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Affordable laptop recommendations: budget £350-£450

The A6 is no faster than the Celeron in comparable Chromebooks and laptops. It's not a bad deal, but not a great one either. It's from the bad old days when AMD was getting slaughtered by Intel for very good reason.
 
Chz said:
The A6 is no faster than the Celeron in comparable Chromebooks and laptops. It's not a bad deal, but not a great one either. It's from the bad old days when AMD was getting slaughtered by Intel for very good reason.
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I don't think the processor makes a great deal of difference in a Chromebook for most people, unless it's something really shit and old - it will certainly be plenty fast enough for my mate, and having a big touchscreen is perfect for someone who's not tech-savvy.

I'm still using my three year old Asus Flip using a fuck-knows-what CPU and it does the job just fine.
 
editor said:
I don't think the processor makes a great deal of difference in a Chromebook for most people, unless it's something really shit and old - it will certainly be plenty fast enough for my mate, and having a big touchscreen is perfect for someone who's not tech-savvy.

I'm still using my three year old Asus Flip using a fuck-knows-what CPU and it does the job just fine.
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In this case it does very well make a difference in battery life. The Celeron based ones are old, too - there hasn't been a new one in a few years. It's about battery life, and until very recently it's not something AMD has been even remotely competitive on. My point was that there are plenty of Intel ones at the same price that are just as powerful.
 
editor said:
I've just got this for a friend. Big 15.6" screen, 64GB storage, HD screen and decent construction. A blooming bargain for £299 if you ask me

Acer Chromebook 315 Laptop, AMD A6 Processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC, 15.6” Full HD, Silver

Buy Acer Chromebook 315 Laptop, AMD A6 Processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC, 15.6” Full HD, Silver from our View All Laptops & MacBooks range at John Lewis & Partners. Free Delivery on orders over £50.
www.johnlewis.com www.johnlewis.com
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Thanks, may consider this for daughter - she has been using my old one and it's fallen apart (literally) and this looks like what we need
 
So a victim of my own success. Work PCs were awful and my boss asked the directors for more money. They only gave £500, but I upgraded one and bought a refurb and two 27 inch monitors and now he thinks I can perform miracles. I'm going to scan the last few pages of this thread, but a tiny £300 for a windows laptop, speed more important then size.

What would be a good refurb to look for in this price. Is it still old think pads or does anything else shine?
 
UnderAnOpenSky said:
So a victim of my own success. Work PCs were awful and my boss asked the directors for more money. They only gave £500, but I upgraded one and bought a refurb and two 27 inch monitors and now he thinks I can perform miracles. I'm going to scan the last few pages of this thread, but a tiny £300 for a windows laptop, speed more important then size.

What would be a good refurb to look for in this price. Is it still old think pads or does anything else shine?
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Depends what it's to be used for as you no doubt know.
My £200 refurbed ThinkPad is the dogs for what I do (Outlook, Excel, Visio and Word get hammered) but for someone else at my place of work it'd be no use (planning dept. for example - lots of graphics and massive images from architects in 'special' software)

For £200 I got a 2016 L460 - i5 6th gen - 4gb RAM and a 256gb SSD running Win 10 - I'd say it was in mint condition but they said it was grade B because of a couple of scuffs on the lid. Like it so much I bought another for my daughter when Lockdown1 started and she was schooling at home.
 
Throbbing Angel said:
Depends what it's to be used for as you no doubt know.
My £200 refurbed ThinkPad is the dogs for what I do (Outlook, Excel, Visio and Word get hammered) but for someone else at my place of work it'd be no use (planning dept. for example - lots of graphics and massive images from architects in 'special' software)

For £200 I got a 2016 L460 - i5 6th gen - 4gb RAM and a 256gb SSD running Win 10 - I'd say it was in mint condition but they said it was grade B because of a couple of scuffs on the lid. Like it so much I bought another for my daughter when Lockdown1 started and she was schooling at home.
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Not super portable, so 14 inch screen and above. Normal office stuff and as its 2020 plenty of video calling.

