Laptop Choice?

Looking for a laptop, 15" mostly for surfing the internet and binge watching Netflix with the odd bit of Football Manager thrown in. Budget £600, max £700 if there is a good sale on. Where best to put down my hard earned cash?

Probably be best to wait for black Friday now so you can get a deal

MS Surfaces are almost impossible to repair. I have a client who cracked the screen, and it three replacement screens didn't work with it.

I've got another client who has a Pro 4 with a dodgy battery, and MS are charging about £400 for a replacement unit.

Chances are that it'll be fine - these are two failures out of 20 odd units, but beware

If you buy from John Lewis. You can get repairs free for years for £75. Includes replacement devices.

Not applicable in your situation, but good for club hands here.

I've just bought a refurbished x230, it's got a 500GB HDD and I'm thinking about getting an mSATA drive to use as the primary drive with OS etc, and 500GB to store music and files and stuff.

Any recommendations? I'm thinking 128GB should be enough and believe the mSATA port is limited to SATA 2 speeds anyway, but should be an improvement over a regular drive still, right?

Bought a Surface Pro 4 from Duncs which I really love.

My partner is now looking to move from Mac and would like something like my Surface.

Not sure whether to get her the same Pro 4 going used on Amazon for around £480 or get her a Pro 6 for more £££. Can't really understand the difference.

Or anyone on here has something to offer?

If your heart is set on the 2 in 1 format, the Dell XPS15 2 in 1 is insanely powerful and a great form factor.

The XPS 13 2 in 1 is also awesome but fiesnt have the same graphics power as the XPS 15.

I've trialled various Macbook pros, all of the surface pros and the XPS range in the last year and I'd say the XPS15 2 in 1 is the best laptop I have used in quite a few years.

That said, a high spec SP4 is my daily laptop as I value the fact it is a touch smaller.

Thanks, I check out the XPS 13 for her and compare with the Pro.
(She thinks if she has the same as me I'll be able to troubleshoot any issues she has :)

I wish the Pixel Slate was cheap. Ah.

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Probably discontinued but I got a refurbed Acer C720 from Argos about 3 years ago for £120, haven't had issues once. Not sure what Acer have on the go at the moment, but my own experiences have been positive.

Quick question for those that know...

Need to get a new laptop as mine is kaput and I'm off on a medium length trip. For the most part it's going to be for Skype and the like, but I would like to be able to run some kind of CAD package on it (although I don't need it to be super fast/capable as I suspect this may not get used as much as I'd like).

Realistically £400 is probably as far as I can justify - any ideas?

Sharing is easy, each person logs in with their google account. There are various parental filters built-in.

Full Powerpoint isn't an option with Chrome. Your choices are either run the Android app or use Powerpoint online (I don't use powerpoint enough to know what those options lack but you can test in any browser/android phone).

Sheets will run fine as obviously it's google based and all in the cloud. Rstudio has two options, either the cloud option or some of the newer, more powerful, chromebooks can natively run Linux apps so you can install and run it that way (actually you can also install Linux via Crouton and run it that way but it's a bit of a hassle).

Telly can be done via websites or Android apps (although not all play nicely).

I don't know about specific models but certainly get one that can run Android apps, 4GB of RAM and think about a minimum of 64GB of storage if you're planning to install a lot of apps or do stuff locally rather than on the cloud).

Generally it's a matter of deciding on form factor and budget and seeing what's available. Obviously you'll pay more for a slim, lightweight model than something a bit bulky and plasticky.

Boss.lovely.

I'd go for this for £413
using code DO17LAST, which is valid for today
(£415 +VAT and then a 17% discount takes it back to £413)

Dell Inspiron 5370
Core i5-8250U (Quad Core, up to 3.40 GHz, 6MB Cache, 15W)
Windows 10 Home (64bit)
8GB RAM
256 GB SSD
Intel UHD Graphics
13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 Display

https://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7UdTCiVUCaTV6J8Kzz2Uw909HmVCBse5CT9Mho4lVSPuDmwfX6nniLQeGzWrz0GW3XExrPOwnPOl9pyBL8jVIQTe%2fnvjKmtmYBFXCaWnndrUjs0TakL6vKQYOW76PEkfFEcLxvCMW%2b71aMXfBn5Wma4JCz0wAhz5Y9UBZgQOIZjj0nefpS1e8BJldQo2s9RxK%2bhZsmURl5EMAeZRhCWNZa9%2b5B%2fbWQZecHkcQds3OoN0Np

'Scratch and dent' is so minor you'll struggle to find the scratch.
Latest gen Intel mobile chips are much faster than the previous gen. It's a genuinely quick laptop, not just quick for £400

@duncs Looking at that Dell ^ would that cover all standard home uses easily (photos, live streaming TV, surfing, kids games, word processing etc, etc) and also be future proof for a few years ? I'm also in the market for a new laptop (or desktop maybe) but I've no idea what to look for spec wise nowadays. Would like a slightly larger screen as well: 15" if they stil do them?

Yeah, it'd comfortably do that and more for a few years. I've pretty much got that machine and it's extremely capable. Home uses no problem. Bit of light gaming. Some dev/coding.
And still plenty of 15" or 17" laptops around. Should be a similar price/spec to the 13" ones.
Dell outlet has been decent recently. Scratch and dent stuff. And look for the latest gen, i5-8xxx range for laptops

Yes.

A desktop will obviously get your more bang for your buck. I was looking on Amazon at refub desktops for work and they had that sort of spec for ~£200.

Realistically all you probably need is an SSD, i3 and above with 8gb ram.

Thanks both, I'll have a search on the site for some options.

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Ah bugger it, I missed this!

Thanks for the info - hadn't seen the Dell Outlet so will have a look through.

I think I'm going to downgrade expectations and get rid of the need for CAD on it as well, and look to pay a little less.

15" version...

https://m.dell.com/h5/m/r/outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7UdbW3hYsqSAn6Hq%2ffgHv3qRTaoBttrP%2fvTvYmyCm0TMGa9TJB0atvcSrTDMDJrMs6T%2bO%2b6GMWNsY4%2feORppB%2bYFbBh%2fJaMDALdjlKcEJN27x986Ntd6QCmNls8iIsh4vk8qcwQpUhyZ0M10krZK57GyO7jOw5cZnmRrB2uaiMAMoRD0I9EW0IimqAnq246M4JTTHyurTPvOWa8IqU1wJufeAcnsKzVDtyQXM%2fVgJM0VWB

Thanks for that. That is very tempting!

Bit left field for a laptop thread, anyone used the Linx 12x64? Gets decent reviews and at a price that's not too painful when I inevitably damage it.

I have a Chuwi Hi10 which is pretty much the same spec (same processor, memory and hdd) with a 10" screen. Cost was just over £100 without a keyboard so pretty commensurate with the £150 for the 12" screen and keyboard on the Linx.

It's OK. I mainly use it for Plex and very light web browsing. It can be pretty sluggish attempting to use generally, clicking on something doesn't always lead to it happening straight away, occasional freezes, etc.

It's OK for media consumption with occasional other use (which is mainly what I bought it for) but if I wanted a functional laptop that I could use daily at that price I'd either get an old laptop (Thinkpad X220 or similar) from ebay or a chromebook.