Intel inside: Six of the best affordable PC laptops The continued stagnation of the PC market is bad news for manufacturers, but good news for anyone who needs an affordable new laptop. Manufacturers are having to offer great value in order to attract buyers, and this means that you can now get some really attractive laptops that'll do the business for a good few years in the £ …
Affordable - as in affordable housing?
I misread it as meaning budget laptops and was expecting stuff in the £150-£250 range. There's good stuff there that will do general purpose computing adequately. Gaming or HD graphics is quite different - and, I assume still a niche market for the major manufacturers.
I remember when entry level laptops were 2 grand a throw (that was real money not todays devalued edition). Nevertheless I haven't paid this sort of money for years and I still have many machines over five years old still performing adequately. Just make sure they aren't trying to run Vista ;-)
Sorry if I'm boring people with the repetition, but you can get best of both worlds --- my son has an 16GB i7 ThinkPad from ebay -- cheap and hard-to-break. It has a small SSD dual booting Linux and Win7, and the content goes on a 1TB Hybrid HDD in a CD slot caddy. All that cost under £350.
For £100 he got a Village Instruments eGPU box and put a £150 desktop GPU card in it. Now he has a boring and not particularly thief-attracting box that he can take to lectures and lug round the campus, but when he gets back to the dorm he plugs in the eGPU (via PCI-Express slot) and has a very acceptable (for < £600) gaming rig.
You can actually get the eGPU output back onto the laptop screen (although it halves the frame rate --- although we're still talking Black Ops 2 on decent settings at nearly 60fps), and the box isn't too unportable to say, take on holiday. But given that gaming benefits from other not-very-portable items (full size keyboard, room to move a mouse, larger monitors) I'm really not quite sure why the eGPU scene isn't busier ...
+1
I just choked on my coffee. My main development laptop cost 250£ when new, so did the kids machines. They ended up ~ 350-400£ _AFTER_ receiving 8 (or 16 in my case) G RAM and a top of the line hybrid drive. All of that with very decent graphics which can push out passable FPS in most games.
Ooops... Sorry... Forgot. IDIOT OUTSIDE, AKA Intel inside. Missed the message there - all of mine are AMD with APUs (E series on the oldest one, A4s on the newer ones).
As much as I'm an AMD fan I wouldn't touch an AMD laptop. Not the range and the specs are usually awful for the price. Sure the APUs are fine (avoid the E series CPUs at all costs) but the rest of the kit is poor usually.
You get the feeling that the OEMs begrudgingly push out AMD equipped laptops.
As for AMD desktops...well you have to roll your own on those.
Reasonable spec?
Have you tried using one out of the box...like a normal user?
Painful! I get them brought to me fresh out of the box by people that bought them saying "Its really slow!" wanting me to make them usable.
Well there is a cost to that...
£199 + 4GB more ram + 120 GB SSD - cost for someone to fit/transfer all that = cost of a decent laptop in the first place. Plus it will still have the same crappy E1 CPU in it...
New Laptop - Don't spend less than £400.00.
the specs are usually awful for the price
You have failed to read the spec correctly.
OEMs with HP being the biggest offender deliberately announce bogus max RAM and other upgradeability figures for AMD so it looks worse than Intel. AMD APUs are limited in their memory capacity _ONLY_ by slot numbers and maximum DIMM size. This is different from Intel where the memory limit is hard and you cannot just throw bigger DIMMs in as they become available. So you should ignore the market positioning drivel and pay attention solely to slot numbers and slot physical dimensions (for disks).
Example in hand - my current fleet (in reverse chronological order):
HP TouchSmart, purchase price 229, spec - 2/4G RAM, real (not HP spec) upgradeability - up to 8G RAM.
HP 255, purchase price 260 (because of one lid scratch, usually 290) - spec 6G, real (not HP spec) upgredeability - up to 16G
Vaio VPCYB3V1E, purchase price 230, spec 4G RAM, real (not Sony spec) upgrdeability - 16G RAM.
If the next density DDR-3 SODIMMs become available, all of these should be able to take 'em, eat them and smile (to 16G or 32G respectively). Throw in a decent flash or hybrid drive and you have a machine that will run circles around anything Intel based under 800.
At that price £500 / £600 range, big brand names just take the p*ss though. I would trust Dell / HP / Lenovo / Toshiba / Acer, etc.. a lot more if they were providing 2 memory banks in dual channel and even an 128GB to180GB SSD instead of the typical 1x4GB single channel RAM + 5400rpm SATA disks one can find on these models. But no... One actually has to bump the budget by £200-£300 with these guys to even come close to these specs. There is no point in loading laptops with newer processors like Broadwell Core i5/i7 or Core M if the other underlying components are so poorly chosen or configured.