I'm actually finding it harder then I thought on ebay to get 8gb or over with an SSD.
 
Well after dire pickings on ebay I'm wondering about this. Only 4gb of Ram, but a £30 upgrade would take it to 12gb. Has the advantage of a slightly more modern form factor as well.

Laptops - Cheap Laptop Deals | Currys

Take advantage of amazing deals on our Laptops range here at Currys. Shop online and get free delivery or order & collect in store.
www.currys.co.uk www.currys.co.uk
 
That's another case of "pull the other one". It was never worth £379. £279 is an appropriate price, not a spectacular bargain. Doesn't make it a bad deal, I'm just aghast at the "sale" part of it when there's a vastly more powerful version of the same laptop at a regular price of £349.

It's bottom of the barrel, processor-wise. If you can cope with things taking a little while to run, it's fine. I don't know where you're getting 12GB of RAM from, though. It only supports 8. Also it only has the one RAM slot.

Edit: Ah, maybe the 4 is soldered on and there's an empty slot. But I wouldn't swear to it, and Lenovo still says it's limited to 8GB.
 
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Chz said:
That's another case of "pull the other one". It was never worth £379. £279 is an appropriate price, not a spectacular bargain. Doesn't make it a bad deal, I'm just aghast at the "sale" part of it when there's a vastly more powerful version of the same laptop at a regular price of £349.

It's bottom of the barrel, processor-wise. If you can cope with things taking a little while to run, it's fine. I don't know where you're getting 12GB of RAM from, though. It only supports 8. Also it only has the one RAM slot.
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My bad. When I googled I found some information that said it supported 20gb. So the 4gb soldered to the motherboard and a 8gb stick. See this is why I'm glad I posted.

I think after many hours at staring at deals (I was being paid) my very strong recommendation is he finds some more money as your right the Ryzen 3 model isn't that much more. Personally I'm slightly at a loss about modern processors. I know that 4gb in 2020 isn't enough, this is very strongly evidenced by the work computer I upgraded. I5 3470, took it from 4 to 16gb and gave it an SSD and it went from sluggish and awful to like a new computer and very very nice to use. I guess I'd hoped that even the more basic ones released in the last few years would work well for office stuff given enough ram and an SSD, but this is why I value your input. :)
 
So my budget is 4-450. I need to be able to run teams and powerpoint at the same time but not to play games (chance would be a fine thing). At least a 14" screen would be good and I'm not keen on second hand or refurbished. I'm not really sure what I should be looking for and am getting bored scrolling through lists of laptops. Is black Friday likely to be helpful or are the bargains associated with it exaggerated?
 
I saw little actual bargains it must be said. Ended up pointing my boss at an Acer at Argos as it was the cheapest I could find with 8gb. From this whole experience I realised that spending a bit more really would pay dividends and why I ended up getting a chromebook for myself (obviously this isn't suitable for everyone)
 
from the Chromebook thread...
Throbbing Angel said:
Chromebook 2 in 1 tablet deal @ Currys

£349 for LENOVO IdeaPad Duet 10.1" 2 in 1 Chromebook & JBL Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones Bundle - MediaTek P60T, 128 GB eMCP, Blue & Grey

www.currys.co.uk

LENOVO IdeaPad Duet 10.1" 2 in 1 Chromebook & Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones Bundle - MediaTek P60T, 128 GB eMCP, Blue & Grey

Chrome OS; MediaTek P60T Processor; RAM: 4 GB / Storage: 128 GB eMCP; Full HD touchscreen; Battery life: Up to 10 hours
www.currys.co.uk www.currys.co.uk
.

