Recommend me a laptop upto £400

futureal33

futureal33

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Hello

I would like to replace my existing laptop with something a bit newer.

Mine is quite old (6 years +) i3 with 4GB RAM and an upgraded to SSD drive. It's OK but very noisy, and quite sluggish

I use my laptop for basic tasks, including on-the-fly import of RAWs at a wedding, a quick slideshow in lightroom here and there for consultations etc and basic stuff at home

I dont do gaming. I dont store large volume of data on laptop (128gb SSD is more than enough) but I have found my current i3 laptop really (really really) struggles with 22mpx 5D Mark III files - it bogs down massively.

I want to spend about £400 really

I have seen this, which looks decent spec for the £

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compu...15-ab271sa-15-6-laptop-blue-10137888-pdt.html

Just wondering if anyone could suggest anything else?
Thanks
 
The laptop you have linked to still has an i3 (dual core) processor and the ram is only 8gb so whilst it may offer a an improvement over what you have i reckon it would be barely noticeable at best.

Your best bet would be an i5 at least and 16gb RAM as a starting point although some i5 mobile chips are dual core also but you will get hyperthreading
Quad would be ideal but it will stretch your £400 budget massively!
 
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stupar said:
The laptop you have linked to still has an i3 (dual core) processor and the ram is only 8gb so whilst it may offer a an improvement over what you have i reckon it would be barely noticeable at best.

Your best bet would be an i5 at least and 16gb RAM as a starting point although some i5 mobile chips are dual core also but you will get hyperthreading
Quad would be ideal but it will stretch your £400 budget massively!
Click to expand...
I'd be inclined to agree. I went to an i7 to cope with 5Dmk2 files!
 
Futureal 33 - Funnily enough the HP laptop you linked to at Currys is the one that I am considering buying for my daughter for university.

The i3 processor (5157u) is pretty fast for an i3, and is in fact higher scoring than an i5 5200u, and only just behind the i5 6200u in the Acer that Ancient Mariner recommends (score 3634 versus 3904). It also has the much better Intel Iris 6100 integrated graphics rather than the standard Intel HD graphics, and can even supposedly do some light gaming, so photo processing should be OK, if not perhaps video editing.

Build quality is reasonable for a plastic bodied laptop, and sound quality is excellent - B&O speakers. With 8gb of Ram and a 1TB hard drive I can't find much to match it at the price - at least new that is. It also satisfies the all important teenager aesthetic test!
 
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I bought a loptop for £440 a couple of years ago(lenovo Z500 i5) and it is generally good however the screen is a 1366 x 768 resolution one and it is terrible the viewing angles are poor and colours look shocking, for photo editing now I use a Dell u2412m display which I plug in via the HDMI.

Also I've found that an SSD(solid state drive) is a much better upgrade than RAM. If you open task manager and go onto performance and then say edit/import/export photos in lightroom and watch what the weak point is, I found my hard drive was often maxxing out at 100% so upgraded to an SSD and it now runs really well with only 6GB of RAM, I actually kept my 1tb spinning hard drive and fitted it in a caddy in place of the optical drive for storage and now just use a USB optical drive in the rare ocassions I need one.

Also worth noting the laptop was £440 the display £200 SSD £60 caddy £10, maybe I should have spend the £710 on a higer end laptop.
 
Dell UK outlet.

Or go used, I just got a mint 128gb Surface Pro 3 plus keyboard/pen for £375 via Gumtree ;-)
 
Fatheadedlizard said:
That looks nice whats the screen like for editing?
Click to expand...

You need to turn off the default 'vivid' colour setting, then preferably calibrate it. It's the equivalent of around a 30" standard dot pitch screen, so you need good eyes or glasses and for pixel peeping you'll probably want to enlarge to 200%. The biggest 'fault' is that the screen can make pictures look better than they do on an ordinary screen, richer, sharper, more finely detailed. DVDs/video looks amazing too.
 
Going through PC Specialist I can configure a 17" Laptop with

i7 6700HQ
16GB 1600mhz ram
500GB SATA (no option to have it drive-less, so this is cheapest HDD)
2GB GFx card

£600

How would this compare to the Dell one with

i7 6500U
8GB DDr 3 1600mhz

Obviously one is Dell and one is custom build... but in terms of machine internal specs?
 
futureal33 said:
Going through PC Specialist I can configure a 17" Laptop with

i7 6700HQ
16GB 1600mhz ram
500GB SATA (no option to have it drive-less, so this is cheapest HDD)
2GB GFx card

£600

How would this compare to the Dell one with

i7 6500U
8GB DDr 3 1600mhz

Obviously one is Dell and one is custom build... but in terms of machine internal specs?
Click to expand...
Is that the Cosmos iv? Ive been looking at PC Specialist as they seem to offer a lot of spec for the money. I've actually just posted on their forum enquiring about the screen quality for photo editing.

I was going to build a PC but have decided a laptop would be more useful so I'm watching this thread with interest.
 
I would prefer for Dell Brand in that range.
 
if you go with a Dell, the ones with the mSATA 32GB "cache" drive aren't that fast. However you can buy a 256GB mSATA drive pretty cheaply. I swapped them out, installed windows on the 256GB mSATA and used the original 1TB HDD for data. Works really nicely.
 
landwomble said:
if you go with a Dell, the ones with the mSATA 32GB "cache" drive aren't that fast. However you can buy a 256GB mSATA drive pretty cheaply. I swapped them out, installed windows on the 256GB mSATA and used the original 1TB HDD for data. Works really nicely.
Click to expand...

I'd disagree to an extent - there's little difference between straight SSD and the cache-hybrid versions *for many purposes*, but the cache versions are slower when loading large files that have not been cached - for instance photographs - that they are no slower than any other computer that uses an ordinary HDD. When I upgraded the cache in this machine to full SSD with the OS I ran it without the cache at all (incredibly slow *by comparison*) before popping the SSD in, and there was very little difference before and after.
 
They help, but they are not the night and day difference that a full SSD will make. For £60 or so you can get a 256GB mSATA SSD that will allow you to throw away the 32GB mSATA the machine came from and rather than using it as cache, install the entire OS onto it as a fully solid state boot drive. For example - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zheino-Msa...F8&qid=1461951092&sr=8-2&keywords=256gb+msata

It's a very worthwhile upgrade and as well as being quicker than using Intel RST caching it'll give you the benefit of splitting your boot drive and data onto two disks so you can reinstall your OS in the future and retain your data.

The other sensible alternative is to ignore mSATA entirely and swap a mechanical boot drive for a conventional 2.5" SSD - this gets a little more expensive if you need large volumes of storage though.
 
landwomble said:
They help, but they are not the night and day difference that a full SSD will make.
Click to expand...

In the Dell arrangement, yes they are the night & day difference: 20sec boot time, applications opening almost instantly - you'd never know it wasn't running from an SSD. I've done a direct comparison on my XPS and there was very little difference between using the cache and running off SSD, while both were enormously faster than running from HDD only (the first time I booted that way I thought something must be broken).
 
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