£300 Laptops

Looking for a laptop with a budget of £300.
Dell Laptops
Its for a neighbour whos asked me to find one for her. Dell do the inspiron for £329 Link above. Which I can get just below the £300

Anyone know of anything better?

[Steve_PPP]

We buy Dell laptops through work for our staff - had a complete range over the years. Probably shifted several hundred units (deliver, re-image then supply to end-user) and the hardware has always been very good. Hardly any failures at all.

Only ones to avoid are ones with slot loading cd/dvd drives, although i think Dell stopped using these a while ago as they were really poor. The Inspiron 15 has a normal drive tray

Only problem with Dell is always their customer service if you need them. Business support is bad enough, but residential is a joke. But for £300 i don't think you'd find anything much better, hardware wise - CPU and 2GB ram should be fine for everything your average Joe Bloggs needs.

[Steve_PPP]

Just had a quick sneaky round and Toshiba's equivalent model (same CPU/memory/HDD/screen) has surprisingly enough been discounted to £329 by PC World

Competition anyone

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/toshib...86957-pdt.html

Plus points - its bought over the counter, and can be returned over the counter if it goes wrong. Dell is always going to be a shipping/data transfer nightmare if you need to send it back.

Its always worth going to somewhere to PC World just to look and feel - some of the more budget laptops just have a really cheap & nasty feel, some don't.

Cheers Steve

Got my eldest a Dell Vostro a couple of years back and it's still going strong now, hence my looking at Dell as an option. Vostro got a slot drive but not had any problem with it

This is there first step up the pc ladder and the budget is a firm £300. I'm not a lover of netbooks, so going to find a fair spec lappy.

[Steve_PPP]

Originally Posted by admin

Vostro got a slot drive but not had any problem with it

Those were the ones, they were bad for the little felt stuff (that keeps the dust out the drive) coming unstuck from the case, then sticking to the cd as it went into the drive. Result = knackered drive with your disk jammed in there

Guess you got one made by someone who had their eyes open that day

[Nick]

Toshibas are known for being extreemly slow on boot up, caus of all the crap they put on em, other than that good solid machines

Thats a good point Nick

The other thing with a Dell is they do come with a good set of installed hardware / software discs well they used too? Would be handy having a windows 7 disc

Neighbour decided to go with the Dell

Ordered today, interesting to see how long it takes to turn up.