[fosterwho]

So I'm going away to uni this year and I need a good laptop. The laptop I have atm is old and super slow (512MB of RAM lol) so I figured it's about time I upgraded. I have £1200 in the bank but I'm gonna set my limit at around £500. 6GB of RAM would be good for high speed because I'd also like to run some games on it. Not top performance games but some recent games at least. Which matters more for the speed of a laptop, RAM or processor speed? I see all these 'i5 dual core' laptops but I don't know what it actually means. My laptop now is 2.1 Ghz but still pretty slow at times due to the RAM. So much choice of laptops and so many reviews that I get lost

Also, a laptop for which I can buy a relatively cheap second HDD for would be good too. I have two different HDDs for my current laptop because I use them depending on performance aspects and what I'm doing. Second HDD doesn't have to be really big or anything but not expensive.

Help is appreciated

[Iqbal007]

(Original post by fosterwho)
So I'm going away to uni this year and I need a good laptop. The laptop I have atm is old and super slow (512MB of RAM lol) so I figured it's about time I upgraded. I have £1200 in the bank but I'm gonna set my limit at around £500. 6GB of RAM would be good for high speed because I'd also like to run some games on it. Not top performance games but some recent games at least. Which matters more for the speed of a laptop, RAM or processor speed? I see all these 'i5 dual core' laptops but I don't know what it actually means. My laptop now is 2.1 Ghz but still pretty slow at times due to the RAM. So much choice of laptops and so many reviews that I get lost

Also, a laptop for which I can buy a relatively cheap second HDD for would be good too. I have two different HDDs for my current laptop because I use them depending on performance aspects and what I'm doing. Second HDD doesn't have to be really big or anything but not expensive.

Help is appreciated

ram shouldn't affect gaming performance if you got at least 4gb which seems to be the norm today. If you want to play some recent games at least, you need a decent dedicated graphics card however most laptops in the sub £500 group try to take advantage by giving built in graphics.

i5 is the mid range of processors intel sell, which are dual cores(so you have 2 singular cores running in sync to an extent) in the laptop series.

Another HDD? You got 2 laptop hard drives or your talking about an external one?

http://www.ebuyer.com/271939-acer-as...p-lx-rnz02-049

Acer Aspire 5560G Laptop
1 review
- AMD Quad Core A8-3500M
- 8GB RAM + 750GB HDD
- 15.6" HD + Webcam
- A8 AMD Radeon HD6740G 2GB VRAM
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64
£480

I would say this due to your budget, based on the the general specs and graphics card.......though it would be better to get an i5, though this range of amd processors have positive reviews.

[xumanah]

Dell Vostro - customise to your specification/budget

[Inverse]

I'm not very up to date in terms of the laptop market, but I would recommend a Lenovo laptop for their durability and reliability. Firstly, you will not need 6GB of ram to play games. You're most probably not going to be simultaneously performing strenuous tasks on multiple monitors connected to a laptop whilst gaming. I don't know much about hard drive disks in laptops, so I can't help you there.

EDIT: Just a tip, I would wait a while, as the new Ivy Bridge architecture was released last month, meaning that laptop releases incorporating this new technology will soon follow in mass quantities. You can identify "Ivy Bridge" processors by their listing as "3rd generation Intel" on the specification sheet of the laptop which you are looking at.

[fosterwho]

(Original post by Iqbal007)
ram shouldn't affect gaming performance if you got at least 4gb which seems to be the norm today. If you want to play some recent games at least, you need a decent dedicated graphics card however most laptops in the sub £500 group try to take advantage by giving built in graphics.

i5 is the mid range of processors intel sell, which are dual cores(so you have 2 singular cores running in sync to an extent) in the laptop series.

Another HDD? You got 2 laptop hard drives or your talking about an external one?

http://www.ebuyer.com/271939-acer-as...p-lx-rnz02-049

Acer Aspire 5560G Laptop
1 review
- AMD Quad Core A8-3500M
- 8GB RAM + 750GB HDD
- 15.6" HD + Webcam
- A8 AMD Radeon HD6740G 2GB VRAM
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64
£480

I would say this due to your budget, based on the the general specs and graphics card.......though it would be better to get an i5, though this range of amd processors have positive reviews.

Hmm probably is I saw some reviews of that and some people were complaining about the speed. I really don't get it. How can a laptop with a quad core processor and 8GB of RAM be getting complaints about the speed?