Seen on Techradar
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maomao said:
Well I've bought it now. Paid a fiver to have it come tomorrow too. Thanks. It's better than my previous favourite and not much more.
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This is a piece of shit, has crashed repeatedly and is now going to the Bios screen and no further. After the first two crashes I asked for a replacement and they told me it would take a week so I hung on to it because I need it desperately for work. Now I've missed an important Teams meeting and am staring at a lump of useless plastic. And the customer service bloke was so rude when I complained I will never use PCWorld again.
 
maomao said:
This is a piece of shit, has crashed repeatedly and is now going to the Bios screen and no further. After the first two crashes I asked for a replacement and they told me it would take a week so I hung on to it because I need it desperately for work. Now I've missed an important Teams meeting and am staring at a lump of useless plastic. And the customer service bloke was so rude when I complained I will never use PCWorld again.
Click to expand...
Would a Chromebook work for you? They're ridiculously fast, smooth and reliable compared to Windows machines around the same price.
 
editor said:
Would a Chromebook work for you? They're ridiculously fast, smooth and reliable compared to Windows machines around the same price.
Click to expand...
I know from colleagues Teams runs poorly on Chromebooks and I struggle with anything less than the full version of PowerPoint and those are my main two needs. I think I'll be sending the bricked one back, requisitioning my wife's one and looking for something decent in the sales.


Though any non PC World suggestions still welcome!
 
maomao said:
This is a piece of shit, has crashed repeatedly and is now going to the Bios screen and no further. After the first two crashes I asked for a replacement and they told me it would take a week so I hung on to it because I need it desperately for work. Now I've missed an important Teams meeting and am staring at a lump of useless plastic. And the customer service bloke was so rude when I complained I will never use PCWorld again.
Click to expand...

tbf it isn't PCW or the customer service bloke's fault that the computer is playing up - so shopping there again or not makes no difference whatsoever to whether next laptop will work properly or not. CSagents are supposed to just bend over though and take what you give them - that's part of the job, within limits, obvs.

Of course, none of this helps you get your computer working or your Teams meeting back. Don't you have a mobile or tablet as well you could have used for that. Resilience they call it in IT.

Are you sure you're holding it right?
 
Throbbing Angel said:
tbf it isn't PCW or the customer service bloke's fault that the computer is playing up - so shopping there again or not makes no difference whatsoever to whether next laptop will work properly or not. CSagents are supposed to just bend over though and take what you give them - that's part of the job, within limits, obvs.

Of course, none of this helps you get your computer working or your Teams meeting back. Don't you have a mobile or tablet as well you could have used for that. Resilience they call it in IT.

Are you sure you're holding it right?
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I don't use companies that piss me off (and he was genuinely rude and dismissive); I have a long list and enjoy bearing grudges.

And yes, I was already aware that people sometimes use Teams on their phones. They're the ones that keep saying 'I can't really see that, I'm on my phone'. I have no tablet to speak of, a titchy mobile near the end of its life, poor eyesight and dislike having work on my phone in the first place so I abandoned the idea rather than embarrass myself squinting into a badly angled screen unable to share or read documents. If I had just needed to talk to her I would have fucking phoned her.

I'm pretty sure I'm holding it right. It's on a nice cool desk, it refused to boot and on the two occasions it got past the password screen it bluescreened within a minute. I've removed peripherals and it's the same. It had only been on for about ten minutes and was far too hot for a laptop with ssd that only had Outlook and Teams open.
 
So, moving on, are Dell laptops any good? Hardwearing is more important than good looks. I can get 5% off as a student so this one is pushing it a bit:

www.dell.com

Dell Inspiron 14 with 13th gen Intel Core processors | Dell UK

Shop the Inspiron 14" laptop with built-in ready for business features, latest Intel processors. View on Dell.com
www.dell.com

but I can get this for more or less exactly what the Asus cost:

www.dell.com

Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Laptop | Dell UK

15-inch laptop with responsive performance in a sleek design with 2-sided narrow borders, optional PCIe SSDs, Express Charge, and an AMD Ryzen™ 7 3700U Mobile Processor.
www.dell.com

I'm not arsed about storage, 250gb is plenty. Is the extra 20 quid worth it for a AMD Ryzen™ 5 4500U rather than a AMD Ryzen™ 5 3450U ?
 
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