[Archived] Laptops

[Tim Southampton Rover]

I'm thinking of purchasing a laptop but as im not as knowledgeable in the world of technology as a lot of people on here, I am wondering if there is any new technology about to be released which will make them significantly better than the ones currently available. If so, would it be wise to wait?

I'm basically after something which will allow me to play games on it.

(I don't want anyone telling me to get a desktop one! - i'm not after one of those)

[Jimmy Jupiter]

Get a desktop.

Sorry, had to be done

[brian_gallagher85]

I'd imagine you avoid one with a HD DVD drive/rewriter thingy

I see PC World are trying to give one away in an "amazing" deal this week

[LeChuck]

I'm basically after something which will allow me to play games on it.

Which games and how much are you looking to spend?

[modes98]

Personally i would go with this one Clicky. Bit of an outlay but you pay for performance!

[LeChuck]

This has appeared on Dell's website today. It'll cost £305 delivered if you buy it today (£20 discount offer ends today). AMD dual-core, 2gb RAM, 120gb HD and ATI 1150 integrated graphics.

If you hadn't mentioned gaming in your post then that would be perfect, but I don't think you'll be able to play the latest games on there (i.e. Crysis). To be honest you'll have to shell out a fair bit to get a laptop that will play the newest games.

[Tim Southampton Rover]

The main game i'd play is Football Manager or games similar to that.

Anything with outstanding graphics etc i'd just play on my desktop PC but its mainly for traveling on the train.

[LeChuck]

Ah. Well that Dell is perfect then, you won't get anything better or equal to it for the money. FM needs a lot of RAM, so 2gb is ideal, and the dual-core will mean you should be able to multitask with it too. The graphics card is still decent and will play pretty much everything bar the very newest games.

[Tim Southampton Rover]

That link doesn't work at the mo, do you remember the actual name of the laptop?

[LeChuck]

You're right, that link was rubbish. This'll work: http://ecomm.euro.dell.com/dellstore/baske...d&itemtype=

Comes with a Logitech wireless mouse and camera too, apparently. My comment about the £20 discount was rubbish too, it should be £305 for a while (although Dell do change their deals quickly, especially with good ones like that, so don't dither too long if it takes your fancy). Forgot, it's a 15.4" widescreen with Truelife (the glossy sort).

Edit: Another thing I forgot to say...don't worry about it being from the small business site, that's just there really to make bulk orders easier. Just enter your name for the business. A small business can be someone selling things on eBay from home, so they have no problem with shipping a single computer to a house.

[Paul]

The family PC after years of abuse is dieing and I plan to replace it with a laptop and then re-format the PC for my youngest to use - I think the main problem is the hard drive is in a total mess. so I have two questions:

1. Is it easy to reformat the hard drive? I have an old, still in the wrapper, copy of XP which has never been used. I hoped this and loads of updates would give a nice clean installation?

2. The laptop spec and any recommendations. The main uses will be:

e-mail and browsing

music and photo storage

BBC iplayer and ITV's equivalent

what about Vista? I imagine it will be difficult to get something running XP so is it worth the hassle to search out an XP machine or is Vista OK now?

We seem to use the PC or my work laptop more and more for watching TV so it would be good to get something which gives a really nice quality in this area. I was thinking it might be an idea to buy a seperate high quality screen to connect with the laptop. Would that work and should the connection be hardwired or is wireless going to be OK? I've found when I watch BBC iplayer on the PC the quality is good if I download it first but quite "jerky" if I try to stream the programme. On ITV this doesn't happen. The family PC is probably 6-7 years old.

Two reasons for getting a laptop. First we are sick of the huge lump of plastic that sits in the corner and second it would be great to be able to move the laptop around from room to room as required. If anyone can offer an alternative to this I'm ready to listen.

[Drummer Boy]

Macbook Pro does everything you want

[Guest Kamy100]

I bought a Macbook at about this time last year and have to say that it is superb. It is very easy to use, the platform is very stable and it has never crashed. I use it for basic video editing and it is superb for that as well. I have also found that you can have a large number of programmes open all at once and system performance does not suffer.

I highly recommend getting a MAC, although if anyone is thinking of getting one it might be best to wait until July as Apple are supposedly going to refresh the range.

[Wilky]

reformatting is easy. make sure u back everythin u want to save on cd or external hard drive.

once backed up try to delete and uninstall as much as u can, it will make the whole reformat process quicker.

[Eddie]

I highly recommend getting a MAC, although if anyone is thinking of getting one it might be best to wait until July as Apple are supposedly going to refresh the range.

How certain are you of this?

[Guest Kamy100]

Not certain, but pretty much every MAC forum is saying this so I would say that it is a high possibility.

[Wilky]

Not certain, but pretty much every MAC forum is saying this so I would say that it is a high possibility.

arnt apple macs owned by bill gates also?

[brian_gallagher85]

Yep, that has confirmed to me that you are indeed the same person

[Wilky]

Yep, that has confirmed to me that you are indeed the same person

lolz.... who did u think i was?

tim flowers?

[Iceman]

how difficult would it be to upgrade a laptop,lets just say the ram and harddrive.im thinking of getting and external hardrive,as i dont intend moving around too much with it.However its the ram im concerned about.i only want to use it for the internet and email,maybe music and movies.

Cheers

[Eddie]

Very difficult to upgrade and you are better off not doing it.

[Iceman]

im not going to do the harddrive,as i will get an external hardrive.its the ram that im more interested in.i knew it might be difficult to do though

[Eddie]

As I said, very difficult to do. If your laptop can't do what you need then you should just buy a new one. Always a risk to play around with them unless you really know what you are doing.

[LeChuck]

Eddie, all this information you are giving is very misleading.

The RAM is very easy to upgrade, it's actually easier than upgrading than a desktop. On the reverse of your laptop you'll see a couple of small panels that you'll be able to take screws out of and lift off. Inside one of those panels will be sticks of RAM, you just simply take those out and put the upgrade in. It doesn't even invalidate your warranty or anything. I did it to my girlfriend's laptop in less than 5 minutes and that was the first thing I'd ever done to a laptop, I found it much easier than upgrading my own computer.

. The only thing you can get wrong really is buying incompatible RAM, but if you use Crucial's memory scanner then you can't really go wrong.

The hard drive is more difficult but still very do-able, but if you're not entirely confident at getting to the insides of your laptop then you should probably just get an external drive, because it does carry more risk of things going wrong. There will be some YouTube videos of this lying around too, have a look at them and see if you feel confident enough to do it.

[Bazzanotsogreat]

As I said, very difficult to do. If your laptop can't do what you need then you should just buy a new one. Always a risk to play around with them unless you really know what you are doing.

Upgrading Ram is an absolute piece of cake, I recently upgraded my laptop from DDR ( 2700) 512 slots to 1GB slots : it took me all of about 2 minutes. Upgrading the CPU is a very different story: but then again im no technical wiz kid.