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OT: Cheapish laptop recommendations?


Happyoldgit

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SWMBO is looking for a new laptop, a basic system will do, nothing fancy bit a wireless card would be good. She's been looking at the Dell Inspiron 1300 which Dell say they are offering for £249 using their current MMMUK4-N04131A E-Value Code offer. However even without an additional £30 for a wireless card they are still looking for an additional £51.00 for delivery (+ VAT etc). I'm damned if I can understand how can they justify fifty quid for delivery?

Anyway, does anyone have a recommendation for a decent base system / supplier?

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Steve,

I bought a laptop from Dell a few years ago and then a Desktop about 18 months ago.. Very pleased with the service and never had a problem with them. I called the helpdesk because I'd cocked it up and they were very helpful. :)

Delivery charge does seem steep, especially when Laptops are supposed to be fairly robust and able to withstand general courier abuse :(

Good luck with it.

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I know it's expensive, but i've dealt with their courier (think it was DHL) three times now, and it's been the best service i've had from a courier, when the laptop was delivered they rang and asked when it would be convenient to deliver, we agreed a date, and 'during the morning', online tracking came up with an estimate of 1130, it was delivered at 1131.

Then, two years later, i spilt a pint of coke into it, caused an awful smell and the laptop was truly dead, the laptop went back to dell, again the courier worked to a time and provided good packaging. they returned the laptop and again rang and got delivery bang-on.

I'd buy another Dell, I've had mine for over 3 years, it's been thrown down a bus, used in the Landrover, dropped a couple of times, and survived the (expensive) coke incident.

Luke

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Another vote for Dell. I actually have a Toshiba laptop myself, but we got some Dells at work recently and one of them gets bashed about doing duty as a programming unit for vehicle speed limiter systems, and it has performed 100% reliably. The only gripe I have in this role is the battery life isn't that good (its in the vehicles or out on test drives most of the time, away from mains power) and takes a long time to charge up again compared to my Tosh, but can't fault the rest of the machine. I think they were a bit less than £400 the ones we got, all it needed was Windows and a USB port so we got the cheapest available at the time, Inspiron 2200s IIRC.

I guess they make their money out of the delivery charge, most laptops (these were no exception) come well packed in a solid little box which would easily stand regular courier abuse. Ours came all the way from UK by DHL and arrived unscathed, which is more than can usually be said for stuff that comes here by DHL!

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Dell get my vote too. Have a look on e-bay as Dell flog new computers with minor scratches etc on there with a full warranty.

Another vote for Dell here. Use them for laptops, desktops, and servers at work. I think I might be able to explain the delivery charge. Dell seem to charge a flat rate of 50quid to deliver anything. So if it's one laptop, 50 desktops, or even 6 big servers, it's 50 quid to deliver. I guess their reasoning is that it all balances out in the end!

Suggest you add a couple of servers, two more laptops, and a couple of 42u comms racks to get your money worth out of the delivery charge! :P

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another vote for dell, the £50 delivery is a bit cheeky but the whole package is excellent.

my current laptop came from dell (very pleased with it) and i've no doubt that my next laptop will come from dell....

at least you don't have to deal with the cocks in PC world...

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Dell are ok for laptops but all the companies are about the same try Acer there good. There are loads of companies that make laptops like Fujitsu, HP, NEC, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba to name a few lol But Acer do some good deals I would try them.

For Desktops I would go with another company like Evesham Technology, as they will be much cheaper than a Dell desk top with similar spec unless you catch one of Dells deals,

!!But Watch out for those extras that’s where DELL will scr*w you!! lol

Tom

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!!But Watch out for those extras that’s where DELL will scr*w you!! lol

Tom

This where they catch a lot of people. Dell are very good for the money. There are not the best make but for the price you will not find better.

Best to look in the papers at the weekend as thats where the best offers are. There were doing a 1.4 dvd-rw and build in wireless network for £329 with free delivery.

Paul

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Anyway, does anyone have a recommendation for a decent base system / supplier?

Dell every time for me - as I've said before they IMHO offer the best comination of cost, quality and reliability.