[TheQuietOne]

(Original post by fosterwho)
So I'm going away to uni this year and I need a good laptop. The laptop I have atm is old and super slow (512MB of RAM lol) so I figured it's about time I upgraded. I have £1200 in the bank but I'm gonna set my limit at around £500. 6GB of RAM would be good for high speed because I'd also like to run some games on it. Not top performance games but some recent games at least. Which matters more for the speed of a laptop, RAM or processor speed? I see all these 'i5 dual core' laptops but I don't know what it actually means. My laptop now is 2.1 Ghz but still pretty slow at times due to the RAM. So much choice of laptops and so many reviews that I get lost

Also, a laptop for which I can buy a relatively cheap second HDD for would be good too. I have two different HDDs for my current laptop because I use them depending on performance aspects and what I'm doing. Second HDD doesn't have to be really big or anything but not expensive.

Help is appreciated

http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Asp...37/version.asp

A bit over your budget, but it's pretty good for the price. I own this laptop and I love it.

Screen size - 15.6 in - 1366 x 768
Processor - Intel Core i7 2630QM - 2.2 GHz
RAM - 6 GB
Hard Drive - 750 GB
Operating System - Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Optical Drive - DVD SM
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M Optimus
Graphics Memory - 1 GB GDDR3
£592

For the second HDD though I think you either need to replace the optical drive with a HDD caddy, or use an external drive. I swapped out the HDD in mine for an SSD and I connect the old HDD via a usb cable when I need it.

[fosterwho]

(Original post by TheQuietOne)
http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Asp...37/version.asp

A bit over your budget, but it's pretty good for the price. I own this laptop and I love it.

Screen size - 15.6 in - 1366 x 768
Processor - Intel Core i7 2630QM - 2.2 GHz
RAM - 6 GB
Hard Drive - 750 GB
Operating System - Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Optical Drive - DVD SM
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M Optimus
Graphics Memory - 1 GB GDDR3
£592

For the second HDD though I think you either need to replace the optical drive with a HDD caddy, or use an external drive. I swapped out the HDD in mine for an SSD and I connect the old HDD via a usb cable when I need it.

Thanks, that does look pretty good and I've read some good reviews about it. How is it for multitasking? Can it keep up? Sometimes I'll have several different programs running and often quite a few tabs in internet browsers, and the slowing down is the worst thing about my current laptop. I've seen a few different recurring 'cons' in reviews and I'd appreciate your opinion on these:

- "Screen colour depth seems a little bleached." Lack of 1080p too. What do you think of the screen quality?
- "No backlight for keys or caps lock light"
- Do you know how it is for gaming? A review stated "don't expect it to run the latest games" but then a guy in the comments said he was pleased that he had Skyrim running on it so I'm confused.
- How is the webcam quality?

[Intriguing Alias]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Thanks, that does look pretty good and I've read some good reviews about it. How is it for multitasking? Can it keep up? Sometimes I'll have several different programs running and often quite a few tabs in internet browsers, and the slowing down is the worst thing about my current laptop. I've seen a few different recurring 'cons' in reviews and I'd appreciate your opinion on these:

- "Screen colour depth seems a little bleached." Lack of 1080p too. What do you think of the screen quality?
- "No backlight for keys or caps lock light"
- Do you know how it is for gaming? A review stated "don't expect it to run the latest games" but then a guy in the comments said he was pleased that he had Skyrim running on it so I'm confused.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...M.41715.0.html Scroll down to see graphics performance.

And that's as good as multitasking gets on a laptop in terms of processor.

But as people said above, it's worth waiting for ivy bridge if you're going to spend near £600

[TheQuietOne]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Thanks, that does look pretty good and I've read some good reviews about it. How is it for multitasking? Can it keep up? Sometimes I'll have several different programs running and often quite a few tabs in internet browsers, and the slowing down is the worst thing about my current laptop. I've seen a few different recurring 'cons' in reviews and I'd appreciate your opinion on these:

- "Screen colour depth seems a little bleached." Lack of 1080p too. What do you think of the screen quality?
- "No backlight for keys or caps lock light"
- Do you know how it is for gaming? A review stated "don't expect it to run the latest games" but then a guy in the comments said he was pleased that he had Skyrim running on it so I'm confused.

