computers

[TerryG]

I should mention that I got to them before they were sent off for environmental recycling. There were literally hundreds of them being disposed of but the lease company insisted on having the vast majority of them to get a WEEE certificate. I was not impressed as I know lots of charities that would have jumped at the chance to have 400 laptops and somewhere between 800-1000 workstations for the cost of collecting them.
My current place only has desktops, all of which are all running XP. I am ordering replacements the first week in December but the old ones are not worth rescuing. They are so old and useless I suspect the local tip will turn them away

[JPB]

Disposing of our used machines from work is one right royal pita as the funding stream that provides the kit comes with a missive to the effect that we have to keep the same machines with the year that uses them right through their courses. This in turn means that we have new stock coming through every year and moving on with the students, in other words the laptops that we issue to them follow them through and the next batches of freshers coming in are issued with new ones. Not a problem you might think? Yeah, except that courses vary between two and four years in duration which means that we effectively have to order twenty four times at the start of each academic year to avoid the situation where a student on - say - a two year HEFC ends up losing their entitlement to one starting a four year degree course in the other block as the latter represents (supposedly ) a better return on the funder's investment.

The upside to all this is that we can end up with machines that never even get deboxed and others that only do a few weeks work before the HODs and their deputes an official, LA-approved redistribution service comes to buy the used kit. We're not allowed to leave HDDs in anything but this fact has nothing to do with the coincidentally massive amount of drive space that always seems to find its way into staffers' own machines. Nope, that's pure chance that is. Though the depute in the catering department is possibly well dodgy (and suspiciously thin), as they are the only dept that gets 17" machines. Maybe food needs greater screen estate so that the germs are easier to spot? Seems wrong somehow.

[zipgun]

No point in starting another thread really . My daughter is 11 , wanting her own laptop for school etc . I know nowt about them . This pc i'm on is a Dell 3100 ' xp', does all i want ...but i'm told it's ancient.. She does like games occasionally ,Photo editing ,homework , the cpu(?) does struggle a bit on this Dell..the fan roars away and sounds like a tommygun.. She's wanting this , will it do? £300 is the top whack i'm afraid and she's payin' most of it ! http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/p ... 079920.htm
Has to be fashionable , as well... 11..

[TerryG]

They were £250 last week! I know 4 people that have bought them. I will say you get what you pay for as they feel quite laggy in operation but they are OK to be used as a typewriter (you will have to budget another £80 if you need office (word and excel)) and for surfing the net.
If the games in question are the ones on facebook, it will be fine. If she is interested in playing 3d games or anything with decent graphics, then £300 would be the deposit on a machine to do it.

[zipgun]

But isn't that far more powerful than this Dell 3100 ?

[Topaz]

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/p ... 079920.htm

I can't comment on the technical spec but it might not be the bargain it seems. Reduced from £349 to £299 but right at the bottom of the page it says

* Please note item 1079920 has previously been on sale at 249.99.

So the price has gone up


I 'think' a Pentium is better than a Celeron which means that this might be a faster machine
http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/store ... 299.99%7C2

Others have various AMD processors and I know nothing about them !

Mike


EDIT - -I see Terry beat me to it !!

[TerryG]

The problem with AMD is they are not honest about the comparative performance of their processors in normal application use.
In day to day usage they are slower than the equivalent Intel but in database work they are faster (as in greased lightning).
Honestly with such a small budget I would just hunt around and get something with the fastest processor and biggest drive you can find. You won't find anything with a full HD screen or true life (or "good" speakers, Blu-ray, etc).
As a general rule bigger numbers are better when you are looking at the headlines. Celeron is the entry level SLOW processor (ahead of the low power mobile ones such as the atom), Then you have the i3, i5 and i7. There are various generations of each and overlap in performance eg a top spec i5 will be quicker for most users than a bottom spec i7. 4gb of ram is more or less standard and anything with less than 2gb won't work properly. Hard drives, the bigger they are, the more stuff you can store. Cheaper ones are only 5400rpm, more expensive 7200 or above. You will notice the performance difference in startup speed and application loading time but once again, I wouldn't expect high performance from a budget laptop.

Have you thought about spending £300 on a tablet instead? Comparatively speaking you will get a better machine but not so good for homework.
If you are not precious about buying used, have a look on cex.co.uk or ebay and see if you can pick up something a year old that will be quicker and higher spec than a new one from Argos. it is also worth keeping an eye on dabs.com, misco.co.uk and ebuyer.co.uk as they all often have good deals on and they all sell returned stock (ie someone orders something, changes their mind and sends it back) at a lower price. It is server kit but I just saved £800 on a new DLT backup drive by buying a customer returned unit. it still has 3 years warranty, etc.

