DELL or MAC???

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wru

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I am being given £500 by the open uni to which I will add between £200 and £300 giving me a total of between £700 and £800.

I have been told in the past that DELL are very good value for money.

i have used Macs in the past and enjoy the way they work.

I want to buy a laptop that is good value for money and is suitable for uni work listening to tunes and browsing the web.

I have found both a DELL and a Mac for between £700 and £800 although I can not tell which is the best option.

i understand that some people like Macs and others do not I just need an impartial opinion on whether I am looking in the right places for my price range.

Should I in fact be looking at a completly diferent make?

Any advice/direction/help you can give would be much appreciated, as this laptop has to last me and I would like to not invest in a dud.

Many thanks.
 
HI,

Does the Laptop need to do any strong graphics work, like design, art anything like that??

If not then you don't really need a Mac.

You can get very good laptops for around £600 at the moment so you can save some cash.

Yeah Dell make good Laptops, as do Toshiba, ASUS, Samsung, LogiQ & Fujitsu Siemens.
 
No I do not need to do any graphics work.


Thanks for the reply but could you be a bit more specific?

I have looked at all these makes but I am unable to tell whats what.

You say that I can a very good lap top for £600 could you point me in a direction where I can find these?

I was told not to bother with places like pc world as I will get a rubish pc deal.

I just need somone to give me a shortlist of the best models on the market for my price range.

Thanks again.
 
wru said:
I was told not to bother with places like pc world as I will get a rubish pc deal.
Click to expand...
Can still get some good deals at PCWorld on Toshiba's.
You could also try Staples who have some great deals on at the moment.
 
Was not planning on it. Never really been a fan of computer games.

Just for the sake of argument if I did want to play games on it (which is a possibility due to personal circumstances) would this mean I would have to spend alot more money, or could I get something in my £600-£800 price range?
 
The cheapest Mac laptop you can buy is £719.00 and is actually a netbook with a 13" screen. It has a 120Gb hard disk and no extra software other than the OS.

The first serious Mac laptop costs £929 and again is woefully under-specced for the price and comes with no extra software. A shame cos they look gorgeous and work well but imo you're paying well over the odds just for pretties.

Within your budget you could get a Toshiba, Samsung, Fujitsu etc and have money left over to get the software you need, the most obvious contender being Windows Office, students edition. Do not buy an Acer machine.

If possible get a machine with Windows XP as with the release of Windows Seven this coming August, Win Vista will be a dead duck.

Having said that, Win Vista usually comes pre-loaded and doesn't really affect the laptop's price so if you see something you like with Win Vista, go for it.

Vista only runs well with 2Gb memory btw so don't buy a machine with Vista with less RAM than 2Gb.

I think that Samsung Waynos_Face linked to is excellent.

I wouldn't touch PC World with a barge pole for a new machine.

Staples can be good but only with special offers, other than that they're usually overpriced.

Here's a similarly priced Toshiba >> Link so you can compare with the Samsung.

I bought a pair of £400.00 Toshibas from Laptops Direct for my twin daughters at Uni about 18 months ago, no problems with them as a supplier.
 
In answer to your gaming question. Yes, you'd need to be looking at good graphics and as large a screen as possible to play games on a laptop.

You could afford a machine that will play lots of games within your budget but in my opinion ALL laptops will struggle with newer games that require a high specced machine to play. You couldn't play Crysis on the laptops we've linked to but you could probably play the Call Of Duty series and probably all RPG's on it.

If you already have the software you need, it may be worth spending all your budget on a machine, you'd certainly get a bigger hard drive for instance and possibly a 17" screen.

The more I look at that Samsung linked above, the more I like it.
 
Some very usefull advice there, you have made the mine field of buying a new laptop a bit easier to deal with.

Thank you very much. :nod:
 
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