It certainly seems so - none of these laptops bar the Tosh offer anything better than 768 vertical pixels? Why is *anything* at any price range offering less than HD in this day and age?
And I agree with Stuart - these are not 'budget' devices. Budget is Chromebook prices - two to three hundred quid.
MSFT (you know, that cartel with the strangle-hold on the PC industry) is still floundering around with "legacy" application support for high density displays.
Did finally get round to bludgeoning IE into shape (ish) a year or two ago... So can't be too far away... Maybe 2025?
In the meantime, perhaps you should consider a Chromebook or iThingy?
"MSFT (you know, that cartel with the strangle-hold on the PC industry) is still floundering around with "legacy" application support for high density displays."
Wtf does that actually mean?
What additional *support* is needed for high density displays that isn't already there?
I still have a rather neat Compaq Armada E500 laptop from the Windows 98SE/2000 era, still working.
It has a 15inch 1600x1200 built in LCD (32bit colour).
This from well over a decade ago (Pentium III era).
Really, why would anybody pay half decent money for something with only 768 pixels vertical?
"Wtf does that actually mean?"
THAT --> "It has a 15inch 1600x1200 built in LCD (32bit colour)."
WOW!!!!one ~120ppi
No shit!
Hardly Retina/Pixel is it?
EXACTLY THAT --> "This from well over a decade ago (Pentium III era)."
Stagnation. They've more than heard of it.
""It has a 15inch 1600x1200 built in LCD (32bit colour)."
WOW!!!!one ~120ppi
No shit!
Hardly Retina/Pixel is it?"
You reckon? Shall we have a look?
A proper current comparison might be the MacBook Pro with Retina display (2560x1600 on the 13", 2880x1800 on the 15"), which the priesthood of the Church of Jobs describe as "superb".
So yes, stagnation is a pretty good word for it: 1200 vertical pixels in a 15" 4:3 Compaq a decade ago, 1800 vertical pixels in 15" 16:10 this year. Marvellous.
It was a matt screen too. They seem to have fallen out of favour for some reason.
Bring back 640 x 480 displays, why not. Hey if you make it small enough you can even call it RetinaVGA.
And I'd still like to know what "software support" is needed to support all these extra pixels. Input welcome.
Please stop reviewing anything with a 1366x768 screen. Your IT wise readers are probably sick to the back teeth withe hearing about screen resolutions that were old news three years ago.
Just tell the makers, 'sorry but that bit of kit won't interest out readers'.
Now if you were to review a laptop with a 4K or 5K capable display then....
Or ones that can take 32Gb of RAM and more than 1TB of HDD/SSD (for all those VM's).
Me too. There's no way I would pay £500 - £600 for something with only 1366x768 resolution. I recently bought an HP8540w EliteBook with a 1920x1080 screen and 8 GB RAM second-hand for £400; that's pretty much my minimum spec. Only problem is that the heat-sink really needs replacing (deterioration of heat-pipe action), but that's not difficult with HP and is par for the course with older laptops.
Been looking at them for a while now. They will probably get my business next year when I replace my 6 year old Dell. That exact model.
Nice that you can order kit without parts to keep the cost down. I don't need an OS/RAM or SSD (got them already) so I can bump up the spec elsewhere.
Been looking for 2 weeks now for something with decent processor, 15/17" Full HD screen and SSD boot drive for £700-900 These have come the closest with the advantage I do not have to get Windows and can go with Mint for £750 including 2 x 256GB SSDs
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/cosmosIII-LE/
I work for a small IT consulting company where we're on the move a lot and use our laptops as our main work machines. Last time we changed laptops, we all went for 13" ultrabooks (and away from our old, larger and heavier ThinkPads, EliteBooks etc.). Well, it's been a while since than and half the guys are pretty sure they want something larger the next time around (in two cases, they reverted to carrying around their old 17" beasts). The 15" 1366x768 screens are pretty disgusting, though.
BTW, a roundup of mobile workstations that can take 32GB of RAM, but aren't gaming machines that would look out of place at work or at a meeting would be a nice idea.
Well there are old people or others with vision defects where an 11" retina screen is utterly a waste of money.
A lot of folk use a laptop as a semi-permanent thing because its smaller than desktop + monitor and can be tided away fairly easily. For them a 15" or 17" screen is just so much nicer to work on, and the size and weight are not the same issue as those always travelling with it.
...but does anyone make trackpads with physical buttons any more? I tried to use one o' thems "no buttons, we'll just let the software figure it out if you meant to right click or not" trackpads but find them utterly unpredictable, and there seemed to be no way to get middle-button chording to work...
