Recommend a laptop

Been looking at hp, novatech, and Acer. My cousin got an hp for £295 from curry's and it looks a solid machine although I don't know the spec.

Would like an i5 with 500gb Ssd and 8gb ram but am open on other specs. I see lots of driver problems on win 10 on Lenovo laptops so would like to avoid, so over to you.

I bought an HP laptop (quite an expensive one) for my wife from PC World for Christmas. By the day after Boxing Day it had stopped working. A one-off I realise, although a little research turned up quite a few people having the same problem - certainly enough for me to say "never again".

On the other hand the (fairly cheap) Lenovo that I bought there for myself a couple of years ago has never missed a beat. It upgraded to Windows 10 with no problem whatsoever.

What was the problem with the hp?

Display went dead, both internal and external. Google search showed that this meant a replacement motherboard was needed. I cut my losses and asked for my money back. As I say, a one-off but just my experience of the two brands.

If I ever buy another laptop I will go for one of the Microsoft Surface range. Expensive but they have a good reputation and are lovely little machines.

I had a Acer for years, it was a good solid machine that never let me down until last year. the main board fried. I still have a Acer that was given me and I stuck the memory and drive from my old Acer into it, going to replace the CPU as well as my old Acer had a faster chip and it is compatible with the Acer I have now.
I don't use laptops enough to justify getting a new one.

So I think Acer are good ones to go for.
Novatech laptops used to be MSI based machines so I was told, I do not know what they use now, but Novatech is a pretty decent company from the few times I have dealt with them and also you can customise the laptop.

What sort of thing are you looking at using it for?

Windows 10 and drivers on a few machines are a bit of a pain at the moment. Try and get a Windows 8.1 machine, update it to ten soi you got the free version and then put it back to Windows 8.1 until Microsoft get their act together, if they ever do. Then you can update back to Windows 10 when ever you want.

I've bought 2 Acer laptops, 2 of the same model, in the past 2 weeks. 1 for church and 1 for a friend.

They're both Windows 10 systems and are running very sweetly. Certainly no driver issues, or any other. Yes I've changed the privacy settings to the lowest possible. But no other issues whatsoever.

I think that buying a non-Windows 10 system and upgrading it has the potential for Win 10 driver (or other) issues. If it's Win 10 from the manufacturer it'll work fine - or it's back for a refund otherwise, but to be honest I think the latter is unlikely.

some Windows 10 drivers are windows 8.1 anyway, so if the computer works on 8.1 it should work on 10. the problem with 10 is that sometimes it thinks it knows best with drivers and try to overwrite ones that are working fine with ones that don't.
Most of Windows 10 driver problems have been with Nvidia cards, since most laptops will not have them, it should work fine.

I was considering getting a new laptop, but if I do i will try and find one with 8.1. Novatech is good in that they do not supply a Os as standard with their machines, the only problem is they supply either Windows 7 or Windows 10, but not 8.1

It don't matter what you change the privacy settings to on Windows 10, data will still be sent to Ms, you can use some 3rd party software that says they can stop it all, not sure if they can.

Ther church one will rarely be connected to the internet. The friend really isn't bothered. At 88 he says, what have I got to hide!

Novatech sell Windows 8.1: http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/software/operatin...

Fair enough.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Novatech sell Windows 8.1: http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/software/operatin...

but they don't give it as a option on their laptops, ok it is possible to buy the laptop without the Os and then add Windows 8.1 on after.

How come there's new laptops floating around with Celeron and Pentium processors, I thought these processors were obsolete?

Both are current Intel processors.

In reply to a post by Banger:

How come there's new laptops floating around with Celeron and Pentium processors, I thought these processors were obsolete?

Updated versions, the Celeron is a different beast these days, still rubbish, but a different beast.
I am shocked that Intel still uses the name

The 1.2GHz Celeron in my old laptop runs Windows 7 quite happily with 2GB of memory. It even worked with the original 512MB of memory although it was sluggish. Surprisingly, the bottleneck is the hard drive. I would install an SSD but the battery's borked (and obsolete) and the screen's a bit ropy. Still, a modern laptop with a less power-hungry processor would be nice.

Edited by micksharpe (Wed 27-Jan-16 02:29:02)

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Display went dead, both internal and external. Google search showed that this meant a replacement motherboard was needed. I cut my losses and asked for my money back. As I say, a one-off but just my experience of the two brands.

If I ever buy another laptop I will go for one of the Microsoft Surface range. Expensive but they have a good reputation and are lovely little machines.

Not just a lovely little machine...a fantastic little machine. I've got an i7 Pro4 and its wonderful but, as you said not cheap.

In reply to a post by micksharpe:

The 1.2GHz Celeron in my old laptop runs Windows 7 quite happily with 2GB of memory. It even worked with the original 512MB of memory although it was sluggish. Surprisingly, the bottleneck is the hard drive. I would install an SSD but the battery's borked (and obsolete) and the screen's a bit ropy. Still, a modern laptop with a less power-hungry processor would be nice.

The celeron had a bad reputation of being under powered and would struggle with basic stuff. Even the Atom was better.

I can't wait to see what the new Zen architecture from AMD will be like, from what I have read, it looks like it will be good and hopefully will knock Intel down a bit.
It is about time AMD sorted things out, the FX chips while cheap and still pretty good is based on 5 year old technology, the chipsets of their boards have not been changed for years, I can still buy the board I got 4 years ago, ok it is version 2, but the only difference is that it have USB 3 internal connections.
Granted some boards have got extras on, but that is because the manufactures have used extra chips to do that.

AMD APU is pretty good, I was chatting to someone who have the top end one and was running battlefield 4 on it with almost the full quality at a good frame rate, which is good as Battlefield 4 is pretty heavy on video cards. So for a APU to run it is good, something that Intel chips can't do.

So hopefully AMD will pull something out of the bag this year.

I won't buy a Intel based machine, but i was tempted by a Apple Mac before i updated this one.

Laptops I have very little interest in to be honest, my old Asus does what I want,, which is not much as I have not used it for months, in fact I am not sure where it is, I think it is in the cupboard under the stairs. i have never been fond of laptops, screens are too small, keyboards are normally naf and unless you pay a fortune for them they are low powered.