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[supermop]

T
Murphys Law states that as soon as I've spent the money
upgrading the old one, it'll vanish in a puff of smoke.  

I think you'll find that's Moore's Law

Anyway starting with hardware...

RAM: 1GB min, 2GB preffered
CPU: Dual-core, 1.8ghz
Hard disk: 80GB min
Graphics: Integrated, shared video memory
Optical drive: for the price, may as well get a DVD-RW

Thats about the basics you'll need for a modern computer. The more RAM you have, the more stuff you can have open at once without fear of the dreaded Windows slowdown.

As has already been said, avoid Vista. Whatever anyone says, it's still crap. I went to MS SQL 2008 launch party and we were told in a seminar (by Microsoft!) that Vista was basically built on top of XP. Only it has a load of crap added nobody wants, which uses up valuable resources and makes the end-user experience god-awful. Vista is not the "fresh" and "new" operating system everyone thinks it is. Stick with XP but make sure you get service pack 3 and a good virus scanner.

Good free virus scanners include AVG and Avast!. Always better to get one with some level of support though, but avoid anything made by Symantec, Norton or McAfee - resource hogs. I recommend Kaspersky Anti Virus personally.

Ebuyer.com have some really good deals on all the time - I'd recommend them all day long. Dell are also quite good. I'd just phone them up to get the better deals, as they can go a lot cheaper than their website advertises. I managed to get a £750 laptop down to £499 (I was buying 22 of them though!).

Wouldn't set foot in PC World if I were you. You will get stung somehow.

[unclelicklug]

Reply to stuart30, why avoid vista?
Because as far as I can see there are no significant advantages over XP, still some glitches, lots of drivers still not compatible and because of feature bloat it is slow and resource hungry....

[stuart30]

Reply to stuart30, why avoid vista?
Because as far as I can see there are no significant advantages over XP, still some glitches, lots of drivers still not compatible and because of feature bloat it is slow and resource hungry....

Hmmm well id disagree with you....i personally didn't like Vista at all when i first tried it but now i find it really rather entertaining,it does everything my Xp pro does and then some.

It maybe resource hungry but with a reasonable machine i find it quite literally flies....of course im sure some people have problems with it but touch wood so far im very pleased and its been trouble free.

[TheBoy]

For a laptop now (which will be Vista), I wouldn't drop below a Core2 Duo (around 1.8G or more), 2G RAM, current generation of integrated video. Virtually everything will have dvd writers and wifi.  If you need bluetooth, make sure its there, same with firewire.

A lot of the sub £350 ones are Core Duo, not Core2 Duo.

I think, much below this spec, it will struggle in 3yrs.

RAM may be cheaper to buy seperate - eg http://www.crucial.com/uk

[Ken T]

Yes, but an old machine would be dog-slow with a modern operating system, and if you stick with an old O/S you'll find MS will have stopped releasing security patches for it years ago, leaving your machine more vulnerable than it needs to be.

Yes, but........
I type this on my main PC running Win98SE. It works, doesn't screw up too often, and when it screws up I can fix it. Also virus writers have moved on to other targets like XP and Vista, and leave the old systems alone. We have a hardware firewall in the ADSL Modem, and in the Router, which keeps most at bay, plus I have Spybot S&D plus AVG which keeps most things happy.

Back to laptops,
Laptops tend to depreciate very fast as soon as they are sold, Why not consider a 2nd hand one from fleabay?. The time is right, the summer hols are looming and everyone is after holiday dosh, so machines get sold for reasonable money. The HP DV6000/9000 series are quite nice, cost a fortune when new, but are not too bad at pres. One advantage of the DV9000 is you can fit 2 SATA hard drives, one for O/S plus progs the other for storing films etc which can then be removed and replaced. The only down side is some of them tend to suffer  from bad soldered joints under the nforce chip, however HP will currently repair this for free!.

Avoid Sony's at all costs, spares are next to impossible to get (price to us for a replacement keyboard is £87 plus vat and post), plus they are a bitch to repair, and spares are very hard/expensive to get.  

Acer are OK'ish but plastics tend to be thin and break easily. The recent acers are a bit naff, cheap, not well made. We have already had one in for repair, 3 months old !.

Its a jungle out there,

Best of luck,

Ken

[TheBoy]

Yes, but an old machine would be dog-slow with a modern operating system, and if you stick with an old O/S you'll find MS will have stopped releasing security patches for it years ago, leaving your machine more vulnerable than it needs to be.