• It can multi-task really well, although I haven't been able to really tax it yet to see exactly how good it is. I've tried video recording, editing and rendering, playing games and listening to music at the same time and it didn't struggle at all.
• Screen colours were a little weird when I first got it. However some fiddling with the calibrate screen colour options fixed it nicely. The screen size itself is manageable - I wanted a full HD screen really, but I heard laptop graphics cards can't handle them well so I went for a lesser one.
• Yes there are no lights on the keyboard, however I haven't really found it a problem. There's a nice big symbol that appears on the screen whenever you use caps lock/num lock/keyboard volume controls. The keyboard itself is lovely, really easy to type on and keep clean, and pretty quiet key presses, unless you're a vicious typer.
• I haven't had it long so I haven't fully tested its gaming capabilities. Skyrim runs fine, so do the Assassin's Creed games, BF3, Minecraft and TERA online. FPS is generally 30ish when running games at the higher settings, but much higher at medium ones. A note though, if you're likely to game for a few hours at a time and intend to play at full settings, get a laptop cooling pad. I've heard GTX 540Ms can get pretty hot (although I haven't found this, mine stays at 60-70C and the fans are really good) it's probably better safe than sorry.

[fosterwho]

(Original post by hassi94)
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-...M.41715.0.html Scroll down to see graphics performance.

And that's as good as multitasking gets on a laptop in terms of processor.

But as people said above, it's worth waiting for ivy bridge if you're going to spend near £600

Hmm do you know much about ivy bridge? I'm not clueless but I'm not the most tech-wise user. How much faster are they than i7 processors?

[fosterwho]

(Original post by TheQuietOne)

• It can multi-task really well, although I haven't been able to really tax it yet to see exactly how good it is. I've tried video recording, editing and rendering, playing games and listening to music at the same time and it didn't struggle at all.
• Screen colours were a little weird when I first got it. However some fiddling with the calibrate screen colour options fixed it nicely. The screen size itself is manageable - I wanted a full HD screen really, but I heard laptop graphics cards can't handle them well so I went for a lesser one.
• Yes there are no lights on the keyboard, however I haven't really found it a problem. There's a nice big symbol that appears on the screen whenever you use caps lock/num lock/keyboard volume controls. The keyboard itself is lovely, really easy to type on and keep clean, and pretty quiet key presses, unless you're a vicious typer.
• I haven't had it long so I haven't fully tested its gaming capabilities. Skyrim runs fine, so do the Assassin's Creed games, BF3, Minecraft and TERA online. FPS is generally 30ish when running games at the higher settings, but much higher at medium ones. A note though, if you're likely to game for a few hours at a time and intend to play at full settings, get a laptop cooling pad. I've heard GTX 540Ms can get pretty hot (although I haven't found this, mine stays at 60-70C and the fans are really good) it's probably better safe than sorry.

Thanks for this it really helps. How is the webcam quality? Also, do you not think there is much point then in paying the higher price for the 8GB RAM? Because the speed does seem very good. What about the swapping for SSD? You said you did this but then a review stated that it isn't possible How much was the SSD you bought?

[Intriguing Alias]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Hmm do you know much about ivy bridge? I'm not clueless but I'm not the most tech-wise user. How much faster are they than i7 processors?

It's not so much them being much faster (the difference isn't very big) but they're much more efficient and the integrated graphics are better (so they'll be useful for laptops - longer battery lifes, thinner..)

[The Polymath]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Hmm do you know much about ivy bridge? I'm not clueless but I'm not the most tech-wise user. How much faster are they than i7 processors?

There are Ivy bridge i7s too. Ivy is what is called a die shrink. Like how Sony released the PS, then the PS Slim, then PS2, PS2 Slim, PS3, PS3 Slim etc. Ivy Bridge is a 'slim' in that it offers slight improvements in efficiency, a little bit (not much) in speed, and I've heard it has better integrated graphics (which are useless anyway because if you're buying a laptop for £1200 you're going to have a separate graphics card).

I'd try to pick up old Sandy Bridge stock, in the same way that I'd find an old PS3 1st gen off ebay rather than buying a new slim one in store.

[Iqbal007]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Hmm probably is I saw some reviews of that and some people were complaining about the speed. I really don't get it. How can a laptop with a quad core processor and 8GB of RAM be getting complaints about the speed?

It's probably cos it's AMD, in comparison an Intel would beat itm but your on a budget and need a good dedicated graphics card as well.

If you had your own OS dvd and like the other guy stated a bit more cash, you could get more.
The one he suggested seems pretty good.

[fosterwho]

(Original post by Iqbal007)
It's probably cos it's AMD, in comparison an Intel would beat itm but your on a budget and need a good dedicated graphics card as well.

