Laptops

Laptops

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Any advice on what type of laptop to buy my daughter to take to university. Lightweight is her preference and value for money is mine.

Word, excel and web browsing as well as music downloads will be the main uses.
Thanks
Toni

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John Stokdyk, AccountingWEB head of insight
By John Stokdyk
08th Sep 2008 15:04

This just in from the Hardware News Desk
Dell has just introduced its own Eee too - the Inspiron Mini 9 laptop, with 9-in screen, built-in WiFi & webcam and 8GB of solid state disk storage. Recommended price will be from £299, with a Linux version (and pretty plastic colours) due in a few weeks.

Could be another contender for your daughter's shortlist, Toni.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

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John Stokdyk, AccountingWEB head of insight
By John Stokdyk
05th Sep 2008 16:35

You all beat me to the punch!
Phew, Toni... I meant to pop in and post a reply when I first saw your post on Wednesday, but things intervened and I feel like I'm bringing up the rear here on a lot of intersting advice.

I've got a lot of sympathy for the view of David Griffiths - and so does Simon Hurst who wrote a piece for us entitled, Never buy a laptop when a desktop will do.

I have to confess that I do use a laptop for my job, and will often go to a conference or interview and type in what is said verbatim. But for lectures and educational material, I think it might be more helpful to work from handwritten notes that you then interpret and enter to the system in a more considered fashion. But what really matters is your daughter's own personal preferences and tastes. If she's a good typist and wants to be a mobile-working cybernaut, go for the laptop option (with street cred points for the Mac, even if you'll have to pay more for it).

To satisfy her lightweight wishes and your budget concerns, I'd also suggest looking at some of the models covered in our recent news piece Dell and Asus join battle of the PC featherweights. You're looking around during a boom time for ultra mobile PC technology, which can start from as low as £170 for an Asus Eee 701 to around £220 for an Acer One. (After rereading some of the previous comments, I'm beginning to falter and veer towards recommending Dell. I've used their laptops for 9 years now and have never had a complaint. I'm a bit of a keyboard snob, so it would get my vote over the Asus). But as I said earlier, it all comes down to her personal preferences (and your budget).

Good luck with your quest and thanks to all the other contributors for such a well informed thread.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

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By User deleted
05th Sep 2008 13:31

£280 for a 10" lightweight notebook, 3 yrs g'tee
The latest offer from Aldi (Sunday 7 Sep 2008) is a Medion Akoya 10" "netbook" for £279.99.
This particular mini laptop is said to have obtained a "Buy It!" recommendation from ComputerActive magazine last month (August 2008).

It includes 3 years warranty / support.
To put this in perspective 3 years warranty/support from PC World would cost "from £7.99 per month" :
which is
£7.99 x 36 = £287.64.

So this Aldi offer could be viewed as pay £279.99 for 3 years warranty & support (which is £7.65 less than PC World) and get a free 10" mini lap top into the bargain ! Or you could pay double for a similar package from PC World.

The main problem with Aldi (Medion) and Targa (Lidl) computers is that they often sell-out within hours of the offer starting, so get the addresses of 2 or 3 local stores and be prepared to visit more than one of them to get the product. One other thing, these stores don't accept Credit Cards, instead you have to pay by Debit Card or cash so Consumer Credit Act protection is lost. So, if the Credit Card and stock availability disadvantages are a problem, go to PC World and pay double the price.

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By Stewart Twynham
05th Sep 2008 11:20

Or...
If she had a Mac, it would come with Time Machine which fully and seamlessly manages all hourly, daily, and weekly backups onto any external USB or Firewire device, allowing you to search for and recover anything - file, folder, e-mail, etc from any previous point in time - as well as providing one-touch full system recovery.

Oh, and there would be no need for antivirus or a firewall.

More money saved, and no 2am phone call... :)

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By kuriyan
05th Sep 2008 10:34

backup, antivirus, firewall
Make sure she also has an external hard disk (pref USB as it can attach to any PC), and subscribe to antivirus + firewall, then teach/preach about regular backups, storing the HDD safely, and saving versions of coursework, and .... (she will ignore your advise, fill the HDD's internal & external with videos, music, photos, not back up anything, and you will get a tearful call at 2AM asking you to sort something out- but then that's what dad's are for!)

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By Stewart Twynham
04th Sep 2008 14:00

Get a Mac...
You'll find a MacBook is an ideal companion for a busy student. Small, light, great battery life and powerful - and much cheaper than the equivalent spec 'small' laptop brands.

You'll get cracking educational discounts on the MacBook itself, qualify for the dirt-cheap education edition of Office 2008 for Mac, and in the coming weeks there may even be a back-to-Uni offer.

