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Affordable laptop recommendations: budget £350-£450

miss direct said:
Gah. Tried to pay over and over again with different cards - finally to be told that because I'm abroad, it won't let me. Never had that before! Any suggestions as to how I can make it look like my laptop is in the UK (without buying or downloading anything?)
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Can you not get one of your family to buy it on your behalf? If not you will need to download/install or subscribe to a VPN in order to make it look like you are in the UK. It might be an anti fraud measure from your bank. Do they know you are abroad? You may be able to get the restriction "switched off" if you contact your bank, worth a try anyway.
 
PaoloSanchez said:
For all round general purpose reasonably "future proofed" computing needs I tend to recommend a minimum Core I5 (if you can afford it). That's what I put in the PC World laptop selection criteria and the HP was the only one within the budget. Pentiums are a bit bargain basement, but as you say are usable for very light use. I bought a HP Stream Pentium for my wife nearly 3 years ago and she's quite happy with it, although it does slow down dramatically when she overindulges with upteen youtube tabs open in chrome.

Speaking of chrome, Chromebooks would also fit comfortably in the budget and although I'm not a fan of them myself there are quite a few folks in here who like them and it might be a suitable alternative.
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That's bollocks. Current Pentium Golds are 2 core/4 thread CPUs like i3s were for the longest time and based on the same core. In fact, the only difference between a Pentium Gold and an i3-7xxx CPU is 10% clock speed and a bit of cache. No normal user requires more CPU oomph than that. It's certainly a great bonus that the HP has an i5 (and thus 4 cores/8 threads) at that price, but I wouldn't have discounted it for an instant if it didn't have it. It's taken 10 years of having mass-market 4-thread (not even 4-core, just 4-thread) CPUs available to get a decent amount of software that can use them. We're not going to need 8 threads for standard computing uses any time soon.

I consider myself a power user and 4cores/4threads is more than adequate. Obviously some people have specific uses that require more threads, but it simply isn't the case for most users.
 
Problem is I also had to give my phone back after being made redundant so I don’t have a phone and even if I did, it wouldn’t let me call international numbers. You’d think they don’t want my money :(
 
No landline and think this netbook I’m using will blow up if I try to put Skype on it. Sick of everything being so difficult! I will keep trying!!!!!
 
PaoloSanchez said:
Getting Office yes or no.
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My son is at Uni and uses Home | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Fun Project - Fantastic People since his 365 subscription expired. It is free and does everything he needs for Word and Excel purposes - no idea about presentation side of things, sorry. Free though so Give it a go?

Also - can't one sign up for a month at a time for Office 365? Like a subscription you can stop when you've finished with it? If that's right you might get away with only spending a tenner or summat on one month's subscription?!?
 
miss direct said:
Problem is I also had to give my phone back after being made redundant so I don’t have a phone and even if I did, it wouldn’t let me call international numbers. You’d think they don’t want my money :(
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Are you out in the middle of a forest or something? Surely there's got to be a phone near you. Can you not borrow somebody's? Apologies if I'm not understanding your predicament.
The woman at PC World said if your transaction failed more than three times then you would have to wait 24 hours before trying again online. Are you sure it's not a bank restriction? You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from what you see on the screen. I remember having a similar problem when I tried to purchase something abroad and my bank phoned me to see if it was really me. I would double check with them to make sure that it isn't the banks anti fraud measures kicking in.
 
I'm not in a forest but people don't have land lines here. I don't know a single person with a land line and most phones block international numbers.

I chatted to someone on the online help at PC world and was told that they don't accept transactions from PCs or phones that aren't in the UK. Seems rather counter productive.

Thank you for calling and asking, I do appreciate it! I am just running a bit short on time for it to be delivered in time to be brought over.
 
Throbbing Angel said:
My son is at Uni and uses Home | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Fun Project - Fantastic People since his 365 subscription expired. It is free and does everything he needs for Word and Excel purposes - no idea about presentation side of things, sorry. Free though so Give it a go?

