good as an Elitebook) Sandy Bridge for under £200.

Point being: why buy a plastic junk laptop which was built down to costing £200 when you can have a slightly used business grade laptop which was built with quality in mind and originally cost £1000+?

[scaryjim]

If you're happy with a 15" netbook that's subsidised by Microsoft advertising revenue (it has the "with Bing" edition of Win 8.1) then it's probably the cheapest you'll find a new laptop of any type.

But as CAT says, it's essentially Atom, and it's just about as low as the spec goes on new Atom. It's almost certainly got the performance for an everyday web + email machine, but don't imagine you're going to do anything on it that would stretch a traditional netbook. I'm sure there are use cases for this machine (if your granny needs something to buy doilies on ebay, perhaps?) but the lack of flexibility (don't even think about playing any game more recent than Torchlight in netbook mode, for instance) means that the low price loses some of its shine. If you want something that can handle more than the absolute basics this probably isn't for you.

[spoon_]

Laptop I'm looking for will be a gift so cannot buy used - needs to be brand spanking new.

I think I need to up my budget a bit as I don't really like the reviews of B50 so far to be honest.

Laptop will be used by a 13 year old for "school purposes" apparently.

What do you guys think of this machine?

http://www.ebuyer.com/614857-lenovo-...JlgaAoBQ8P8HAQ

or this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/629702-hp-250-...op-f7x94es-abu

or this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/636132-hp-255-...op-f7x83ea-abu

[mynameissi]

Things to look for in laptops are:
Multiple cores, quad core is preferable
Low clock speed. This is because a higher clock speed means the laptop overheats faster and more severely, reducing performance by a fair amount.
Ram doesn't really matter, about 4gb should be enough, even 2.
Most laptop graphics cards suck, so you don't really need one.
I think the second one you linked is the better of the two.
Im upgrading from a dual core 2.3ghz laptop to a gaming rig, so one thing I would say is a laptop of this calibre would not be able to do much more than schoolwork and surfing the net. It would be almost like notebook.

[kompukare]

Well, those three are still all built-as-cheap-as-possible laptops but in terms of performance, the Lenovo is probably the fastest judging by the Passmark scores:
Lenovo IdeaPad G500 Laptop, Intel Pentium DC 2020M 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM + 1TB HDD
HP 250 G2 Laptop, Intel Pentium Quad Core N3510, 4GB RAM + 750GB HDD
HP 255 G2 Laptop, AMD Essential Quad-Core E2-3800, 4GB RAM + 500GB HDD

CPU:	Passmark:
Intel Pentium 2020M @ 2.40GHz	2297
Intel Pentium N3510 @ 1.99GHz	1672
AMD E2-3800 APU	1751