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By pauljohnston
04th Sep 2008 13:59

If I were you
have a look around ask friends and dont forget ebay. If you are holidaying in the Far East maybe look there too

But the most important thing is a warranty that will replace items when they fail.Try and get three years.

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By User deleted
04th Sep 2008 12:40

PC World & Battery life
PC World have an offer on at the moment, probably also going on in other outlets too but I haven't looked for it.

If you want mobile broadband, they then give you a healthy discount off the laptop that you buy. I got a £280 discount off my laptop with Vodafone with a £20 a month, 24 month contract !

The only other piece of advice i'd give you is if you go for the laptop route, check the battery life. It's worth paying that little bit extra for a larger capacity one as the power bricks and cables add significant weight and bulk, plus you have the issue of where to plug it in.

good luck, Mike

www.mpa.me.uk

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By User deleted
03rd Sep 2008 13:48

Factor in warranty support costs
There are many suitable Lap Tops in the £399+ price bracket.

But before choosing do factor in the cost of an additional 2 years parts & labour warranty, then you'll find that the cost of some "good value" lap tops might actually be double that of others.

My personal preference in recent years, have been to purchase computers from Aldi (Medion brand) and Lidl (Targa brand).
NB. Beware : I think Sainsburys supplied Medion computers might not have the extra two years free warranty.

An offer I saw yesterday at Aldi was £499.99 for a Medion Lap Top of quite high spec - including at no extra cost an extra 2 years parts & labour warranty. A 250GB pocket-size external back HDD had been reduced to £34.99 at Aldi too, yesterday.

The Acer brand is on a blacklist so far as I am concerned because my sister had one which kept having a failing Hard Disc drive, and a contributing factor was the visiting engineers (Comet supplied the lap top - was it a Comet error not an Acer error ?) of formatting the Hard Disc in the obsolete FAT32 format on a Win XP machine (NTFS being universal standard except for Acer / Comet).

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By Robert Hurn
03rd Sep 2008 15:52

Dell with Numeric Keypad
If she is study accounting and finance may be woth considering the Dell 19" range as thye have a numeric keypad. In the past i have laways had problems with USB numeric keypads

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By AnonymousUser
03rd Sep 2008 10:18

so many of them.......
Go and enquire about Acer, HP, Compaq, Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Fujitsu.

Next, you go and get confused over their goodness and qualities as advertised.

Next, take your confusion to the competitor model and tell them how confused which model you plan to buy.

This is how we make shortlisting of PC models.

You eventually ended up with only one model to buy.

Good luck for getting confused.

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By User deleted
02nd Sep 2008 19:46

Dell are top notch!
I'd go for Dell everytime, if you want to shop around then you may get laptops that have a slightly higher spec, but I've always found the Dell reliability to be first class.

Also, when I have had problems, their on site service agreement (I only ever take out the first year) has been excellent.

Particular model that I would go for for value is the Vostro, last time I looked you could only get them on the business section, but they are cheaper than the equivalent Inspiron models, they have better speakers as well, although the Inspiron does look nicer. Make sure you have a DVD writer and wi-fi and you can't really go wrong.

This is just my personal opinion, a friend of mine has recently bought 'Acer' and had a lot of trouble, another friend has bought a Toshiba recently and thinks it's great.

Web browsing is free with wi-fi at most McDonalds, or alternatively if your daughter will need roaming access to the Internet, Vodafone's broadband stick is a good product with higher browsing speeds than equivalent products from Orange or Three, cost is £15 per month, but if you go through www.quidco.com, you can get £90 cashback (incidentally, you can also get 4% cashback on Dell Computers bought through quidco). If you're thinking of taking out mobile broadband, you may wish to consider the Carphone Warehouse's current offers, but I don't really know much about their computers.

Download Open Office (www.openoffice.org) for a free alternative to Microsoft Office and you're good to go.

Hope this has been helpful.

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By User deleted
02nd Sep 2008 18:24

Are you sure you want a laptop
It's easy to fall for the line that a laptop is the way to go, because it can be taken to lectures, to the library etc. We fell for it.

In practice the laptop rarely left my son's accommodation, apart from the two occasions that he had one nicked - and neither were his fault. It took us a couple of goes to work it out, but we eventually decided on a desktop. Portability was only a benefit to a thief!

(For the record, the first one went when thieve unscrewed the windows of his university owned accommodation from the outside, and stole the laptop. It's probable, but not certain, that a desktop would have been less attractive.

The second came when one of the occupants of the apartment block in Bordeaux had her keys stolen, but didn't have the brains to tell anybody. Somebody got access to the block, and stole the laptop when my son was actually in the apartment, by opening the door and walking off with it. Absolutely certain that would not have been possible with a desktop.

As I said, neither were his fault in anyway)

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