Shopping for a laptop

[WhiteCrow]

I'm looking to buy a cheap laptop - doesn't need to be state of the art, but needs to be wireless, and able to run MS Office 2003.

Anyone got hints and tips? Any good places to look for one?

[Lissa]

Acer - available from Play and Comet - are pretty good value from what I've seen. I recently sorted mother out with one and she's over the proverbial m. It was about £300 for a decent processor, 2gb of RAM, 15" screen and Vista. I would say 2gb is the minimum for Vista to run well. My PC has 4gb and Vista still limps at times.

One thing I learned is that laptops tend to come with 16:9 screens these days so 15" is significantly smaller than it used to be when they were 4:3.

[Antony Cox]

15" is significantly smaller than it used to be

Never was a truer word spoken...

[WhiteCrow]

Although I know it doesn't handle office applications - anyone tried those Asus EasyPc thing which run on Linux?

[Rob McCow]

Yes. The amount of difference I notice between OpenOffice and MSOffice is round about zero.

[Dirk Gently]

I'd steer clear of Vista if at all possible, stick with XP. Just a personal opinion.

[Rob McCow]

This might be useful, Mike!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/12/rh_bg_netbooks/

[WhiteCrow]

I bought myself an Acer Aspire One netbook - but it's been a bit of a disaster. Even I, a seasoned Unix man has struggled upgrading the programs.

So far since Saturday I've had to go back and reinstall the machine 5 times. 3 times today - which means I've had enough of it really. Thankfully I can send it back to Amazon.

[Anthony Williams]

In my opinion, ACERs are useless.

Three of the people who lived in my house last year (including myself) all had one, and we'd all bought them at the same time (different models, though) - by the end of last year, all three had broken (and, because they were two years old, they were, of course, out of warranty).

In my opinion, if you want something reliable and durable - get a Dell. It worth the extra

Ant x

[WhiteCrow]

I loved the Acer netbook, the feel of it. With the Linux system it was very sleek and fast.

But making any software change was difficult, even to an experienced UNIX engineer like myself. Returning it to factory settings (and losing data and software updates) three times in one day was the final straw.

I've gone now for a more conventional laptop now.

It's been interesting - most nights once our son is in bed, my wife catches up on TV, and I go into the spare room to do some research/work/spodding. With a laptop I now can be in the same room as her, and realise some of the really disturbing TV she watches.

[Dirk Gently]

I'm using a Packard Bell EasyNote SW with AMD mobile Sempron. It works fine for what I want it for, but it was pricey.