For reference, anyone running Windows XP after April next year is asking for trouble as there are NO SECURITY FIXES after that point.

[tractorman]

I can't argue with Terry, though have used the much cheaper AMD for donkey's years and they do my job adequately - though I don't play games on mine.

eBuyer have the Tosh on at about £250, so don't just go to Argos because they are there. I've also dealt with eBuyer for donkey's years and, apart from a case that was damaged in transit (which they quickly sorted out), I have had no problems with them - or their delivery (though I tend to use the "send by the slowest possible method if it is cheap" and it is delivered by an asthmatic slug three or four days later).

One or two places where I worked had Tosh laptops as standard, but more and more seem to reckon Dell are the ones to beat at the moment. Mind you, in my last job, the Dell service people almost had a daily visit - but there were a lot of their machines on site.

I have two Tosh notebooks - but not the "domestic" (cheaper) models. Neither are very new (the old one is Windows 98 as it won't even run XP!) - the newer one now has Win7 with 2Gb and, as Terry says, it struggles with the limited memory; on the positive side - it only cost £100 a year ago from a shop on eBay. While I have MS Office (97 on three computers), I suggest you think of "Open Office", which will do most of what MS Office does but is free!

[JPB]

Whatever you buy, DON'T buy it from Argos! They're hopeless at honouring warranty claims and some of their clearance stock is dearer than the same machines split new, only they're not very good at telling the buyers which are actually new, in the sense that the HDD will not contain someone else's private material, the up time will not be in four figures in the hour column and the lid won't be covered in scratches that - once you take the trouble to check their very, very small print - you accept as "minor repackaging marks".
Ebuyer is consistently the most efficient supplier when it comes to warranty claims, machines being supplied with the spec that you actually order and low prices with no hidden surprises such as Currys' favourite trick; "price [insert as appropriate] after £XXX cashback on your old machine, subject to its being accepted by our recycling programme, but we don't make that decision before we have the cash so basically, you're f***ed."

There are fewer really bad laptops these days but unless you spend several grand on one of thae fantastic MSI gaming machines with its array of SSDs, massive RAM, equally massive GPU specs and solid ali chassis, avoid that brand as their budget, everyday stuff is pure sh*te!

Better yet, consider as Terry suggested at and buy pre-owned. This Dell that I use everywhere when I'm not playing with my custom Mario Fish was supplied new in December 2011 but came with a single core, 2.2GHz Celeron 925 so couldn't run anything 64 bit, not that there'd have been much point as it also came with just 2GB of RAM. Dell's official line is that it can't possibly address a more modern (Core 2 duo @ 2x2.4GHz) processor or any more than 4GB of RAM but then they want people to buy new machines. I prefer to ignore their advice and have upgraded this thing to the point where it even plays games well, though not at its full, 1080p potential but for a GM45 graphics chip it's pretty fair and will run 1080p video from iplayer streams or from my library of films. I also upgraded the supplied, 320GB HDD to a 500GB 7200rpm one and while it doesn't boot as quickly as the CR-48 with its 256GB SSD, it's the device of choice for HD movie watching in the house, with my LineX FM transmitter taking its sound to whichever of the big old boomboxes is closest at hand.
Here the numbers and yes, Dell, gerritupye, I am running 8GB of (DDR3 12800) RAM on this in spite (because?) of your insisting that I wouldn't be able to:


It cost me £199 to buy as bankrupt stock (Cash Converters, 29/12/11) but when I connected it to the Dell site the service code showed that it was in fact absolutely split new! A few months ago, I spent under a tenner on the CPU to upgrade and got £8 for the old one when I sold that, the 500GB, 7200rpm hard drive was also new, taken from a new machine whose buyer wanted a quicker SSD in its place so we did a deal - £12 to me. And the 2x2GB sticks of DDR3 10600 were sold on eBay for £22 which went toward the £34 that the 2x4GB DDR3 12800 RAM cost me so for less than the cost of a new machine with a rubbish processor and half the RAM, you could look at the option of buying something of similar age which would be cheaper and more satisfying.

'Scuse the novel, bedtime....


(PS, don't worry about my IP being visible, it will be totally different by the morning so is of no use whatsoever to anyone with mischief in mind.)

[rich.]

don't buy a packard bell...

ooops