Basic laptop question

Bruce, if this is to be used for simple surfing, beging letters, emails rather than video encoding / decoding, hardcore photo manipulation then most will be up to the task. As to brand I have found Lenovo to be worth a look but others may catch your eye.

Best of luck.

I'm sure there will be many suggestions but I'll second Lenovo.

You can buy direct from them. Lenovo is the company that bought the IBM PC brand from IBM.

Bruce,
I have just experienced some poor after sales service from Hewlett Packard following a design fault. They don't want to know and keep fobbing me off.

I don't know how computer literate you are, I guess not everso by your description. But the problem with laptops seems to be the amount of rubbish you get pre-loaded on them.

I have helped out a number of friends and wife's friends in recent months by getting a new laptop and taking off all the unnecessary programmes - aspects of Windows and third party rubbish. Doing this makes them run a lot faster. Get the shop/a friend to do this.

Also make sure that you have at least 2GB of Ram if you have Vista. Cheaper laptops use some of their RAM to run the video I believe, so what you actually have to use for programmes is less in practice than it says on the box.

If you buy now you should get Vista loaded on it with an undertaking to upgrade to Windows 7 free. Check this out.

You do not need to spend a lot on having a large hard disk in your machine for everyday use - you can always plug in an external hard drive later.

Also, and this is a personal grudge. Most laptops seem to be pre-loaded with Norton antivirus, which you then have to pay for. I am told that it is now better than it was, but in the past I have found Norton to be like a virus itself - difficult to get rid of, and slows the system down.

Better to use Avira Free or AVG Free, which are, err, free.

Better to use a free firewall (e.g. Zonealarm Free) in preference to the Windows one.

A bit like hifi really - with a bit of tweaking a medium spec machine can perform better than poorly set up expensive kit.

HTH
Don overcast downtown York.

Thanks Don

I do indeed strip out the rubbish from a new computer. I run Norton on my desktop so have this anyway for use on the laptop.

We have a big capacity back up storage drive already too.

I'm more keen to get a nice screen and decent speed with handling images-some at quite high res (my wife is an artist and stores lots of scanned files).

Bruce

Bruce

FWIW, I have bought three lap tops (Mrs D Miss D one and Miss D Three. I bought IBM (now Lenovo) twice and Apple once. All have been excellent.

The IBMs were both from the "R" series and represent really good value. They are heavier than the "T" and other series - but this isn't a big issue for me and shouldn't bother you.

IBM fixed a DVD drive problem on my daughter's (I had a 3 year next business day warranty because she was at Newcastle Uni - too far to travel to fix myself) so no problem with support. Machine is now more than 5 years old

Mrs D's is about 3 years old and hasn't had any problems - touch-wood!! bought it from Toye who were very nice to deal with

The Apple is only about one year old (MacBook Pro) but cost about £1,500 so is very expensive. bought it direct from Apple.

For a PC Laptop I can certainly recommend IBM, but you do need to read the specs very carefully to know what you are getting, and the price shoots up as you keep adding little "extras"

Cheers

Don