Help selecting a decent all rounder laptop around the £1k mark pls?

[Terry01]

I will be looking to upgrade to a new laptop over the next few weeks. I'm not a online gamer or anything like that that would need a high power machine. I just need a general surf the web, check emails and watch YouTube videos type of machine for around £1000 quids.

Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks

[Ampera]

If you're just doing web tasks, I'd throw half that into a nice Chromebook, or an Android tablet (I use the Yoga Tab 3 Plus, they also sell a more expensive one with a core atom, and built in projector). There are also Surface tablets, but I'm not a fan myself.

If you are in need of something more powerful for additional tasks, I'd suggest you list more requirements, otherwise any Android tablet or Chromebook would be your best bet really, just pick what is built the nicest, and has the best keyboard.

[senso]

Used Dell XPS from Dell Outlet UK?

[jmelson]

I will be looking to upgrade to a new laptop over the next few weeks. I'm not a online gamer or anything like that that would need a high power machine. I just need a general surf the web, check emails and watch YouTube videos type of machine for around £1000 quids.

Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks

I never buy new!  Get a relatively recent Dell laptop.  On the good ones, there can be 3 different screen pixel resolutions, so you have to look up the details to know which exact model # has the best screen.  Then, buy one where the hard drive has been removed.  Buy a decent solid state disk and install the OS yourself.  (I use Linux exclusively, but you can get legit copies of your favorite OS fairly cheaply.)

On eBay, never buy a Dell unless they photograph the manufacturer's ID tag that gives the exact model ID code, so you can look that up on Dell's site to get the exact features built into that model.  I'd guess the same provisions should be followed for other makes.  I try to only buy the Dell "commercial grade" models, not the "consumer grade".  Somehow, they put better parts in the commercial ones.

I generally can get a VERY good laptop for no more than US $150 or so, delivered.

Jon

[nctnico]

I'd strongly advise to get a Dell from the 'for business' section. Sure the secs are lower then other laptops but the built quality and reliability are much better. I'm typing this on a Dell laptop I bought at least 6 years ago. Meanwhile it got upgraded with an SSD and 16GB of memory. The battery still works as well (but I'm using the laptop mostly from mains power and when working from a battery I never let it run low).

Edit: my own laptop is just a single data point but the reason I buy only 'for business' Dell computers is because I used to sell desktops and laptops (a very long long time ago) to businesses and the Dells just kept working and had no problems with drivers. Very much unlike the cheaper laptops which in the end just got me unsatisfied customers because of stability and driver issues (not to mention the amount of time I had to waste on service).

[Ice-Tea]

One tip: steer clear from the dual-core i7's. Those days  are over, even if you get a huge clearance discount.

[jmelson]

I'd strongly advise to get a Dell from the 'for business' section. Sure the secs are lower then other laptops but the built quality and reliability are much better. I'm typing this on a Dell laptop I bought at least 6 years ago. Meanwhile it got upgraded with an SSD and 16GB of memory. The battery still works as well (but I'm using the laptop mostly from mains power and when working from a battery I never let it run low).

My previous main desktop was a Dell Optiplex (commercial product line) that was bought on eBay several years old.  I ran it for 12 years 24/7, and then decided to replace it before problems developed.  My mother in law is STILL using it, it must be 20 years old, now!

I still use an older Dell laptop when traveling, and got my daughter a newer one with a big screen.  They have been just fine.

Jon

[Deridex]

I'm gonna throw in a Schenker Notebook.
I think they are quite decent value for the price.

[Ice-Tea]

As far as I remember, Schencker is a boutique store, so their stuff is as good as the ODM they chose for any given machine...

[james_s]

This is the sort of question that is likely to get you a lot of passionate responses urging you to get brand X because brand Y is crap and vice versa so I'll preface my response with the fact that this is just my opinion and there are many machines which will meet your needs.

