So I'm now looking out for a new laptop. It doesn't have to be anything flash or have a masive memory as I have external hard drives. Basically something around the 12-15 inch screen and resonably lightwieght (pretty important because of the amount of travel I do). I'll just use it to watch films on, a bit of web surfing and a little bit of word and excel. Any suggestions?
Word and Excel are uncomfortable to use on screens as small as 12" with the typical resolution offered by those screens so a Netbook is probably not what you are looking for. For me the best compromise of usability and weight is achieved at around 14" screen at about 1280x800 resolution and a weight of 2 to 2.3 kg. For playing movies you will want a decent processor, not a single core processor, preferably at least dual core (most of them are these days) and you also want reasonable amount of RAM absolute minimum 2GB. Are your movies on DVD or have you got them ripped to disk? If DVD then you need a resonable DVD drive, that also excludes a lot of Netbooks as most of tehm don't have one. Anyway after all that it's pretty much down to price, my personal favourite brand these days is Lenovo (used to be IBM but the Chinese bought the IBM Laptop manufacturing business). Sony do some nice laptops these days as do Acer and Asus.
12-15 inch screen??? Take a look at one of the new Google Chromebooks. And if they don't float your boat, have a gander at Laptops Direct
I just would not pay 350 to 400 quid for a device that won't work if there is no internet, plus I'm stuck with Windows anyway as that is where I make my living Good site that Laptops Direct
I'm actually looking at a couple Asus on ebay at the moment, found on with a 13.3" screen which seems pretty good. All my films etc are ripped to my external hard drives.
I wouldn't know what to recommend, I am stuck in a time warp with my Toshiba. Only got it because it was an offer with AOl...
I bought a Sony netbook last year (2010) and took it with me the Philippines. Mainly to watch the General Election (how sad is that) Must say it worked very well and was much more convenient for carrying around. The screen is a little small, as is the keyboard. To be honest though I have hardly used it since then. I've been looking around for a new laptop and must say that the netbooks don't seemed to have "moved on" much. The laptops are all pretty good specs, some very nice Sony equipment at reasonable prices. Very tempted but not yet taken the plunge, as nothing really shines as being a leap ahead of what I'm using. My neighbour bought himself an iPad2 couple of weeks ago just for travel convenience. Now he wishes he had gotten the Motorolla. Claims that the iPad is better then a netbook, but I can't see it, the iPad has no USB connectivity for a start. Maybe if these new tablets had some good connectivity they could be much more useful??
What processor are you on just now on your main laptop Peter? If it's an i3 or i5 then you probably wont see any benefits in current upgrades, if it's older you would probably see big improvements, but then again it is often hard to see any benefit if you don't tax the machine very much currently. I run multiple instances of of Visual Studio 2010 (around 3 or 4 at a time) single instances of Word, Excel, Adobe Lightroom, Zune , Smart Plug n Talk, Outlook, Multiple Delphi 7 development environments, and usually about 20 Chrome pages and 10 to 20 IE9 pages, my laptop suffers There are lots of other things running too but not so important
Here's what it says oss:- Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU T3400 @2.16GHz,2100Mhz, 2 Core(s) It's just a cheap Sony Vaio VGN-NS20E_S My netbook is Sony Vaio 21313M with Intel Atom N450 1.66 GHz 64 -Bit 1GB RAM MEMORY 250 GB HDD HARD DRIVE WEBCAM WIRELESS BUI. But I really don't use it. May well give it to my sis-in-law when she get here next week.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html yours scores 1142, it's in the Low to Mid Range CPU level. My second hand thing is on the slightly higher page http://www.cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html it's a T7500 and scores 1273 so it is almost the same as mine and I consider mine to be great The current Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz range are relatively cheap and score 7256 on this page http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html It should be noted that the i5-2500K is a desktop processor but I bet the mobile versions are equally greater in performance (roughly). Personally I use my laptop very heavily and I am very happy with it, as yours is very similar to mine I would not feel the need to upgrade just now, I do think I would want to upgrade next year though as some things are staring to annoy like Lightroom, it takes to long to render previews, most of that is disk time though as I use an external 500 GB 7200 RPM 2.5 inch disk for my 300 GB photo library Faster processor will always help with IO though (IO = Input Output). The Intel Atom single core thing, yeah I would give that away too.
Nice links oss, thanks Thanks for the advice also, maybe I'll hang on a bit longer. Well until the urge gets too much
