Hi all,

I'm being taken out later by my brother to find his girlfriend a new laptop. She wants to spend as little as possible, with the absolute maximum being £350.

What are the sort of specs we'd be looking at for that kind of money? CPU, RAM, HDD, graphics, etc?

Any guidance would be great, we're going out at about 2:30 I think...

Thanks in advance,
Ben

£350?

Some [LIFTED] Celeron thing I expect. You'd be better off going second hand with that kind of money.

You're pulling my leg? PC's cost a fraction of the cost of an equivalent Mac I'm constantly told, so where are they? I need one now!

Yeah but for £350 for a laptop you're taking the piss. Especially since that's the top end of your budget. £400 would get you into low-end C2Ds at least.

I would suggest that a Netbook would be a more reasonable expectation for that budget.

If you do find a laptop available at that money you will probably end up regretting it, as it will leave a lot to be desired.

*sigh*

OK, is this going to last? How future proof is it? I'm presuming it'll run a 64-bit OS and take at least 4GB of RAM even if it doesn't come with that much? e're looking at about 150GB hdd?

Do those presumptions seem realistic?

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/lapt ... ese15.html

That's not unreasonable. Remember you'll end up paying a premium in a shop.

Edit: That price doesn't include the OS btw, but if you can persuade her to go with Linux…

Thanks Jon. I know that a shop will charge more, but hopefully she won't want to buy today, only look and see (then we can get it online later).
I doubt she'll go with Linux, she'll be getting any technical advice from my brother, who struggles to use a computer as it is, he won't be happy with something different, so neither will she unfortunately Saying that, if she waited a couple of months and got Windows 7 she probably wouldn't be happy because that was different too...

I got my girlfriend a good spec laptop for £350 with bag, AV security (AVG professional) and laptop lock from Dabs, it's more about waiting for the right time to buy and looking for the best deal
http://www.dabs.com/products/hp-6735s-a ... -5GFB.html
With all the accessories and postage it came in at £355

As for a cheap but decent one:

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Toshiba_ ... rce=ldawin

She fell in love with a Toshiba thing, according to the specs I remember it had a single code Semphron running at about 2.5GHz, could take up to 8GB of RAM and had a 250GB hard drive, she spent a bit under £300. Although there were better laptops for her money, she liked the look of this one...