Steady all you sharks.I said lap top not lap dance.

She has started a course at Hatfield college & needs a lap top to help with her course work etc.Being a silver surfer myself,I am out of my depth regards good,bad or indifferent makes/models etc.

Her budget (with a bit of help from pa) is £800.Obviously she wants the best speed/memory etc for her bucks but nothing too fancy & techy.

We have looked at the Toshiba A30-104 which is :-

2.6GHZ Intel Cel.
256 Mb RAM
30 Gb Hard Drive
DVD ROM & CD ReWriter
15" Screen
64Mb Intel 852GME Graphics

Is a Toshiba "tosh" or ok?

Hope you guys can steer us in the right direction.

Mark

 

Mark

Can't help with regards to that but look online at dell i've got an old latitude and it's never missed a beat, granted it's a bit old now P2 266 but still a rock solid machine

Si

 

Mark

I've had a few laptops over the years and I reckon that the Toshiba that I had about 6 years ago was the most reliable I've had. It happily stood up to 45000 miles per year bouncing around in the car boot. A Siemens Nixdorf that replaced it was nowhere near so robust (an absolute nightmare, in fact), the Dell that replaced the SN was pretty good (if needing reasonably frequent BIOS upgrades to fix bugs), and the current IBM seems to have random faults that equally randomly cure themselves.

I'd say go for the Tosh for the reliablilty reputation, however the specification that you mention doesn't sound "state of the art". What course is she doing as this could make a bit of a difference? If she just needs the laptop to produce reports, web pages, etc., it sounds fine. If the course involves graphics, more memory would be good as might a DVD writer.

Have the college given you a mimimum spec for what PC is necessary for the course?

Doug

 

My daughter (A2 stage) got a Packard Bell laptop from PC World which she is delighted with. XP home edition etc. About £1000. I am sure if you are knowledgable there are better deals around but she did get some student discount although this may have been a bit of a marketing gimmick. If you want more on the spec then mail me and I will ask my daughter when she gets back this afternoon. David (ex-Hatfield in the 70's!).

 

Thanks for the input so far.I will pass it on to her at the weekend.Cheers.

Mark

 

Have a look at Dabs and the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptops. Very good price/bundles offered.

FSC have yet again come top in one of the PC mags group laptop tests this month.

Dave

 

I would take a look at evesham as when it comes to reliability and customer satisfaction they seem to appear top or near top in almost every survey.

 

Will happily sort you a good deal if you want.

Let me know.

TONY
www.thewestongroup.co.uk

Quicker to contact me through web site during the day!

 

I just bought a pair of Toshiba's from PC world business for £549ex VAT each. They're excellent machines for the money, just a little heavy and large by "modern" laptop standards.

 

I have the following:

Compaq Presario 2100

20gb hd
2.4gb Intel Celoron processor
DVD drive
64mb graphics
14" screen

came with XP, Works 7.0 and Word 2002

£800

Edited to add you can now get same machine with 40gb for same money.

 

I agree with druddle. My Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D is just over a year old and going superb. I spent most of this year developing on it as well so it has had some use!