Which Laptop?

[juanpabloingram]

I am looking to purchase a new laptop for approximately £300-£500.

 

Requirements:

• Decent battery
• Lightweight
• Decent sized hard drive
• Primary use music and internet

 

Thoughts on Chromebooks?

[darrenm]

I love my series 3 Chromebook. It's lovely. You have to 'get' it though, understand its positives and negatives and work out if it's the best fit for you. If you're a heavy Google user then it may well be.

 

Otherwise if you want a classic style laptop, you can't really go wrong with Dell or Lenovo. Just get a 2nd or 3rd generation Core i3 with an SSD. All these laptops are speed monsters being crippled by poor IO from their crap 5400rpm HDDs.

 

I'd recommend something like http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/gbweb/LenovoPortal/en_GB/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=468&Code=MAANUUK

 

Sell the HDD on eBay and buy a modern SSD like http://www.ebuyer.com/409850-samsung-250gb-840-series-ssd-mz-7td250bw

 

c. £500 all in.

Edited April 18, 2013 by darrenm

[limpid]

... and install linux on it.

[blandy]

Do they have "decent sized" hard drives? - I had the notion they had tiny storage space.

[Voinjama]

I have a HP, the one that was on the Curry's advert all the time. It has served me well.

[juanpabloingram]

Excuse the potentially daft question but what is an SSD then? Guessing a different type of memory?

[darrenm]

Solid State Disk.

 

Your normal hard drives are spinning disks where the heads move very quickly to seek data from the surface. Slow drives operate at 5400rpm, quicker drives are 7200rpm.

 

They have a very short life and will fail early if repeatedly shocked.

 

SSDs are flash memory in high capacity to replace a normal hard drive. They're now far, far more reliable than a spinning disk, are quieter, take a lot less power and are way faster.

 

The IO (input/output) latency is very low and seek time is non-existant. They transform the performance of a laptop, especially as the Intel Core technology is so good for IO.

 

This is a decent demonstration of the speed difference 

 

But it's not until you start using one inside your own machine and everything just happens instantly like a smartphone do you appreciate just how much it improves the experience.

[darrenm]

Do they have "decent sized" hard drives? - I had the notion they had tiny storage space.

Only the Pixel has anything like decent storage space, all the others are just local cache spaces of 16GB flash.

[The_Rev]

I'm not sure about the examples that guy chose to use in his videos.  He was deliberately picking things which would take ages on hard drive rather than picking things a normal user would frequently be doing.  You will see improvements, obviously, but most applications only take a second or two to load with a normal hard drive as it is.  I'd still rather have the storage space at the moment.  

[Frobisher]

I saw huge improvements in speed after installing an SSD on my laptop, I'd never go back now. The laptop runs much more quietly also, I have noticed. Lack of space is a downside but I just use a separate portable HDD to store all my videos etc. 

[The_Rev]

I've toyed with the idea of replacing my optical drive with a SSD in my laptop because I honestly can't remember the last time I put a DVD in there.   I do have quite a bit of video on the machine though, so limiting myself to a couple of hundred GB is just not an option. 

[darrenm]

 

I'm not sure about the examples that guy chose to use in his videos.  He was deliberately picking things which would take ages on hard drive rather than picking things a normal user would frequently be doing.  You will see improvements, obviously, but most applications only take a second or two to load with a normal hard drive as it is.  I'd still rather have the storage space at the moment.  

 

But isn't that the stuff that most people do? Boot up and load a document? Most applications don't just take a second or two to load, time it, you'll be surprised

 

I've toyed with the idea of replacing my optical drive with a SSD in my laptop because I honestly can't remember the last time I put a DVD in there.   I do have quite a bit of video on the machine though, so limiting myself to a couple of hundred GB is just not an option. 

 

I've got an SSD and HDD in my desktop machine. Sandforce 180GB for the main OS drive, then 1TB 7200rpm Seagate for my 'store'. I end up keeping as much as I possibly can on the SSD like program files, user profiles, games etc. on the SSD because the speed difference is so much between the two. When I have to access something on the HDD, you hear the disk spin up, read config information, churn away pulling stuff off etc. It gets painful.

Edited April 19, 2013 by darrenm

[darrenm]

 root@darrenm-lt:~# hdparm -T /dev/sda

 

/dev/sda:

 Timing cached reads:   9784 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4894.66 MB/sec

root@darrenm-lt:~# hdparm -t /dev/sda

 

/dev/sda:

 Timing buffered disk reads: 1382 MB in  3.00 seconds = 460.31 MB/sec

 

So with a 2nd gen Core i3 I'm getting pretty close to maxing out the SATA3 bus.

 

For comparison, this is the output of a server using a spinning disk RAID 5 array:

 

 

server1:~# hdparm -t /dev/sda

 

/dev/sda:

 Timing buffered disk reads:  314 MB in  3.01 seconds = 104.37 MB/sec

[The_Rev]

 

I'm not sure about the examples that guy chose to use in his videos.  He was deliberately picking things which would take ages on hard drive rather than picking things a normal user would frequently be doing.  You will see improvements, obviously, but most applications only take a second or two to load with a normal hard drive as it is.  I'd still rather have the storage space at the moment.

 

But isn't that the stuff that most people do? Boot up and load a document? Most applications don't just take a second or two to load, time it, you'll be surprised

 

I can only speak for my own use, but it's not really how I use my computer.   I boot it maybe once a month, the rest of the time I just hibernate.    I don't do any work on the computer at all so I rarely use documents. 

[limpid]

If you have GBs of data on your laptops, how do you back them up?

[The_Rev]

Photos are backed up in dropbox, on an external hard drive,  on another machine and in the cloud care of Google plus.  Home video on an external hard drive.  The other video isnt backed up because I wont be gutted if the hard drive dies. I still like having it on my laptop though. 

[CVByrne]

Just gonna chime in here and say the most important thing to choose when buying a laptop is it having an SSD. It make a HUGE difference to performance. 

[jim]

Recently purchased a Sony Vaio T series i5 Touch Ultrabook. Really pleased with it, doesnt have an SSD but has a 32gb SSD that is used for booting up and switching applications so it is ligthning fast.

 

Was a bargain too was supposed to be refurbished from Sony but when it came it was brand new sealed so saved myself nearly £300 on the new price

[regular_john]

Whatever you do, avoid any laptop that comes with Windows 8. It is dogshit.

[jim]

On a touch screen it isn't to bad tbh but I came from a vista machine so anything is better than that!