computers

[zipgun]

Will staples hp 15" touch come with a W8 disc ? Uk Dell has a 15r with dvd cd & touch for £368.Not quiet as good spec as the hp but much cheaper . Reviews say the screen is a bit dim, are they being picky? My options ; Dell http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-15r-5 ... n-15r-5521

hp in pcworld 450 /or 404 online / or 399 from staples but a slightly lesser spec..doubt if its noticable for kids use?
dell 368
Are all the guts the same more or less ? Dont bombard me with tech..I'm just a blacksmith

[JPB]

Buy the Dell! Spec is higher than that of the 15" version of the HP, its 6GB of RAM means that, should you decide to upgrade to 8, you only need one more 4GB module, the processor is adequate and the graphics will be fine for anything apart from running 3D games at higher frame rates, but then that's why dedicated gaming machines cost so much and you don't need one of those.
I wouldn't worry too much about reviews of subjective issues such as screen brightness, the review sample could have been set up less than optimally. I'm not sure whether that Dell is one of the models that's available in retail outlets too but if it is, you could always pop into a shop and examine one in the flesh before clicking the buy it button on the Dell site.

That's a damned good price and I would have it at that.


I believe that the HP wouldn't come with an OEM windows disc but the Dell does. I just asked the question.

Don't go for the Macafee package or the Office trial, Avast free edition will give every bit as much protection and Office Libre or Open Office are free and fully compatible with Microsoft products and established output formats.

[zipgun]

You suggested "dell "last night so i looked... and found this morning! I'm thinking its a better bet too . Buy it in argos, and its 450 and only 500gb ,quiet a bit cheaper direct

[JPB]

Yes, and Argos can be a bad place to buy a computer from if that computer should need warranty attention at some time. If I had a pound for every tale of woe I hear that involves Argos and poor after sales service on laptops, I'd have enough for a good takeaway meal and the wine to go with it!

That Dell is a very decent buy, IMHO, and future upgrades are always easy and cost effective with Dell stuff, in the case of that machine it will run an i5 and some i7s if the time comes to look into processor swapping. It will also take up to 16GB of RAM so it's future prospects are good. Depending upon how much battery time it will be expected to provide, the 6 cell upgrade may be worth considering but the supplied battery is slimmer and should still give a solid 3 hours of use in Windows.

I think you'll find it satisfactory.

[zipgun]

Thanks very much , much stress over . The tesco 5.99 "Value" Kettle's busted now..What should replace it wit......

[TerryG]

Why does it matter if you get a recovery disc or not? Download the OEM one from Microsoft (for windows 8 you have to enter your serial number). Then either stick it on a USB stick or if you are old-school, burn it to DVD.

[JPB]

It matters when you come to sell the machine on a few years later and the buyer's isn't the name on the paperwork, plus it's always possible that a machine could fall over and need to be recovered at some random time. Having the means of doing that included in the box would save your having to find a source later, bearing in mind that you couldn't download a suitable one from a different machine. Only when that download is taken from the machine that matches the key will it instantly register itself and not take you through the whole telephone process which is annoying and time consuming.

Lookie there! a whole post with no trace of my inbuilt anti-Microsoft sentiment contained in it.

Thanks very much , much stress over . The tesco 5.99 "Value" Kettle's busted now..What should replace it wit......

An Asda one, they're only a fiver!

[mr rusty]

Do dells still come with that 'smart' dreadful battery/charger combination? Check before you buy- we have a dell latitude at home with a battery which won't charge........the 'fix' is to flash the bios from the dell website, which it won't do because it needs at least 10% of battery, which of course it hasn't got and it won't recognise a fully charged spare because the bios won't flash...grrrrrrrr. This was a free ex work machine so it's just run on the mains all the time now but had I paid money for it I'd have been most unhappy! Check on the web-it's a common dell curse, expensive to fix, ok if it happens within warranty but if its out of warranty you're on your own.

[TerryG]

All (branded) laptops have smart-ish chargers. They have a 3rd pin which reports to the laptop how many watts the charger can supply so it charges the battery appropriately. If you connect a cheapo charger without the 3rd pin, your battery doesn't charge.
I have to hold a stock of chargers at work as the staff that work out and about lose so many of them it is ridiculous. Before I started they had a fight with maplin over one of their after market chargers made a laptop catch fire.

Historically, I have had a couple of laptops with their charge circuit burn out preventing the battery from charging at all but most common are that laptops recognise when the battery is not performing appropriately so don't try and charge / run from them any more. Old kit doesn't detect things like that so will run until the battery is not supplying sufficient wattage for them to run but modern kit is more sensitive to voltage fluctuations so requires more protecting.

If you order an HP laptop without recovery media, you can run the recovery application that comes built in to burn it but anybody running a machine with all the factory rubbish installed will find it slower than the person who has dumped it all and installed a clean version of Windows.

[JPB]

Do dells still come with that 'smart' dreadful battery/charger combination? Check before you buy- we have a dell latitude at home with a battery which won't charge........the 'fix' is to flash the bios from the dell website, which it won't do because it needs at least 10% of battery, which of course it hasn't got and it won't recognise a fully charged spare because the bios won't flash...grrrrrrrr. This was a free ex work machine so it's just run on the mains all the time now but had I paid money for it I'd have been most unhappy! Check on the web-it's a common dell curse, expensive to fix, ok if it happens within warranty but if its out of warranty you're on your own.

That's one of the other problems with the internet! We never get to hear about the vast majority of machines that don't do this since that's not newsworthy. Between three sites and over 2,800 students we've only had that happen twice and these were both machines in use by dpeartments whose tech buyer believed that the cheap battery from the China-based eBay seller was the best buy! This machine is on its original battery and that still has between 80 and 90+ percent of its capacity at 100% charge after its years of mixed use around six hours per day on average. The battery specified is a reasonable £40 to replace so how they thought that it was worth buying a machine sensed one without the ath alf the pruice is beyond me. One of the other great advantages of Dells from the introduction of the A05 firmware (current is A06 since late 2010) is that the bios has a full GUI with mouse and USB being available to use and is a doddle for even newcomers to flash from a pendrive during boot, though I'd be thefi rst to admit that flashing the firmware isn't always a good plan if there's nothing wrong with the stock setup, the exception there being unrelated to the OP's search for a conventional laptop.



That one showed a maximum of 94% on a couple of occasions and it still does a good 3 hours with screen brightness at 70%, I have a spurious battery that does for times when I have to take this machine on my work-related visits as that - high capacity - one does 5 hours and swapping between them never causes the problem with the chargers (mains and car) that some reported, so makes this machine almost as practical for outdoors as the CR-48, which currently does pen-test work and runs BT5R3 or Kali (week & week about) for up to eight hours at a time. I might have been lucky with the larger battery as it's not a Dell branded one but it was made by Onkyo, the ones that cause the trouble are invariably cheapies that can be identified by their lack of weight and carelessly copied, often misspelt big brand logo.