Virtually all our work PC's and laptops are now Dell, my home PC is a Dell and my daughter bought one too, she purchased it with Dell's wireless set up so she could piggy back my cable BB internet connection from her room and the whole thing has worked faultlessly for months (tempting fate I know....)

I also use a Dell Axim pocket PC which has worked faultlessy for well over a year now......

The only problem I have ever had with Dell related to one of the couriers they use.

When my daughters PC was delivered the wirless keyboard was damaged - to Dells credit and with no questions asked a replacement was sent fairly swiftly (though not as rapidly as the original PC).

Dell didn't want the damaged bits back and I realised the new wireless one was identical in size shape and form as my corded one so I just swapped over the damaged keys and I got myself a corldless set up...... so we ended up being very happy Dell customers.

If money is tight I feel fairly confident suggesting Acer - www.ebuyer.co.uk have them at really good prices. We bought my other daughter an Acer desktop (they do laptops too) from them for xmas for the ridiculously low price of £230 (not inc. a monitor) and she is really happy with it particularly after she got some more RAM for it - which sped it up no end.

She has had one problem with it (just this week) resulting in the need to re-install the OS - unfortunatley she hadn't made backups of some farily important photos - but you can't blame Acer for that. The Acer helpline were really very good apparently and had them back up and running in no time - the moral of the tale of course is to keep backups of important data - but that would apply to any system

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I thought about building a computer as I did ten years ago, but I couldn't get close to Dell's price for an entry level desktop, so I bought one and I'd do it again. Just don't tick all the extras because that's where their markup lies.

On the other hand, I've had a brand-new Toshiba laptop from work for 6 months and there's a corrupt horizontal line across the screen already. Good job it's not mine, eh?

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SWMBO is looking for a new laptop, a basic system will do, nothing fancy bit a wireless card would be good. She's been looking at the Dell Inspiron 1300 which Dell say they are offering for £249 using their current MMMUK4-N04131A E-Value Code offer. However even without an additional £30 for a wireless card they are still looking for an additional £51.00 for delivery (+ VAT etc). I'm damned if I can understand how can they justify fifty quid for delivery?

Anyway, does anyone have a recommendation for a decent base system / supplier?

Try finding links on the Dell website for the "Dell Outlet" ... they flog off lightly used / ex-demo laptops cheaply, I'm getting pestered to death at the moment as they're offering free delivery on systems bought from the outlet.

I bought one from there and it was great, still working now around three years later. Had to have the motherboard replaced under warranty once though.

All-in-all, big thumbs up for Dell.

Watch out for Acer, I recently bought a top-of-the-line Acer Travelmate 8204... 2ghz Core-Duo, 2Gb RAM, 120Gb HDD... the dogs danglies... until it died 5 hours after delivery... it then spent 5 days away under warranty repair... came back and bluetooth doesn't work... Acer UK support tried to tell me that this model doesn't come with bluetooth (despite the Acer website spec saying it does) and then they tried to tell me they "forgot" to re-install the bluetooth module and could I send it back to them for another 5 days! After paying £1,700 for this laptop I expected support better than this! :angry:

I'm now using a Toshiba... anyone wanna buy a top-of-the-line Acer ?? :ph34r:

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Well, my Dell must have been listing to you lot,, as it has just gone fut !! has a illegal operation explorer error on start up, shame as got a fair bit of stuff on it, which is now lost :(

admittedly, it was a few year old, and only the spare used on the boat,,so had a bit of banging around !!

going toughbook this time, anyone have any suggestions for a good supplier ???

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Well, my Dell must have been listing to you lot,, as it has just gone fut !! has a illegal operation explorer error on start up, shame as got a fair bit of stuff on it, which is now lost :(

admittedly, it was a few year old, and only the spare used on the boat,,so had a bit of banging around !!

going toughbook this time, anyone have any suggestions for a good supplier ???

Send it to me and I will see what I can recover for you Tim. Should be able to get all your data back even if the machine turns out to be a write off. PM me and we'll see what we can do.

Chris

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