Laptop - Deals

[onesea]

Ok totally out of date with this stuff. 

 

My last Laptop is 10 years old and is fooked, it's taken me 2 days to make it start and back up contents to cloud. 

 

Historically with travel I used to destroy one every 2-3 years, so knew what a good deal looked like. 

 

I have been surviving on phone and iPad however, miss abilities of laptop.

 

What I would want it to do? 

• Maybe some mild video editing, 
• Word processing,
• Usual internet stuff, 
• Managing photos etc - mostly stored on line or on external hard drives,
• Bluetooth - WiFi obviously several usb ports,
• Battery life an hour or 2 would be good more better.

 

How much Ram? 8gig or more? 

 

How fast a processor? I don't have clue. 

 

I am thinking 100gig hard drive would do? what type is best?

 

Anyone know of any decent deals out there I am definitely sub £300 preferably £200 and have no problems with reconditioned for the use it's going to get.

 

 

 

[husoi]

I got my last laptop from https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/

They have a range depending on what you need it for.

Another great place is pc specialists

You can Google them

[Bender]

Bear in mind the newer version of windows is only going to update with tpm v2 so don't buy something too old  

 

Video editing that isn't like drawing teeth is usually not good on bottom end stuff.

[onesea]

13 minutes ago, Bender said:

Bear in mind the newer version of windows is only going to update with tpm v2 so don't buy something too old  

 

Video editing that isn't like drawing teeth is usually not good on bottom end stuff.

Was looking at windows 10 or 11, seems windows 10 support is ending October this year.

 

video editing would mainly be cropping and joining nothing to difficult.

[daveinlim]

3 hours ago, husoi said:

I got my last laptop from https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/

They have a range depending on what you need it for.

Another great place is pc specialists

You can Google them

 

I've got my last 3 from here. Never had an issue with any refurb from them. 

[Fish]

I tend to go on Dell Outlet nowadays, which is mostly cancelled orders. Come will the warranty and you can choose the spec you want.

[S-Westerly]

Laptops direct is where I tend to go but I'm buying high end MSI gaming laptops as it is one of my stress relievers. Nothing takes the edge off like killing lots of electronic entities. Very cathartic. 

[onesea]

10 hours ago, Fish said:

I tend to go on Dell Outlet nowadays, which is mostly cancelled orders. Come will the warranty and you can choose the spec you want.

That good knowledge problem is what spec do I want?

[Bender]

35 minutes ago, onesea said:

That good knowledge problem is what spec do I want?

Best you can afford lap tops age quickly 

[husoi]

57 minutes ago, onesea said:

That good knowledge problem is what spec do I want?

I think you need to visit PC specialists website to give you an idea of what spec you want.

You can personalize everything from graphic card, memory, processor, etc.

As you change the specs it will automatically adjust the price.

Then you will get a better understanding of what you will need and go to laptops direct for a deal.

I agree with @Bender better spec = longer life span.

My old laptop wasn't cheap but lasted 14 years

[RideWithStyles]

The only thing that stands out that needs some form of actual processing power and some middle specs to a gpu (graphics chip/card) is video editing, now it will be light to mild stuff so id say middle of the road spec should get maybe 10years out of.
mid Avoid shared gpu if you can for video editing work is quite demanding it will be very hard work.

What program will you be using, and whats its minimum/reccomended spec requirement, Plus the latest windows?
What ever it is double it and see if that fits a middle of the road laptop.

 

now the real devil is a little bit of knowledge of what year those specs of that laptop came out and history of their support like compatibility ( I mean like the intel, Amd, nvidea).
You can get stung buying a what looks on first page was a slightly more powerful unit yet not quite as expensive but is older at this point and you’ve already lost 2-4years of support at this stage. And technology development is very fast paced so easy to start behind and lost money in the investment before you even started if your wanting to hang to it as long as possible. 

[bonio]

Yeah it's not that helpful but 'best you can afford' is pretty good advice. It's all about making sure the thing will be up running whatever is around in 10 years time. In my experience, though, this means spending at least around £500.

 

Put your money into getting a faster processor and more RAM (i.e. dont worry about so much disk space... once you have 500gb of disk space, you have more than most people will ever use). An ssd will be faster than an old fashioned hard disk, though, so it's a performance upgrade that gives good vale for your money.

 

Search for list of processors ranked by speed, and try to ensure yours is around the middle, if you can afford it.

 

More RAM is always good. Last machine I bought, three years ago, had 8MB of 3200 MHz RAM. But that's for the missus and she just wants to use the Internet and wite the occasional spreadsheet. Video editing, even just simple stuff, is more resource hungry.

 

That machine had just a 256 GB SSD by the way, which is more than enough for her. But again, if you want to store lots of videos you might need more. Have a look at how much space you've actually used on your current laptop for a guide of what you will need.