Seems my requirements are nothing like the previous posters. 15" isn't too small, I want a 17". The PC Specialist configurator can't build a laptop to match a Dell Inspiron 17-5000 for the same price and with the 17" Dell at least you get a 1600x900 display. All for £499, same as the 15" on here, just dropping the i7 to an i5.
Agree these aren't budget laptops, but they are in my budget range.
Last June I bought an HP Envy 15t j100 quad edition, Core i7-4700MQ quad core, 8GB RAM, 25GB Boost SSD, 1TB HDD, 802.11ac, Intel HD4600. For $710, about 460 GBP. Knocks the socks off any of these offerings. Apart from the finish coming off the trackpad due to hours of use per day, a happy purchaser.
Am I the only one who looks at these and sees a pile of cheap looking laptops with nasty low-res glossy screens and who then thinks "No wonder people aren't buying new laptops"?
I really don't see why the laptop manufacturers find it so difficult. Cut the crap screens (especially the appalling 1366x768 resolution) and provide some with nice resolution matte displays. Also, stop using 16:9 on everything and add a bit of variety. Plenty of cheap tablets provide 16:10 or 3:2 screens, as do some Macbooks, Surface Pro 3, Google Pixel etc. So why are they not an option in any proper laptops?
Secondly quit with the whole "bigger is better" for trackpads. My wife leaves the trackpad on her laptop almost permanently disabled because it's so big it interferes with typing too much. The touchpad on that HP Envy is just ridiculous. There's no palm rests left any more! Oh, and put the proper buttons back. They may not look as sleek, but they improve usability tenfold.
Lastly, do a bit of work into making a good keyboard as well. One with some real travel to the keys and good tactile feedback. Even Lenovo (usually famed for their keyboards) are failing here by adding multimedia buttons in place of function keys and generally diluting aspects of it as well.
Fact is, modern laptops have crap screens, generally disappointing keyboards, stupid trackpads and mostly feel cheap and unpleasant. Is it any wonder that I'm therefore keeping hold of my upgraded 2010 Thinkpad X201? 16:10 matte screen, excellent keyboard, decent trackpad and solid build quality. Try building a genuinely good laptop and you might be surprised how many people may actually want to buy it...
Depends on what you mean by "good" it seems. If you gauge good as function over form then laptop buying is becoming increasingly worrying and depressing. I paid through the nose for my completely un-sexy Elitebook 2170P (crummy 1366x768 screen [but at least it's matte], mediocre battery life) because the keyboard was the best I'd ever typed on on a laptop and the trackpad (with buttons!) and clit mouse (with more buttons!) were both bloody fantastic. Everything I've tried in the last two years, even in the "How Much?!" price bracket seems to be on a permanent downward slide as far as workstation-esque features are concerned. Apart from 1366x768 screen which still appear to be at 110% of market penetration, particularly in the "business" segment for some reason. Because... business people never need more than a few lines on screen at a time I guess?
4GB of RAM is also apparently an acceptable amount for even high-end models to have. If you pick on of those laptops you can shave with but can't lean your elbow on, you can't even upgrade it. Many of the ultrabooks top out at 8GB of RAM which is, in my worldview at least, completely miniscule. OS and various utility programs will easily swallow 2GB by themselves on a fresh boot these days. 8GB gets you to running an OS, a web browser and maybe half a VM smoothly.
Lenovo are becoming especially crap here. Their keyboards are starting to resemble an amateurish tribute to the ZX spectrum. Hopefully Dell will come out with a decent workhorse at some point, I'd happily pay twice the price for an XPS 13 if it came with mouse buttons and upgradeable RAM.
Actually - thumbs up for E_nigma's suggestion of a roundup for professional mobile workstations that El Reg's readership might appreciate rather than stuff they might buy for their friends and family...
</snob>
Dell are an interesting one. The screens on all their laptops are pretty dreadful, but a number of the business oriented ones do have fairly decent keyboards and trackpads. My work machine is a Latitude E6430. Nice keyboard, very good trackpad (with buttons - although the later driver stupidly reverses the scroll direction until you tweak the registry), and decent build quality too. The only thing that really lets is down is the awful 1366x768 screen with a bezel that's so fat you could park a car at each side of it. They'll happily take 16GB of RAM, which is nice.
Meanwhile, the missus has a Samsung Series 9. Lovely build quality, fairly nice 1600x900 matte screen, but the keyboard is only average and the touchpad is too big and it's annoying to use due to the lack of buttons. Soldered 4GB of RAM too which is a pity.
