Help With Laptop

[ERICS MUM]

Hi,

I'm thinking of buying a laptop but I have no idea what sort of minimum specification I should go for and what sort of prices these would be.

If there are any experts or enthusiasts out there, I would welcome your advice. I plan to buy in the UK, but are there any benefits from buying in Florida?

Linda

[emily1982]

Well, im not sure if it makes much difference but the voltage might be different. Also you'd have to throw all the packaging away due to customs.

[Obi Wan Kenobi]

The keyboard will be different, no £ sign for a start. You would have to enter it every time as an ALT+(Number)

Secondly, with the price of laptops in the shops and on line in the Uk the prices are as good now or in some cases better than in the USA

[Goofyish]

If you plan to get one that runs Vista make sure you have at least 1Gb of RAM. Also go for a Dual Core processor.

[Boss Hogg]

What sort of thing do you want to run on the machine? Naturally, some applications use RAM more than others, so if you want heavy duty applications get as much RAM as you can.

We've got an Apple iBook which runs pretty well since I increased the RAM from 256 to 768 and it has a 1.33Ghz processor. I rarely use a PC now and must admit that I find the way a Mac operates much better than a PC and some of the applications sync very well with each other.

[Kevin Stringer]

As Matt says, it really depends what you want to do with it.
If you want to do things that are resource intensive such as video editing or playing the latest games, you will need a pretty fast piece of kit in the £800+ category. If you just want to surf the net and do the odd bit of word processing, buy the cheapest thing you can lay your hands on.

As Tim pointed out, Vista is very hot on using up RAM, 1Gb is the minimum requirement if you want to run all the whistles and bells on Home Premium. It's a shame they everyone seems to have stopped selling machines with XP on.

Kev

[tashasmum]

If you want a standard machine for email, web browsing, word processing etc Dell are doing some very good deals at the moment and are allowing you specify your machine with XP rather than Vista.

DH gets these for people at work, personaly we use a MacBook at home.