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Budget Windows laptops: recommendation, great deals etc

editor

editor

hiraethified
Everyone might be banging on about the Asus Eeee, but for a little amount more, look what you can get - a proper laptop!

Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo Mobile V5535 Laptop
Dimensions (WxDxH) 36 cm x 26 cm x 3.9 cm
Weight 2.7 kg
Stereo speakers, wireless LAN aerial
Processor Intel Celeron M 530 / 1.73 GHz
Cache Memory 1 MB - L2 Cache
RAM 1 GB (installed) / 2 GB (max) - DDR II SDRAM - 667 MHz
Hard Drive 120 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400 rpm
Optical Storage DVD/±RW (+R double layer) / DVD-RAM - integrated
Display 15.4" TFT active matrix 1280 x 800 ( WXGA )
Networking Network adapter - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g
Keyboard, touchpad
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium

Battery life is rubbish, but it's not a bad looking laptop for an amazing price and well worth considering if your budget is tight: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/133383
 
Xanadu said:
Almost 3 kg. Great if you're not going to carry it around too much though.
Click to expand...

yeah but come on
great for the money of it is staying in your house and moving from couch to table to bedroom on an occasional basis huh
 
Really good value these are.

As someone else noted, the HP one is the same price. http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136220/

It doesnt have a 120gb hard drive (80gb), but it does have a better processor - 1.86ghz.

Someone I know got this one recently, and its a pretty solid machine. Doesn't look too bad either. If anyone is looking for a decent machine on a very tight budget - for pretty much any general home use, get one of these!

Dont get ripped off by those low spec PC word 'sale' offers, they just aren't as good. They're either more expensive or pack a useless 512mb ram.
 
aspirationjones said:
yeah but come on
great for the money of it is staying in your house and moving from couch to table to bedroom on an occasional basis huh
Click to expand...

Xanadu said:
Almost 3 kg. Great if you're not going to carry it around too much though.
Click to expand...

Oh dear :p
 
Would be perfect for someone like my old man, it would never leave the house, but he doesn't want another desktop in his house as it takes up to much space, but annoying my mum as he has just discovered youtube.
 
I couldn't in all seriousness recommend a Celeron-based laptop when proper chips (be they the "new" Pentium E2xxx or even Core 2) that actually implement power-saving features are only a little more. I'd even take a T23xx dual-core Pentium over a Celeron, despite it being last year's technology.

This one: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136219
is easily worth the extra £85.

And if you don't need battery life, then what the hell do you need a laptop for?
 
Small Form Factor PC then? Same price (ie: more than a traditional desktop), but perfectly portable and space-saving, and far more "oomph" for the money.

Laptops are for people who need computing on the go. Those bottom-end laptops with 90 minutes of (real) battery life are a total waste.
 
Yeah, but sff PC = 4 pieces of hardware (PC, monitor, kb, mouse), and 5 cables. Most likely won't have wifi either. A laptop can be put away in a cupboard or drawer when you're not using it, moved from eg. kitchen table to bedroom to coffee table. If you move house frequently, it's easy to shift around. It takes up less desk space than a keyboard and monitor. You can take it round someone else's house.

I know several people who have a laptop as their primary computer for these reasons, and it suits them well.
 
Chz said:
I couldn't in all seriousness recommend a Celeron-based laptop when proper chips (be they the "new" Pentium E2xxx or even Core 2) that actually implement power-saving features are only a little more. I'd even take a T23xx dual-core Pentium over a Celeron, despite it being last year's technology.

This one: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136219
is easily worth the extra £85.

And if you don't need battery life, then what the hell do you need a laptop for?
Click to expand...

Frankly for that extra 85 quid you're getting a slower CPU than the HP (1.4Ghz C2D is going to be slower than a 1.86 Core Solo in all but a few apps, and no, dual core does not mean it's going to be faster even most of the time), a smaller hard drive and a shorter battery life as the 5270 draws 5w more than the 540.

Plus you're still looking at 1 GB, first thing to go up should be the RAM not the CPU.
 
Bob_the_lost said:
Aren't the current generation Celerons (mobile) just Pentium M or Core (single) chips? Which are more than enough Ooomph for anything up to gaming.
Click to expand...
It's not the oomph so much (and graphics-wise they do lack it for gaming). It's the battery life. Celeron chips don't have the power management features that their more upmarket cousins do.

Crispy, if they're *that* hard up for space then fine. But you pay a serious premium for a laptop - so long as they accept that, I guess it's fine. Most people I know who bought laptops for that reason end up never moving them and using external mice, HDDs and even monitors. To me that really defeats the point and I find it frustrating when they're my friends and I want to get them the best value for their needs.
 
See edit. The Celerons are mobile Core chips with a different name, a generation old, nothing more. The difference in power saving has not improved nearly enough to even dent the greater power draw from the bigger chip.
 
Chz said:
And if you don't need battery life, then what the hell do you need a laptop for?
Click to expand...
Portability?

Almost every academic i know--professor and grad student alike--needs to do research in libraries and archives. These places always have power points, so battery life isn't an issue, but you try dragging your desktop along with you. :)
 
Yep, i use my laptop all the time for my project (UG). Tried using a USB key with all my favourite apps on it, but it just didn't work as well. The battery life is steadily going down the toilet but i can nearly always find a power socket to use, if not then i merely get an hour or two in before toddling off to somewhere that does.
 
