By reputation Sony Vaio's are decent I've heard.
sony vaio's offer poor value, in terms of feature to price ratio. they're really not good value for money at all.
I'm after a decent-ish one for £250-300. Does anyone know what happens to unsold laptops? A laptop that PC world are selling for £500 now, in six months won't have gone down in price, it'll have just vanished from their site and a much better laptop will be on there for £500. Do the old ones go to some kind of clearance centre or do they get sent back to manufacturers and recycle the parts?
no offence, but for £250-300, you really won't get a 'decent' laptop. actually, that's somewhat of a lie. if you scour the internet, you should be able to find some asus laptops for about £300 (and slightly north of that). trouble is, these laptops are equipped with a weedy celeron processor - coupled with the memory-hungry, resource-intensive windows vista, it wouldn't really be ideal for anything more than web browsing, editing documents, and listening to music.
really, i'd be looking at spending about £370 minimum, to allow for a comfortable experience of everyday computing tasks. i'd reccomend you look at the following brands: asus and toshiba. that's basically, it, really. PLEASE, avoid the REALLY horrible 'bargain' brands, such as e-machines, medion, and so forth. also, in terms of the more well-known brands, dell have once again gone downhill, offering cheap build quality and poor choice of system components. avoid dell until they get their act together again. hp really aren't that good, either. lastly, you'll see a lot of acer laptops flying around. whilst these offer a very good price to feature ratio, they are unreliable - things go wrong more often than not, and they have shoddy build quality.
take it from me, i stupidly purchased an acer laptop from an online retailer eight months ago. it worked perfectly for about two months. then, the problems arose. the touchpad basically died for no reason. so, i sent it off to acer for repair, and it arrived back two weeks later. almost a day later, despite the fact acer had fitted a new touchpad, it died once again. as well as that, before i'd actually sent it off for a second repair, they keyboard decided to find a mind of its own - it'd delete words i would be typing, and generally be an unresponsive pain in the arse. so, off again it went to acer, two weeks later, it arrived back, and they hadn't bothered to fix it. cute. in the midst of this, i was going through a right battle with aforementioned retailer, about receiving a full refund - as i was fell entitled to do so (read: consumer rights and sales of goods act 1978). next thing, the laptop refuses to charge. by this point, i was at the end of my tether. i eventually received my full refund, sent the laptop back to acer, and that was the end of that unnecessarily long, drawn-out saga.
i'd decided i'd had enough of laptops in general, and decided to purchase a much better value pc, for less money than i paid for my laptop (which is a given, really). a lot of things can go wrong with a laptop - moreso than with a pc. at least with a pc, if something goes wrong, you have easy access to the pc's innards, which you don't with a laptop. o course, i understand that for some people, a laptop is essential in certain situations.
anyway, if you're buying a laptop, trust me, it's worth paying that little bit more for an asus or toshiba. they're two of the most reliable laptop manufacturers going. not a lot is likely to go wrong with them, and paying that bit more for them will give you a lot less of a headache in the long run, compared to if you bought, say, an acer laptop.
in terms of laptop specifications, i'd recommend you look for the following, minimum:
processor: intel pentium dual core, or amd equivalent (i think it'd be an amd athlon x2).
ram: 2gb will be more than sufficient for most computing tasks.
hard disk drives: nearly all laptops come with a 160gb hdd by default, which should be more than enough for most users.
graphics card: most laptops come with an integrated graphics card, so if you're a mid to serious gamer, forget about it.
unless you're always near a power source, try to research the specified battery run time for your laptop - arguably, battery life is the most important aspect of a laptop. remember, laptops won't last as long as your average pc will, spending that bit more is essential if you want a laptop to be problem-free for at least a year (or two, if you get lucky).
i think what pc world do is this: they offer the unsold laptops at a later time of year, in-store and online (mainly in the run-up to the christmas period), for a reduced price. you know, store specific clearance bargains/managers specials, and that kind of thing.though i'm not 100% certain.
lol at the buy a mac(book) comment. yes, because you can buy a macbook for £400. try nearly double that price, ... moron.
lol.