Laptop for my parents

PostLaptop for my parents by **Lotus** » Sun Dec 15, 2013 11:01 am

My parents are looking for a new laptop, and while they have some ideas of what they want and a couple of models in mind, I wondered if the in-the-know minds of GRcade could offer any insight.

They're looking for:

<£500
i3 processor (minimum)
500GB hard drive (they're not fussed about HDD but I said 500 would do them)
6GB RAM

These are the ones I've found that I think are suitable. Any thoughts on these or others I've haven't mentioned?

http://www.ebuyer.com/579806-asus-x551c ... 1ca-sx153h
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00G ... =computers

Thanks.

PostRe: Laptop for my parents by GM » Sun Dec 15, 2013 2:34 pm

Those are kind of bizarre requests, they'd have been much better off telling you what it was for rather than saying "we want 6GB RAM because reasons."

Any idea how they're going to use it? Do we want something that has outstanding battery life or is it just going to move around the house a bit?

Will they be doing games or CAD or video editing? Assuming not given the processor, but then why 6GB RAM? Or is it just for browsing and Netflix - in which case is a great screen important (in terms of colour, viewing angles etc).

You'll get better value focusing on exactly what you want rather than buying a generic jack of all trades thing.

PostRe: Laptop for my parents by **Green Gecko** » Sun Dec 15, 2013 6:12 pm

I guess they'll have at least 100 browser tabs open.

All laptops are basically gooseberry fool, but get an Asus.

http://gizmodo.com/5406415/laptop-reliability-study-asus-and-toshiba-come-out-on-top

http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

PostRe: Laptop for my parents by **Lotus** » Sun Dec 15, 2013 8:46 pm

Yeah the 6GB RAM is a bit odd. They'll only be using it for general internet browsing, a bit of word processing and maybe watching the iPlayer. They're basically obsessed with it not being slow, which is why I think they've said that about the RAM. I don't think battery life matters particularly.

Thanks for that GG, interesting.

PostRe: Laptop for my parents by **Green Gecko** » Sun Dec 15, 2013 9:17 pm

That graph + budget + reviews (although I'll admit, it's almost impossible to find proper reviews of any Asus models or generally the same laptop model for any brand, because there's always 1000 versions) = your answer. You might need to scour through Amazon reviews.

If they really want speed, they might be able to get something with an SSD for under £500. Really any processor i3+ is fine and at least 4GB of RAM. There's many many other factors (such as SATA controller for the SSD, try to find some disk performance benchmarks for the actual laptop model).

iPlayer/YouTube etc. benefits slightly from discreet NVIDIA/AMD graphics as that gooseberry fool gets offloaded from the CPU. Although all the contemporary Intel processors support hardware video decoding, so maybe that doesn't make any difference these days.

PostRe: Laptop for my parents by **TheWay** » Mon Dec 16, 2013 8:50 pm

Used a couple of Asus. Found the build quality to be utter gooseberry fool. The graph says I'm wrong though.

Laptop for my parents

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