Budget laptop c£350 ?

damianmkv

damianmkv

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i currently have a 5 year old Packard bell easynote nm85 ( 3gb memory, 250gb hard drive ) which is pretty much dead - fans always on, no space on the hard drive, keeps coming up with "not responding"...

So I need a new one. I'm loathed to spend a fortune as I only use it for photo editing - it has PSE and LR installed

Is it possible to get a laptop with a good 14+" screen for around £350 ? Need atleast 500gb hard drive - am clueless so pointers appreciated

Thanks (y)
 
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If you don't mind going for an used one try a forum or ebay, you can get a great deal there. You can even get 14"+ IPS screen for that kind of money. Just make sure the seller has a lot of positive feedback (none negative) and ask questions, anything that is not mentioned in the description
 
Look for a second hand one in your local computer repair shop and pay by credit card to get the maximum protection. You should find you can get something quite nice for that money. If you want to try eBay, I'd suggest that you only buy from a UK seller with at least 300 previous sales and 100% feedback, then pay with Paypal, who will provide a level of protection.
 
Have you tried shunting a chunk of the files onto an external drive? - an over-full hard drive will bring any PC to it's knees and kill performance.
 
:agree: if your laptop is struggling it could indicate being low on memory and if the hard drive is full there won't be any available space to create a decent sized swap file. If you do go down the router of a new one make sure to avoid anything that says Celeron or any of the AMD budget cpu's. Try to go for an Intel i5 at least, quad core variation if budget will allow. Also try to aim for 8GB of ram. If not go for 4GB then upgrade the ram at a later date.
 
Thanks - have dug out an external drive to see what I can move. The laptop only has 7.25gb free at the moment
 
My missus (on my recommendation) just bought a Dell Inspiron 15 3000 laptop on offer for £299.

i3 and 6GB RAM with 1 TB hdd.

Bargain.
 
Thanks Terry - will have a look

Have managed to free up 45gb by moving files to the ( now full :( ) external drive. I have about 25gb of photos still to move so another hard drive required

One thing I noticed is that I have a "favourites" folder - from what I can see it's a duplication of my photos ie when I look at what's using all the memory, the folder size is the same for my photos and for favourites. Am I safe to delete the favourites file as I guess it's automatically created ?
 
Back to this topic, my laptop keeps coming up with "not responding" all the time. In LR, the preview small window left of screen is often a completely different photo to the one I'm editing ! And it flits between programs without me touching anything so I think I need a new one

I had a look at this yesterday in Currys

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/comput...gclsrc=aw.ds&dclid=CNiz3ofD7s8CFW-t7Qod_FgF_g

It wasn't responding so I rebooted it...and it took nearly 2 minutes to come back on :o put me off really and the screen wasn't fantastic in terms of colours and blacks.

Is £400 too little to spend ? Should I be looking at ( say ) £600 ?
 
Looks the business, doesn't work

Like me :(
 
I'd say that would be fine but i would look to replace the hard drive with a SSD. They're magical. You could have an external HDD to save your pics to and just keep the SSD for your OS and programmes. That would keep it speedy.

Just my opinion which i know you always value massively.
 
I had a 1TB external HDD so that's ok. Maybe I'm better looking something with for 256gb SSD then ?
 
Yep, that would be my preference. Certainly not something you HAVE to have, but boot times and programme opening times are majorly improved. For me Lr opens in about 6-7 seconds and PS is the same. Boot time is around 10 seconds.
 
Have a look in the Dell Outlet store. Just seen an inspiron 17" 1080P/i5 device for £405+vat.
 
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