Anyway I personally am a fan of Lenovo, you might check their refurbished offerings as many times you can get as-new laptops with a warranty at a significant discount over buying brand new. I would also advise looking at corporate rather than consumer models no matter what brand you get. The corporate machines really are much better made, quality and durability over bells & whistles.

Oh and no matter what you get, install a SSD as the boot drive, that makes an enormous difference. At least in the case of Lenovo they tend to charge a lot for hard drive upgrades so when I bought mine I got it with the cheapest smallest drive they offered then immediately replaced that with a SSD and put the original drive in an external box as a backup media.

[bd139]

There’s a ton of Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon units on eBay. I’d get one of them.

You’re not going to get a better laptop for £1k than a £400 or so second hand X1. It will cover all your use cases perfectly as well.

Example: https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F323095101188

Edit: I might actually snag myself one for that money to replace my T440.

[Terry01]

Thanks for the replies. That's given me somewhere to start from and do a bit research. I'll post back when I settle on something.
I really don't know that much when it comes to laptops and the fact there are a million of them to choose from just makes it sore head stuff when you start looking.
I have an HP machine just now which is ok I suppose but it seems to stall a little sometimes. I'm not a heavy user with lots of windows open at once or a few tasks going at the same time so just feel it should whizz through what I do no problem at all, not get a little sluggish sometimes as it does.

Anyways, thanks again everyone who replied.

[retiredcaps]

I have an HP machine just now which is ok I suppose but it seems to stall a little sometimes. I'm not a heavy user with lots of windows open at once or a few tasks going at the same time so just feel it should whizz through what I do no problem at all, not get a little sluggish sometimes as it does.

Given the above, instead of buying a new laptop, tell us the HP model above and how much DRAM it has inside.

You could be running out of DRAM?  If not, replacing your likely 5400rpm drive with an SSD will cost significantly less than a new laptop given your simple email, youtube and web surfing requirements.

If you are running Windows, it might be time for completely fresh install to get rid of all the junk that has accumulated over the years?  Or start uninstalling all the bloatware that comes with your typical Windows install from a manufacturer.

If you are running Windows, a virus/malware scan would help too.  Malwarebytes makes a good free one to use.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/

[nctnico]

When it comes to Windows: disable the swap (virtual memory). Windows tries to push as much as it can onto the hard drive to keep as much memory as possible unused  . This makes a PC incredibly slow ofcourse. A typical symptom is a slow down when switching from one application to the other.

[james_s]

That comes with its own problems. I had the swap disable for a while on my laptop but even with 8GB of RAM I was constantly running out of memory. Several browser tabs and one or two instances of Quartus running, then if I fire up something like Inkscape or Gimp pretty soon the memory is full and I'm getting errors.

[bd139]

There’s no need to disable swap these days, at least since windows vista and 64 bit platforms.  This is bad advice. Let windows manage it. Barely touches it even with memory heavy workloads.

[IanB]

I have an HP machine just now which is ok I suppose but it seems to stall a little sometimes. I'm not a heavy user with lots of windows open at once or a few tasks going at the same time so just feel it should whizz through what I do no problem at all, not get a little sluggish sometimes as it does.

How much memory you have installed is a really important question. For almost any laptop, the rule of thumb is to increase the memory to the maximum supported. These days that should be 16 GB, and not less than 8 GB. A certain way to a sluggish laptop is to have only 2 GB or 4 GB installed.

[Terry01]

It's a pretty standard £450 HP laptop 15-bw**** is the model number, it has 4Gb memory and I have windows 10 installed. It's only a few months old, 6 or 8 I think. I may try the SSD option, that could be a winner for me.

[bd139]

SSD is easy win. Biggest performance jump ever.

If you do that, get a Samsung one. 250Gb EVO for £59.99 at the moment: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B078WQJXNF/ ... been using a 120Gb of these in my 9 year old desktop PC (!) for about a year now and is pretty snappy.

[Terry01]

SSD is easy win. Biggest performance jump ever.

If you do that, get a Samsung one. 250Gb EVO for £59.99 at the moment: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B078WQJXNF/ ... been using a 120Gb of these in my 9 year old desktop PC (!) for about a year now and is pretty snappy.