If you had your own OS dvd and like the other guy stated a bit more cash, you could get more.
The one he suggested seems pretty good.

Yeah, I am considering the Acer Aspire 5755G even though it is over my limit for the performance. Do you know much about Acer? This has put me off a bit: "But I would highly advise against getting an Acer because although they have the best value for spec, they use poor quality parts which are likely to cause the computer to break down."

[TheQuietOne]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Thanks for this it really helps. How is the webcam quality? Also, do you not think there is much point then in paying the higher price for the 8GB RAM? Because the speed does seem very good. What about the swapping for SSD? You said you did this but then a review stated that it isn't possible How much was the SSD you bought?

The webcam quality is great compared to other laptops I've had.

6GB of RAM is probably enough unless you're really into video and image editing and having many programs open at the same time. I do a little bit of all of that and I find 6GB is more than enough. I still haven't managed to get mine much over half used at one time. However upgrading the RAM isn't too expensive if you decide later on that you want to.

Swapping to SSD worked fine for me, not sure why the review said it wasn't possible...although I sent it to a pc shop to have it fitted so I'm not exactly sure how it was done. Honestly though I haven't noticed the difference between an SSD and a HDD for anything except a couple of seconds less on start-up times and starting games, photoshop etc - I almost wish I'd just left it as it was really. If you get an SSD I guess make sure you get a really good quality one. My SSD was 120GB for £70.

[TheQuietOne]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Yeah, I am considering the Acer Aspire 5755G even though it is over my limit for the performance. Do you know much about Acer? This has put me off a bit: "But I would highly advise against getting an Acer because although they have the best value for spec, they use poor quality parts which are likely to cause the computer to break down."

I can comment on this as I've had two previous acer laptops and am now on my third.

The first one lasted about 3 years and despite its low spec I forced some pretty heavy gaming and video editing on the poor thing - and I used it on my lap so very little air could escape the vents. It lasted over two years like this, until in the last few months of its life it began to overheat a lot and eventually the graphics card completely stopped working. When we opened it up to have a look, it had overheated so badly it looked melted.

The second one I used for heavy gaming for 3 years and it is still in perfect working order today, and still as fast as the day I got it. The ONLY fault with it was that the keyboard got a bit iffy - keys would register as pressed when I hadn't touched them etc. After I spilt liquids on it and replaced the keyboard, this went away .

The third one is my 5755G that I got a few weeks ago as my second laptop's spec wasn't good enough for the games I wanted to play...and so far so good

TL;DR = Can't really say if they use cheap parts or not, but neither of my old laptops failed due to poor parts.

[fosterwho]

(Original post by TheQuietOne)
I can comment on this as I've had two previous acer laptops and am now on my third.

The first one lasted about 3 years and despite its low spec I forced some pretty heavy gaming and video editing on the poor thing. In the last few months of its life it began to overheat a lot and eventually the graphics card completely stopped working.

The second one I used for heavy gaming for 3 years and it is still in perfect working order today, and still as fast as the day I got it. The ONLY fault with it was that the keyboard got a bit iffy - keys would register as pressed when I hadn't touched them etc. After I spilt liquids on it and replaced the keyboard, this went away .

The third one is my 5755G that I got a few weeks ago as my second laptop's spec wasn't good enough for the games I wanted to play...and so far so good

So would you advise getting the 3-year extended warranty? It's £60 extra and I'm already going over what I was going to spend so I'm not sure

[Iqbal007]

(Original post by fosterwho)
Yeah, I am considering the Acer Aspire 5755G even though it is over my limit for the performance. Do you know much about Acer? This has put me off a bit: "But I would highly advise against getting an Acer because although they have the best value for spec, they use poor quality parts which are likely to cause the computer to break down."

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/ac...view-50005088/

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/lapto...r-aspire-5755g

http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/...1580/test.html

There's 3 reviews on it....general consensus is poor battery life. With it's build quality, it's ok from what i'm reading....hp is the poor quality one in my opinion.
And do you have a windows dvd?

[fosterwho]

(Original post by Iqbal007)
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/laptops/ac...view-50005088/

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/lapto...r-aspire-5755g

http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/...1580/test.html

There's 3 reviews on it....general consensus is poor battery life. With it's build quality, it's ok from what i'm reading....hp is the poor quality one in my opinion.
And do you have a windows dvd?

Yeah that seems to be the main complaint but it doesn't bother me because I only use my laptop at home. And no I don't why?