Alright everyone?

My sis is thinking about buying a laptop and a printer in the near future.

Any suggestions? It's not got any need to be super specced, it'll be doing MS Officey type stuff and the usual web stuff.
A 15" display would be fine.
No word on a budget, but I think the cheaper end of the market (sadly) is where we're looking at. So I'm anticipating a load of grief further down the road.

I heard someone is selling a Toshiba Tecra M1 with loads of accessories for about £100 on the sales board, you could up the RAM and it would compare to the newed base entry machines

A MacBook?

What price range?

My Toshiba Tecra A10 is excellent, but probably over her budget.

I'd look at the Dell Studio line, they aren't bad and reasonably good value for money. Acer is also good for budget laptops, mine is over 5 years old and the battery still holds over 90% of the original charge.

A limit has been set of about £350, and she'll be needing MS Office as well.
I'd love to get her onto a MacBook, of course.
Actually, I'm a little concerned as she's very much of the XP based experience and hasn't even heard of Vista. Can I still buy a lappy with XP on it?

Fin, your offer is being seriously thought about, btw. Especially as it'll be used mainly for education, she wants the 'puter in question to be cleaner than clean to avoid any naughtiness from the previous owner, so a new HD would be a smart move.

I'll have a look at Acer as well.

Edit: The Acer store doesn't appear to actually sell any computers, just warranties and accessories.
Clicky - am I missing something?

New hard drive isn't an issue, I was going to scrub the current one anyway as I used it for a period at MS and has bits of stuff that I should make sure can't be recovered and probably keep it as my current portable external hard drive is on the blink

If you wanted to pay the cost of a new hard drive I'd install it etc as I'd send it off with XP Pro as it still has the COA on the base (and I have the drivers on my main pc currently)

for a price (as in what I paid) I could also include a retail box of Office 2007 standard, so word, excel, outlook etc (still sealed, was going to install when I get Win 7 retail but might hold off a bit or get my licence via the uni)

Apart from Dell, most manufacturers don't sell direct. You will need to shop around at places like Scan etc.

In your price range, you probably won't get more than a bundled trial of Office 2007 (30 or 60 day).

She can get the Student / Home version for 60-90 quid (not sure on the exact price in the UK).

As to XP, you will need to buy a Business laptop with Vista Business installed (no media center) to get a downgrade right to XP Pro (XP Home isn't available as a downgrade), a business laptop probably isn't what she wants and will probably be over your budget. Alternatively, you could get a netbook, a bit under powered, but runs XP.

To be honest, Vista is easier to use and friendlier than XP, it is (generally) more stable than XP and the initial driver problems are long behind us and shouldn't affect her if she is buying a new laptop - unless she has a pre-2002 printer or something.

Or, I have an unused, BNIB OEM XP Pro at home, which my Dad would probably take a hit on, as it looks like he won't need it anymore....

This maybe of interest if you have an OS kicking around - Extra Value Laptop, Intel Dual Core T3000 1.8GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB SATA HDD, DVDRW, 15.4" WebCam, NO Operating System £299.98

If not have a look on Acerdirect which is part of laptopsdirect

Writing this from a new Compaq CQ60 with Vista Home Basic.
Athlon Dual Core 2.1GHz, 3GB RAM, 160 GB HD (although usefully less with recovery partitions etc).
About £340, IIRC.
After shopping around town, and with a deadline of needing it for work tomorrow, we eventually got it from Staples of all places. All the other local stores were either more expensive or lower specced. Or both.
No free upgrade to Win7, but I'm not convinced my sister would take it up anyway.

So, sat here burning System Restore discs.
First impressions...
Power up and the machine does the all singing 'Welcome to...' thing. It then does it's registration routine thing, that wants an email address (setting up a new one for my sis) which we couldn't give it, wanted to load on Norton ASAP, then wanted to connect (without first letting me give it our network details). So ultimately, I think could complete one completed section of a 5 piece set up section. As first impressions go, this isn't great. I want to see a row of nice green ticks on my shiny new laptop, not 4 naughty red crosses.
Anyway, onwards.

The keyboard isn't too bad. The key travel is a little further than my usual keyboard, so in some ways it doesn't feel quite as precise and a little spongy. But it's a good size, and easy enough to type on.
The display... no major worries here either. It's a display; it's displaying. I'm happy.
What else... it's got a 5-in-1 card reader built in, wifi, not sure about Bluetooth, but I don't think she needs it.
It's trackpad is ok, although the buttons are a little plasticky. I'm using a mouse.

Vista - c'mon... it's XP in a party frock, isn't it? I'm sure most of you know about my feelings in this regard, so I won't dwell on it. It's not my machine anyway.

This disc burning seems to have taken forever. Nearly an hour now for 2 4GB DVD-Rs.

So far, I've installed Firefox, Avira (I'd love some pointers on ridding the machine of Norton 360 btw), couple of screensavers - actually, there's something. I couldn't see a logical place where screensavers live. So I created a folder on the public area and stuck them in there, then did a right click and Install. Right thing? Wrong thing?

Also downloaded a load of Windows Live software, as the bundled Windows Mail app doesn't like Hotmail. Which suprised me. I assumed there'd be some interoperability between the two, but I was wrong. So off to download Windows Live Mail instead, with a load of other stuff. More downloading.
I was surprised to see a check box offering to make Bing my preferred search engine... and excluding any other software from changing it!
Oh, and no, MS, we're not letting you data harvest our machine. Or at least any more than you can by default.
Oh alright, we'll have Silverlight then.

So main thoughts are, plasticky hardware and a plasticky OS. I guess you get what you pay for.

Fresh install with seperate media... NOT the recovery discs, first thing I did to my Aldi laptop, was full of rubbish on it I didn't want which is down to the OEM

he OS is good...you will need to strip a fair bit of the 'bundled' (not the stuff that comes on Vista) out though

Good plan, if you know someone with compatible disks. I'm not sure I do!

My newish laptop came with Vista installed and an XP CD. I'm seriously trying to like Vista, but after 4 months I'm seriously close to using that CD...

That is Vista's (and Microsoft's) biggest problem. The manufacturers get extra money from the software producers for packing software onto new computers. That means the new user gets a pretty miserable experience.

I wish they would do a base install and have all the "optional" software as just that, packages on the drive that man could install, if they want.

If there is a Novatech store near you, have a look in there or on their website - their laptops come bloat free - just Vista and a laptop. We've not long bought one for my little brother-in-law! You can buy them without OS as well.

To be fair, from what I can see in the Windows Defender (is that the one?) control panel that deals with the software launched at start up, the biggest offenders are HP themselves, who start about 4 or 5 separate apps. And Norton, of course. There isn't actually a load of crud starting at launch. From what I can see. Although Norton's still giving me a huge popup.



The next thing she's buying is Office, she really doesn't have the cash to spring on a Vista (or Win 7) install disc. I'd really not expect to have to do so, frankly, for a brand new computer.

My compaq PC was exactly the same.

5 minutes in MSCONFIG sorted it out.