I am coming up to my 18th birthday on the 30th April, and will be getting a laptop as one of my presents, I am looking at spending around the £400 mark (US$800), I have narrowed my choice down to two laptops, with me its all about how something looks that makes my decision, these two laptops both look good and have good features to match for the price.
Please give me your opinions, and if you own one please tell me about them and your experiences. Now lets go into detail about them:
Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi
Acer’s look good, I havent used them before but have seen them, they seem to be small and fairly reliable, this model comes with:
AMD Turion 64 2Ghz Processor
512MB RAM (I can upgrade this to 1GB for £25)
60GB HDD + DVD-RW + 5in1 Card Reader
14.1″ TFT Windows
Vista Home Basic
This laptop costs £399.96 inc VAT from eBuyer (although it is on offer at the moment for £379). An extra £25 will bump it up to 1GB RAM which means I will have a 2GHz laptop (fast for a laptop), 1GB RAM, 60GB HARD DRIVE, DVD RW, Card Reader and Windows Vista, all for around £400.
Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V3515
I have been put off with some of the designs of FS laptops before, but this one looks great, I have looked at very high resolution images of it and I am impressed with the design, I am a firm believer that a laptop should be black and dark making the screen so much better, but with the mix of the two shades on this laptop it makes it much better, the specs arent bad either:
Intel Celeron M 430 / 1.73 GHz Processor
512MB RAM (Again another £20 – £25 will bump it up to a GB)
60GB HARD DRIVE
DVD RW
15.4″ TFT Screen
Windows XP Pro
There are advantages and disadvantages to the laptop, disadvantage is no Vista or card reader but that is easy to sort out with an external card reader, another disadvantage is that on reviews on the previous versions of these laptops, the battery life was appaling, people weren’t even getting an hour out of it when they were just word processing, now I do a lot of programming which uses Visual Studio, which is a very hardware eating application, and I do like to have music in the background, however this laptop apparently has up to 2.5 hours battery life, which is about average.
OK, advantages, a bigger screen, also it has an Intel processor, OK Celeron are the lowest in the Intel family but I prefer Intel over AMD.
Conclusion
I am still undecided about which one to get, I have a bit more time to think about it until I have to order it but if anyone has any opinions on the laptops or the companies reputation when it comes to laptops please comment. Thankyou.
Simon North
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