Yes, but........
I type this on my main PC running Win98SE. It works, doesn't screw up too often, and when it screws up I can fix it. Also virus writers have moved on to other targets like XP and Vista, and leave the old systems alone. We have a hardware firewall in the ADSL Modem, and in the Router, which keeps most at bay, plus I have Spybot S&D plus AVG which keeps most things happy.

Worms tend to exist for many years.  Also, flaws found in today's Windows often existed in earlier versions, only MS won't be patching.  Really shouldn't be running such stuff now.

[Ken T]

Hey, if it 'aint broke don't fix it  

OK, I am considering a bit of an upgrade, trouble is I still use a lot of older software that prob won't run under XP, so I'd have to buy all the soddin' stuff again

Ken

It's good this, I can agree and disagree at the same time

[TheBoy]

Hey, if it 'aint broke don't fix it  

OK, I am considering a bit of an upgrade, trouble is I still use a lot of older software that prob won't run under XP, so I'd have to buy all the soddin' stuff again

Ken

It's good this, I can agree and disagree at the same time

Trouble is, older OSes are broken.  And there are millions of PCs around the world that are compromised without their owners knowing.  Tonights slowdown is one of the consequences of that

[jereboam]

Laptops tend to depreciate very fast as soon as they are sold, Why not consider a 2nd hand one from fleabay?.

Don't think that's a good idea.  Every laptop I've seen for sale secondhand, including those on ebay, has been overpriced.  Sellers are trying to recover as much as possible of what they paid, and their expectations are unrealistic, yet they often get what they ask from people who know no better.  

You don't know what condition a second hand laptop will be in, either.  For the prices expected, you can often get a new machine with a 12 month warranty.

[Omegaani]

OK, I am considering a bit of an upgrade, trouble is I still use a lot of older software that prob won't run under XP, so I'd have to buy all the soddin' stuff again

I keep a 500Mhz Compaq small form factor PC with Win98 on it for those few occasions I need older programs.

No way I would attach it to the interweb, though!  

[Ken T]

Laptops tend to depreciate very fast as soon as they are sold, Why not consider a 2nd hand one from fleabay?.

Don't think that's a good idea.  Every laptop I've seen for sale secondhand, including those on ebay, has been overpriced.  Sellers are trying to recover as much as possible of what they paid, and their expectations are unrealistic, yet they often get what they ask from people who know no better.  

You don't know what condition a second hand laptop will be in, either.  For the prices expected, you can often get a new machine with a 12 month warranty.

Aye you are right, but they won't sell. Give them a few weeks, holidays looming and prices will drop. Last week, DV9000 wireless cards were £12 plus, I have just picked up several for £4.99, nobody else interested. Don't forget last Xmas people were selling "broadband ready, Wifi Enabled" laptops for £175. These were Tosh 4600's which are pretty nice but are at least 6 years old ( P.S. I've got one for a very reasonable price if anyone's interested!). Last week there was a DV6000 which went unsold at £220. Now that is potentially a nice machine, capable of taking a good processor either Core2Duo or Turion X2, and having lots of ports.  Guarantee's are useful, but if you get it cheap enough, and it last over a year then who needs a guarantee?. Unless you pay extra for several years, and some companies refuse to honour the guarantee if for example the ram is not approved by them, or Hard Drive, etc. There are plenty sharks out there. My current laptop is an Acer with a 64bit AMD proc. The plastic is crap, keeps breaking, but it works and does what I want most of the time. I see so many Celeron based machines that are so slow, although they are not doing much. Trouble is the market got flooded with these things recently, and they keep ending up on our repair rack.  Don't forget, for not a lot, you can fit a brand new 160GB SATA HD, and even less, a new DVDR/W, Dual layer to most machines, so an older machine will most likely have worn out the drives but the guts will still be good. One repair I did today was on a Compaq C300, fairly new but the light was pinkish. THis is a clasic sign of the backlight tube going. Its  a bitch of a job to change but can be done for not a lot.

Ken

[jereboam]

I think it's all luck and timing, then.

But I wouldn't want to pay £250 for an 18-month old machine when I can get a new one for £350.  That's the sort of thing I was seeing las September when I needed to get a machine for my son.  

But as you say, that was after the holidays...

[John Lewis]

Another good place for cheap lappies is www.bigpockets.co.uk - I just got my missus's niece a cracking little Gateway machine from them for £235.99, albeit Vista with a Sempron processor. looks really nice and well built too. 241.99 delivered with 1 year free back to base warranty.