I just find it disappointing that laptop manufacturers keep on pumping out poor quality kit all the time, then wondering why it's not selling that well. I can honestly say over the last few years that I've not seen a single laptop out there that manages to combine a good screen with a decent keyboard, good trackpad and decent build quality. To my mind, these are the basics. It's also the reason why I've not bought one.
It's the little red thing right between the "G", "H" and "B".
I know, I know... you can't find it on your keyboard. Lots of guys have that problem so they just start mashing on the touchpad instead. Perhaps you could find a helpful video on the Internet to show you what you're missing out on.
Agree on all points. Build quality seems to have stagnated while design fads seem to have taken over. Bendy/touchy screens to fit the Windows 8.x / tablet paradigm, awful trackpads, keyboards with customized layouts... Anything that will impair productivity yet provide limited benefits to the user. It's hard to feel sorry for big OEM when they release such disappointing machines on the market then complain that nobody wants to buy them.
Anytime you have to sell to the general public in a showroom, the design goes crazy. Everything is about curb appeal, so glitzy but useless keyboards rule and shiny screens are a must. I'm surprised they haven't started adding fins already.
Thank Heaven for smartphones and pads. They are soaking up the pleb demand for cool ways to swap inanities and selfies. Eventually the pleb market for laptops will collapse and (hopefully) some manufacturers will start producing laptops that are useful for something other than checking your reflection.
They're not all bad. Okay, that Acer keyboard looks as though ergonomic design is something that happens to other people, but I for one started using nipple-nav on Thinkpads a few years ago, and haven't looked back.
The downside is I now find touchpads utterly intolerable, but that's just one man's opinion.
So what say ye? A 15 inch laptop (or 17 inch with a numeric keypad), i5, 2400x1800 (4x3 aspect ratio) matte screen, 8gig ram (upgradable to 32), 256gig SSD*, a decent, backlit keyboard** and good trackpad?
Any objections? I suspect if such laptops were available to the Reg commentards (for a less than utterly ridiculous price) they'd sell like hotcakes and yet nobody makes em.
* Could always do with more but I wouldn't want less.
** Costs about $10 extra and is useful on odd occasions.
Would pay a premium for a nice, light 13" that can take a lot of memory and docks nicely. Not too fussed about screen resolution as it's going to be docked most of the time, but I'd rather shave 500g off for when I do have to lug it around.
No? Looks like I'll be sticking with Apple…
I had a Samsung 535U3C. It was certainly powerful but the heat and battery life were intolerable. The screen was shit as well. Started fading in one corner after a month. Suspiciously close to the epicentre of the heat.
Also, is it just me or do AMD based laptops always come with massive powerbricks?
Lastly, ive yet to find an AMD laptop with an excellent screen.
I agree with an earlier post...AMD stuff seems to get shunned by OEMs. Ive never seen a flagship AMD laptop. Its usually the poor mans version of the Intel model. Always with some sort of catch.
In the days when I was strapped for cash I was an AMD fanboy but in recent years ive come to understand why Intel charge that little bit more.
Ita not simply the power of the device that matters.
AMD is like the American muscle car of computing.
Raw power is there but sub standard everywhere else.
For a short drag race through the benchmarks its awesome but when you put it through a real world test its a bit lacklustre.
Indeed, I was looking on Ebuyer a few months ago for AMD laptops. The best one I could find then was a HP with 4GB of ram, a 5400RPM HDD and a 1366x768 screen.
Yours for nearly £1000.
Laugh? I nearly shat!
The best A10 one on there now is a 4GB/500GB HDD/1366x768 13" model for £815.00.
There seems to be no middle ground/ultrabook quality level with AMD. Cheap junk or overpriced junk is all you get.
I wish it were different. I doubt we'll be seeing much change with the new AMD mobile chips either.
instead of a trackpad it only has one of those clumsy nipple-pointers
"Clumsy"? Bite your tongue. Isometric pointers might not be to everyone's taste, but that doesn't make them clumsy.
I cannot abide trackpads, but I don't go around claiming they're a poor design.
Ah, well. Looks like the Reg has found another reviewer who can't see past his own prejudices and thus can be safely ignored.
I have one and while it's a nice concept, the execution of that concept sucks monkey balls. It's 1. very bendy chassis, 2. power cord in a bad place, which makes 3. the touchpad too far left, so when it's say... in your lap, the positioning of said touchpad activates the motherfudging charms bar more than half the flipping time when casually dinking around the net..
I miss my HP 8440p.*
*miss it so much I'm buying another one Friday.
Why a 2015 laptop with oodles of ram and an i5 processor just is only good enough to run office and light web browsing is beyond me. IT hacks have been saying that about 'entry level' machines for 15 years. So either performance has not improved over that time or......
Plus these are not entry level machines at those prices, in spite of the crap specifications.
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