I love my laptop because I can sit on my arse on the sofa posting nonsense, and watch Corrie at the same time. I couldn't do that with my desktop. :)
 
Bob_the_lost said:
See edit. The Celerons are mobile Core chips with a different name, a generation old, nothing more. The difference in power saving has not improved nearly enough to even dent the greater power draw from the bigger chip.
Click to expand...
So, do the mobile Celerons not have the same lack of L2 cache that earlier Celerons had, making them considerably slower than similar Pentium chips?
 
mhendo said:
So, do the mobile Celerons not have the same lack of L2 cache that earlier Celerons had, making them considerably slower than similar Pentium chips?
Click to expand...
The cache is halved iirc but you're still looking at 1mb of L2, which is a decent amount. Might knock 5-10% off in some applications (based on performance numbers between a 512k and 1meg dual core chip, which is pesimistic as doubling cache size does not realise a halving of cache misses even in best/worst case scenarios) plus some of the low end C2Ds have 1Meg cache too. Then again some won't see any difference at all. Most of the ones i'd run on a laptop personally.
 
Bob_the_lost said:
The battery life is steadily going down the toilet but i can nearly always find a power socket to use, if not then i merely get an hour or two in before toddling off to somewhere that does.
Click to expand...

I think mine only did 2 hours new, its down to about 40 mins now!
 
Bob_the_lost said:
The cache is halved iirc but you're still looking at 1mb of L2, which is a decent amount. Might knock 5-10% off in some applications (based on performance numbers between a 512k and 1meg dual core chip, which is pesimistic as doubling cache size does not realise a halving of cache misses even in best/worst case scenarios) plus some of the low end C2Ds have 1Meg cache too. Then again some won't see any difference at all. Most of the ones i'd run on a laptop personally.
Click to expand...

Celerons run up to 40% slower than 4MB or 6MB Core2s at the same clock, averaging about 20%, IIRC from the last reviews I saw. Bear in mind that the original post is a Celeron M 530. It will be quite a lot slower in multimedia and floating point work. And especially on anything that can use a second core, where the Core can be up to 80% faster.

If battery life is irrelevant, it should be good enough. The full Core2 only draws more peak power. Something rarely used. It draws significantly less idle power because it clocks down - something that is disabled on Celerons.

So despite what you say, the Core 2 based laptop will be faster and have better battery life. I'm not going to say it's night-and-day, but there is a significant difference and it's worth £85 easily.
 
The core 2 has two cores that both run at the same clockspeed, as soon as you ramp up one from it's resting state, which may not be as deep as you're thinking depending on the USB bug and the machine in question, you're going to be burning two core's worth of power even when running single threaded apps, peak or no peak you're going to suck down more power every time you use the chip. Celerons lose some of the deep sleep mode refinements, not all of them.

Why do you think that the numbers for a 4mb l2 cache chip are of any relevance when the one you're looking at is a 2mb one? I'd like to see those tests, could be i'm wrong but since you didn't read it quite right in the first place ;)

I'd still go with the Celeron laptop there, the one with a larger hard drive and longer battery life, not to mention the faster one. (1.4 x 1.2 = 1.68 < 1.73 and that's using your numbers for the ones with twice the cache) Oh and there's a slight performance advantage to the larger hard drive, either more platters (which will up the power draw a tiny amount i admit) or denser ones (which won't) that'll result in faster streaming of media.
 
*subscribes to thread*

Would it make sense to make a sticky thread on cheap PC deals? Threads seem to come up regularly, and it would be a handy community resource...
 
I'm going to have to spend a long while searching now, but I've never seen a battery life test that a Celeron has won. The fact is that most PCs spend 95% of their life in standby and 5% running flat-out. The Celeron is going to be drawing a good 15W over the Core 95% of the time. I remember seeing a laptop where both the Celeron M 5xx and 4MB cache Core 2 were available and the 6-cell battery life was a hair over 4h for the Core and about 3h10 for the Celeron at a higher clock speed. I'd imagine the 2MB version takes a smidgen less juice.

I'd say speed of a single core will be close to a draw. Perhaps you're right that the Celeron would win that. But having the extra core for things that can use it is a tremendous advantage. Having a disk that can stream faster isn't any good unless the processor can work on it faster, and multimedia apps are one of the few things in this world that are almost universally multi-threaded. (Though let's face it - platter density rarely makes much difference in any real-world tests, but the extra space is always welcome)
 
How's this for a bargain:

HP 530 Celeron M 440 /1.86 GHz
15.4" Widescreen TFT 1280 x 800 ( WXGA ),
RAM 512 MB
HDD 80 GB DVD±RW (+R double layer) / DVD-RAM GMA 950
Wi-Fi, Ethernet
Vista Home Basic

You'll need more RAM, but that's a lorra lorra lappie for £270!
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136619

(PS Thread title edited to reflect changing content)
 
Here's another one - £280!
R0140709-01.jpg


HP 530 Laptop Intel Celeron M 520 1x 1GB 120GB brightview 15.4" widescreen DVD±RW WLAN Vista Home Basic
Processor
  • Intel Celeron Processor 520
  • 1.60-GHz,
  • 1-MB L2 cache,
  • 533-MHz FSB
Memory
  • 1GB Installed
  • 533/667-MHz
  • DDR2 SDRAM
  • Two SODIMM slots;
  • Supported memory 2GB
Hard Drive
  • 120-GB 5400 rpm
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/140709
 
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