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Laptop choices for under £500

by Tarinder Sandhu on 3 September 2008, 05:00

Tags: Laptop pricing, HEXUS

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qao6p

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£350-£500

 

£350-£500

Spend a little more and you can put the money towards reducing the weight of the laptop and keeping the performance the same, or adding to performance by having more of everything, including a discrete graphics card for ad hoc gaming or assistance with rendering in professional applications.



Bucking the homogenous trend is Dell's Studio 15 laptop, available in 13 colours and patterns, and sporting generous specifications. The £449 model is equipped with an Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T5750 processor, 2GB RAM, 160GB drive, DVD ReWriter, Vista Home Premium, 15.4in (1,280x800) screen, and a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 graphics card, for basic gaming and multimedia speed-up. Again, it's a touch less than 3kg, making it semi-portable.

Spend £499 and a Dell Studio 17 can be yours. The specs are a touch better, too, with an larger screen - 17in, 1,440x900 - 250GB hard drive, and Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card. The downside is weight, naturally, with the '17 weighing around 3.6kg.

However, if you need both power and lightness in one package, the options narrow down to using a thin-and-light notebook.



The Toshiba U400-124 springs to mind, priced at £499.99, and housing an Intel Core 2 Duo T5550, 2GB RAM, 160GB drive, DVD ReWriter, Vista Home Premium, and a 13.3in (1,280x800) screen. Graphics are integrated, of course, with Intel's X3100 providing the grunt. The beauty of this particular design is the weight, or lack thereof, as it tips the scales at just 1.97kg for a fully-fledged notebook.

£449.99 @ Dell - Dell Studio 15

£499.99 @ Dell - Dell Studio 17

£499.99 @ PC World - Toshiba Satellite U400-124

All the laptops in this list ship with a one-year warranty as standard, although the terms are specific to the laptop.

By no means is this an exhaustive list of what's on offer at various price-points. If you've bought a laptop recently and been impressed with just how much power or portability you've gained for a modest outlay, tell us in the HEXUS.community; we'd love to hear your thoughts.

So if you receive so much goodness with sub-£500 laptops, what's the incentive to spend more, you might ask? We'll answer that in the second part of this guide, to be published on Friday.


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HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by staffsMike - Wed 03 Sep 2008 08:51
I think the only one there I could stomach dropping my own money on would be the Dell Studio 15, you can pick up similar specs with lesser CPU's for a little cheaper at dell.

You can also usually get a fairly decent spec Vostro Laptop using either special deals at the time (on the dell website, lots around during back to school) or current voucher codes which usually bring them down to £300 - £330 delivered.
Posted by joshwa - Wed 03 Sep 2008 08:57
As long as it's got a core 2 duo, 2gb ram, Vista home premium, 80gb+ HD, DVDRW, and wireless then I'm happy. You can get these with 15.4" screen for about £330 - £350 (or less with special offers, voucher codes etc). Play have ones with this spec for around £350 (the Acer range), and Dell have the Vostro 1510 around this price as well - I managed to get one for £316! :D

You can get a similar spec AMD X2 for around £300 - but what I want to know is how these all perform and whether it's worth spending an extra £30 for core 2 duo? There seems to be too much choice at the moment regarding CPUs and not enough details when people are selling them, for example Tesco sometimes just list the CPU, eg T2390 - what does this mean? Why should I have to google to find out?

AMD Sempron
Celeron M540 (meaningless letters and numbers!)
Celeron 560
Celeron Dual Core
Pentium Dual Core T2370 (ditto)
Intel Core 2 Duo
AMD 64 X2 TK57 (ditto)
Turion 64 X2 T60

These are just some of the options from Dell, Tesco, Play. It's absolutely ridiculous and give no indication of performance! And are some of these chips the same as each other with different names? M540 with an M, and then Celeron 560 without an M, and AMD 64 X2 and Turion 64 X2 or are these actually different?!? No wonder people can't understand what they're buying!

Is an M540 10x better than a TK57, and is a T2390 41x better again, and is a T2390 4x better than an M540…??

And this is ignoring all the CPUs available in the netbooks.

PS - It gets worse - there's also the Turion X2 Ultra Dual Core XM-80, a Core 2 Duo P8400, Core 2 Duo U7600 (at 1.2ghz!?!), an Athlon X2 QL-60, a Pentium M773 (these examples from play.com), and Centrino.
Posted by samcross - Wed 03 Sep 2008 15:25
Got to agree with the studio, if you're spending £350-£500 on a laptop Dell are generally the best bet, build quality and design are normally brilliant, and (normally) the spec is the best you can get for the price. But the customer service isn't always great.