Awesome! I'll give it a go. At that price it's got to be a winner too right! 60 quid aint bad!

[IanB]

It's a pretty standard £450 HP laptop 15-bw**** is the model number, it has 4Gb memory and I have windows 10 installed. It's only a few months old, 6 or 8 I think. I may try the SSD option, that could be a winner for me.

4 GB is probably not enough these days. You should think about upgrading to 8 GB. I would do that before doing the SSD. The disk has never been a cause of poor performance in any computer I have owned.

You need to understand that an SSD may make a machine go faster, but lack of an SSD is never a cause of a machine being too slow to use.

[james_s]

Wasn't that long ago that 1GB of RAM seemed extravagant, nevermind the dark ages when I was totally stoked to have 4MB. How things change.

That said, things seem to have stalled somewhat, machines that take a max of 16GB have been around for years and still seem to be fairly common.

[bd139]

My main desktop has 4Gb of RAM and is fine. Depends what you do with it. I run kicad, LTspice, Office, Python, all sorts.

SSD is the biggest performance boost for the money

[Terry01]

It's a pretty standard £450 HP laptop 15-bw**** is the model number, it has 4Gb memory and I have windows 10 installed. It's only a few months old, 6 or 8 I think. I may try the SSD option, that could be a winner for me.

4 GB is probably not enough these days. You should think about upgrading to 8 GB. I would do that before doing the SSD. The disk has never been a cause of poor performance in any computer I have owned.

You need to understand that an SSD may make a machine go faster, but lack of an SSD is never a cause of a machine being too slow to use.

It's for sure no where near too slow to use. Just sometimes when I watch YouTube videos it can be a wee bit sluggish. It's still very usable and flicking through web pages like this forum or things like that it is instant.
Now I come to think about it the Mrs gets free Microsoft Office through her work but it takes like 1 Gb to have it on the machine and I think after I installed that it started getting "sluggish" sometimes. I use Office to make spreadsheets and stuff like that. Like I say it's still a very usable machine and I wouldn't say it's slow by any stretch, just sometimes it stalls a bit for a few seconds.
I'm not looking for a better one because this one has become un-usable, i just want a better machine. An upgrade! 

[tooki]

When it comes to Windows: disable the swap (virtual memory). Windows tries to push as much as it can onto the hard drive to keep as much memory as possible unused  . This makes a PC incredibly slow ofcourse. A typical symptom is a slow down when switching from one application to the other.

That is absolutely, completely, 100% false.

Since Windows Vista, Windows does all it can to prevent unused RAM, since empty RAM is using power and going to waste. So Windows will actually preload things from disk to RAM that it expects will be used soon (based on statistical analysis of your usage patterns). They call this SuperFetch, and the memory in question "Standby memory". So if you then open something and SuperFetch has put it into the Standby already, it's simply changed from being in Standby to In Use. If it wasn't preloaded into Standby, no harm done. Some of the Standby memory is emptied and used for your application. (It will also keep recently-closed things in Standby, too.)

This is what you see in Resource Monitor, on the Memory tab, under Physical Memory, as the "Standby" memory usage.

You can observe the Standby preloading in action, by opening Resource Monitor immediately after restarting Windows, and watching the Physical Memory stats while doing absolutely nothing else. It'll begin with a huge Free segment, and any programs that autostart will load and you'll see the In Use segment grow. Then, once the system is idle, you'll see the Standby segment grow and grow as it preloads things until it's consumed nearly all of the Free memory (usually leaving under 100MB!).

But because Standby memory is fully available for programs to use with no speed penalty, you can consider your available RAM to be the sum of both Standby and Free (which is exactly what the "Available" statistic in Resource Monitor does). It's only once BOTH Standby and Free have run out, and serious swapping begins, that performance suffers.

(Windows XP and earlier did some prefetching, but it was nothing like SuperFetch in Vista and later.)