Also - can't one sign up for a month at a time for Office 365? Like a subscription you can stop when you've finished with it? If that's right you might get away with only spending a tenner or summat on one month's subscription?!?
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My daughter was using LibreOffice for her uni assignments after I changed job and no longer had access to the 365 subscription. Unfortunately the LibreOffice word equivalent caused some formatting issues with her assignments so I ended up getting the 5 user 365 subscription. I think it cost £65/year. LibreOffice is ok and it's free. I did find a few quirks and annoyances though and reverted back to my personal copy of Office 2010 before getting the 365 subscription.
 
miss direct said:
I'm not in a forest but people don't have land lines here. I don't know a single person with a land line and most phones block international numbers.

I chatted to someone on the online help at PC world and was told that they don't accept transactions from PCs or phones that aren't in the UK. Seems rather counter productive.

Thank you for calling and asking, I do appreciate it! I am just running a bit short on time for it to be delivered in time to be brought over.
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Can your mum not do it your your behalf? I can understand to a degree why they don't accept online shopping from foreign locations. There is an awful lot of fraudsters around getting up to all sorts of mischief.
 
...otherwise you might have to go with the vpn. I'm not sure how that works so can't really advise you on that.

Are there any internet cafe/call cabins nearby? Perhaps you can call from one of those.

(sorry running out of ideas)
 
dervish said:
I would use something like tunnel bear which is free and works pretty well. Just install the extension, choose your destination country and connect.
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I tried that repeatedly and it didn’t work. Once it finally connected to the uk, it wouldn’t let me open any websites and said I had no internet connection. Thanks though.
 
The impression I get is that free vpn's can be a bit hit and miss and that the only way to guarantee a reasonably reliable connection is to pay for one. I remember trying to use one from Brussels so that I could watch stuff on the BBC Iplayer, but it didn't work and was all a bit of a faff.

A final suggestion if you haven't already sorted it out miss direct , do they have international phone cards in Turkey?
 
miss direct said:
I'm going for the HP. Is it worth buying office too?
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Office online does all the basic stuff you might need. If you are a student or know a student, you can pick it up for £10. Or if your work place is part of the Microsoft home use program, you can also pick it up for a tenner.
 
PaoloSanchez said:
A final suggestion if you haven't already sorted it out miss direct , do they have international phone cards in Turkey?
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I used to use them when I was first here but haven’t seen any for a few years. Hopefully it is sorted now. Lots of things are made difficult here regarding phones and internet - lots of sites blocked, even booking dot com and Wikipedia.
 
Riklet said:
The chromebooks with 4gb of ram def look pretty tasty, bet that ASUS runs extremely snappily. How do you find it and the OS compared to the last one?

For those who need Windows, my x230 Thinkpad has been going strong past few months, now using it as my daily driver over my three times more expensive Dell!

For 250 quid you can get one with 8gb ram and an ssd (or cheaper and buy your own Samsung 860) and it should fly doing not-too-demanding stuff.
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Throbbing Angel said:
Aye, 4gb or more is the way to go. I made sure if that last time too.
The recent update you mean? Not a fan of what it has done to the look of Chrome tbh. Other than that I haven't noticed any difference. Doesn't matter anyway. I can run other browsers now if it bothered me that much.
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If you want to roll back the UI changes in the recent Chrome update have a look at this
 
heinous seamus said:
Any thoughts on this? It looks good to my novice eye:
Refurbished HP Proebook 430 G1 i5 Laptop, 8GB, 128GB SSD
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The link says 128gb ssd above but the description says 500gb hdd. So I assume it’s not an ssd drive.

The device is about 4-5 years old. Personally I’d ‘upgrade’ to an ssd drive from their options if you can afford it. 256GB should suffice for the operating system, applications and small docs, however if you’re going to be storing movies and such things on it also you might want to consider something larger or an additional external drive.

Also take into account most batteries on ex business laptops are ruined because they stay plugged in most of the time. So don’t expect great battery life out of it unless you get a replacement. Research how easy it is to replace the battery in that model. It’s getting more and more difficult with newer equipment. No longer can you just easily pop them out and put a new one in. Now requires taking things apart.
 
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