Budget laptops

[Sockstuff]

Hi guys,

I'm looking to buy the girlfriend a cheap laptop which would mainly be used for browsing and the occasional bit World of Warcraft.

There seems to be a massive choice in sub £400 laptops these days and I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations or advice?

I've never bought a laptop before myself so don't really know the pros and cons of each brand.

Cheers Guys.

 

[Killswitch]

Hi guys,

I'm looking to buy the girlfriend a cheap laptop which would mainly be used for browsing and the occasional bit World of Warcraft.

There seems to be a massive choice in sub £400 laptops these days and I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations or advice?

I've never bought a laptop before myself so don't really know the pros and cons of each brand.

Cheers Guys.

Some interesting advice/links here;

Budget laptop for WOW. Need tips!!

Laptops are generally bad for games and ones that are good for games tend to be expensive. If it has to be a laptop and it has to be under £400 then don't expect to be raiding or doing much in the capital cities!

If you're brave, you could hit up Ebay...my step-dad plays WoW on a laptop and his last couple of upgrades have been Dell laptops off ebay. Maybe something like;

Dell XPS M1530 15" Laptop T6600,3GB,nVidia 8600M,DV,RED | eBay

or

MSI Gaming, Intel-i3, Nvidia 1GB, 4GB RAM, Blu-ray | eBay

 

[Syri]

For a budget gaming machine, I'd say to go AMD. You'll find it hard to find a budget intel model with a decent GPU, whereas AMD use Radeon chips in all of theirs. They might not be the best performing models, but they'll all beat the pants off intel's graphics chips.

 

[Zenith.UK]

Good
Fast
Cheap

Pick 2.

If it's Good and Fast, it isn't Cheap.
If it's Good and Cheap, it isn't Fast.
If it's Fast and Cheap, it isn't Good.

 

[MYstIC G]

Rather than start a new thread anyone got any opinions on this lot:

Fantastic deals as seen on TV | PC World

 

[Syri]

Advent, avoid them like the plague. They're Dixons own brand, and they're the cheapest, least reliable pieces of garbage I ever had the displeasure of working with. When I was on the phones for PC World, the majority of calls were about advents.
I've had no issues with HP, and Compaq since they became fully integrated with HP. I've heard the AMD V series is seriously underpowered though, so I'd avoid them myself. I'm not sure how well the current generation celerons hold out, but I'd guess not as well as a similarly priced dual core AMD, especially if you factor in the graphics power.
Certainly looks like there's some decent machines among them though, and even the celerons could be decent, considering the price, if you're not after anything more than something for office work, browsing and video playback.