[RideWithStyles]

Agree with Bonio- put the specs into the meat grinder rather than the trough.

aftermarket Portable Ssd cards are cheap and easy to get and use so as Bonio says the pc you wont need much for system requirements even though windows is quite massive and has loads of patches and additionals it wants to put on often and work with (compared to other platforms) that it has in place with space to add on.

we got one like over 15yrs ago 500gb (it came with the good spec) never got near 250 even when it started with xp towards windows 10, it had loads of pictures, videos and random stuff on before we got a portable ssd.

 id use a separate ssd card for all your videos to store on and work with as even the cheap ones are compact, big on capacity, really fast compared to the best hdd ones.

the only two positives to hdd is cheaper and. Less likely to suffer corruption, questionable if its more likely to be recoverable. 

 

Edited Tuesday at 08:37 by RideWithStyles

[onesea]

Thanks guys. 

Agree external hard drives I have always backed things up on them.  

 

Presently just dumped 100gig of data on the cloud from various old hard drives (much duplication). Part of reason for laptop is to bring them from cloud and sort then back up.

 

I also have mums digitised photos & video to sort.

 

Presently looking at 16gig ram 256ssd (as you say there is always cloud and external memory) reconditioned for £300 

 

Edited Tuesday at 08:47 by onesea

[husoi]

Be weary of external drives.

I would strongly advise spending the money in cloud storage instead.

I lost around 3000 photos because my WD drive decided to stop working.

Cloud services will end up being around the same price as external drive and easier to recover if something goes pear shape 

[JRH]

For video editing check costs of software.
i had to replace my quite old laptop that was initially windows 8. Then upgraded to 10. Wasn’t suitable for win 11. Took 15 minute to boot up let alone run a program. So I bought a new one.

then found all my old software for photo editing and video editing no longer ran under win 11. Wouldn’t even run under the so-called compatibility mode.

then found you couldn’t buy the software only rent at £19 / month .

eventually found some from (I think) NCH which can be bought for a one off payment.

i still have a really old windows NT machine to run my cad software. This doesn’t go on the internet.

[RideWithStyles]

Sounds good but precondition units specs and prices vary wildly.

Not to complicate things but as video editing id be looking at what Ram it is? DDR3,4 or 5? and what speed does that one run at that will determine how much it can shift through and the speed.

[husoi]

2 hours ago, JRH said:

For video editing check costs of software.
i had to replace my quite old laptop that was initially windows 8. Then upgraded to 10. Wasn’t suitable for win 11. Took 15 minute to boot up let alone run a program. So I bought a new one.

then found all my old software for photo editing and video editing no longer ran under win 11. Wouldn’t even run under the so-called compatibility mode.

then found you couldn’t buy the software only rent at £19 / month .

eventually found some from (I think) NCH which can be bought for a one off payment.

i still have a really old windows NT machine to run my cad software. This doesn’t go on the internet.

I wonder if you can get good android app that could run on a tablet for image/video editing.

Most are fairly cheap and Android is always less demanding on hardware.

[onesea]

Well thanks for the advice…
I just hit the button on:

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/refurbished-dell-latitude-5490-core-i7-8th-gen-16gb-256gb-14-inch-windows-1-t1-5490i716gb256gbw10p/version.asp

 

Thanks for recommendations, thanks for recommendations.  I have used Laptopsdirect before, first time he was just about a one man band in Bradford.  
I phoned him to check he wasn’t dodgy site!  
Have used since and always had good service.

 

@RideWithStyles

 

Ram Size16GB TypeDDR4 Form FactorSO-DIMM Total Slots1

 

you can decide if that’s a good thing I understand 16gig

[RideWithStyles]

It’s just acase of checking its right and you not paying high price for a low/slow spec for what you’ll be doing, which is very easy to fall into the trap on a laptop.

16gb and ddr4 is a good start, would be nice to know it’s speed. You could research the laptop and its spec online it get some idea.

if its a laptop more often than not its a single stick of ram but depending on if its soldered on or not will depend on its upgradeability which would make it even more valuable and save money further more. if it has a second slot there for another stick of ram or a ssd board slot but is unused/not fitted at the factory.

i just seeing details and letting you know but depends on how flippant you want to be about it. 

[onesea]

2 hours ago, RideWithStyles said:

It’s just acase of checking its right and you not paying high price for a low/slow spec for what you’ll be doing, which is very easy to fall into the trap on a laptop.

16gb and ddr4 is a good start, would be nice to know it’s speed. You could research the laptop and its spec online it get some idea.

if its a laptop more often than not its a single stick of ram but depending on if its soldered on or not will depend on its upgradeability which would make it even more valuable and save money further more. if it has a second slot there for another stick of ram or a ssd board slot but is unused/not fitted at the factory.

i just seeing details and letting you know but depends on how flippant you want to be about it. 

Will see how it works is arrives tomorrow.