New Lap top, suggestions

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Gwylan

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Hard drive in the 4 year old, much used, lap top is making noises that would really make me anxious on the boat.

Sounds of metal on metal or similar.

Backed up the vital stuff to a memoory stick and looking at the future.

As a general rule, for security reasons, it does not go on the boat - we have a tablet and paper charts for that sort of stuff.
Suggestions for a lap top that will run the usual word processing, publisher or similar [biggish files being manipulated], spreadsheets and do the internet stuff.
Budget say £400 including operating system [or is that too optimistic?
 
replacing a lap top hard drive is a doddle usually - they fit into a caddy that simply unscrews. ebay will get you a hard drive cheap so why not repair the old one for a small price and take it on the boat? its value will be negligible but you can pick up wifi in marinas and even install charts from Visit My Harbour for around £25. Keep the new lap top safe and secure at home. for new laptops try Morgan Computers. they do lots of refurb deals with guarantees.
 
A second vote for the Dell Outlet - also had lots of success with them. Stuff from them is better than new sometimes as it gets an expert engineer looking over it and extra testing.

But that said I've also bought a few from www.saveonlaptops.co.uk - pick a good brand like Dell, HP, Lenovo... Not Fujitsu etc.
 
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Sounds of metal on metal certainly wont be the Hard disk. Much more likely is the cooling fan, on some laptops quite a simple replacement..
and a 4 year old laptop probably has 2 years more life in it.

but I usually advise customers £350 -£450 ish, so your budget is good.
 
Probably better to stop old machine before it becomes un recoverable?

If it's Win XP you probably will not like Windows 8...

You could buy a new machine for £200- £300 and a fresh copy of Win7, for maybe £100 which is pretty decent and user friendly. Very few business users are messing with Win8.

Most XP stuff is transferable to Win7

Win 8 is rather weird stuff in my humble opinion.
 
pagoda said:
... a fresh copy of Win7, for maybe £100 which is pretty decent and user friendly...
Click to expand...
I've got a few new Windows 7 DVDs left over from a bulk purchase. I'm selling for around £80 each on eBay, will do for £75 to forum members.

I've also got a used copy for 20% off; the PC it was on has been junked. It will work fine, but user may need to phone the automated activation line.
 
Notwithstanding the good advice about checking the fan, if it is your hard drive can I suggest getting a solid state drive.
Very little expense.
Lightning fast!
Another poster said he advises customers that laptops have 5 or 6 years in them.
This is generally true but not always the case. Get a new battery, solid state hard drive and a bit more memory and you will give your machine a new lease of life.
My experience is with schools - staff laptops.
 
stu9000 said:
Notwithstanding the good advice about checking the fan, if it is your hard drive can I suggest getting a solid state drive.
Very little expense.
Lightning fast!
Another poster said he advises customers that laptops have 5 or 6 years in them.
This is generally true but not always the case. Get a new battery, solid state hard drive and a bit more memory and you will give your machine a new lease of life.
My experience is with schools - staff laptops.
Click to expand...

When our HP Pavillion went down, I replaced with an ASUS Eee, amazing difference in power consumption particularly since I fitted a solid state drive. Also upgraded from XP to W7.

Also have an 11.9" Asus 1225B running W7. Wouldn't go back to a PC for on board use, can leave the Asus running all day it draws so little power.
 
Gwylan said:
Hard drive in the 4 year old, much used, lap top is making noises that would really make me anxious on the boat.

Sounds of metal on metal or similar.

Backed up the vital stuff to a memoory stick and looking at the future.

As a general rule, for security reasons, it does not go on the boat - we have a tablet and paper charts for that sort of stuff.
Suggestions for a lap top that will run the usual word processing, publisher or similar [biggish files being manipulated], spreadsheets and do the internet stuff.
Budget say £400 including operating system [or is that too optimistic?
Click to expand...

If it's a perfectly satisfactory machine (and reasonably modern so has an SATA controller) why not just replace the hard drive - you can download the mirror-writing software off the internet and all you then need is an external caddy (£5) and a new 1 terabyte HDD (say £90).
Then use the old HDD in the caddy for non-essential back-up. I've had noisy HDD's going for years - on Dells it usually a motherboard failure.
You'll be hard-pressed to get a good, reliable business laptop for £400 - unless you go for others' cast-offs with Dell outlet or the horrors that are the HP bottom-end consumer offerings and you'd be wise to avoid buying now and being saddled with Win8.
Save your £400 to go towards a Lenovo or like. I prefer to have 8Gb or so of RAM, even in a notebook, and save on the processor.
 
stu9000 said:
Notwithstanding the good advice about checking the fan, if it is your hard drive can I suggest getting a solid state drive.
Very little expense.
Lightning fast!
Another poster said he advises customers that laptops have 5 or 6 years in them.
This is generally true but not always the case. Get a new battery, solid state hard drive and a bit more memory and you will give your machine a new lease of life.
My experience is with schools - staff laptops.
Click to expand...

I wonder at your concept of "very little expense" - comparable SSDs are x10 the price of an old-fashioned magnetic disk - if one buys business laptops you can expect 8-10 years out of them though the battery will probably need changing. The best way of getting a new lease of life out of a tired laptop is to use a Linux distro and dual boot. Very few 64-bit machines with XP.
Frequently all one needs to do with a noisy fan is to clean out the gunge - though replacements are pennies.
 
Gwylan said:
Hard drive in the 4 year old, much used, lap top is making noises that would really make me anxious on the boat.

Sounds of metal on metal or similar.

Backed up the vital stuff to a memoory stick and looking at the future.

As a general rule, for security reasons, it does not go on the boat - we have a tablet and paper charts for that sort of stuff.
Suggestions for a lap top that will run the usual word processing, publisher or similar [biggish files being manipulated], spreadsheets and do the internet stuff.
Budget say £400 including operating system [or is that too optimistic?
Click to expand...

£400 is easily doable for what you want. If you're manipulating biggish files then get one with at least 4GB RAM, if you can get 8GB RAM then do so and get the biggest hard disk you can afford (more RAM will be better for you than a bigger disk). CPU power is not an issue, a basic Intel i3 will do, full HD screen resolution is also not needed, make sure it has enough USB ports for your needs (USB3 ports will run USB2 and USB 1/1.1 devices ok).
 
Tam Lin said:
+1 for solid state hard drive, wow!
Click to expand...


+1 for the SSD. I added one to my old netbook and it made a big difference - quieter, cooler, lower battery consumption, starts faster [and now runs even faster after replacing Windows with Linux].
 
charles_reed said:
I wonder at your concept of "very little expense" - comparable SSDs are x10 the price of an old-fashioned magnetic disk - if one buys business laptops you can expect 8-10 years out of them
Click to expand...

AN SSD is certainly considerably more expensive per GB than a traditional drive (a quick search of amazon suggesting ~ 4x in the 512GB bracket, less difference as you go down in capacity) but how many people actually *need* 1TB of storage in their laptop? 256MB seems to be well under £100. Or there's the hybrid option at ~£70 for 1TB. Although the OP mentioned not really using it on board, some people will argue that on a bouncy boat there is a reliability advantage in them in the short and medium terms over traditional drives.

Regarding lifespan, my first two laptops I retired after 7 years after upgrading the memory as far as I could and a couple of hard drive upgrades each. The limiting factor was that people were writing more bloated software for newer whizzier computers. At that point I couldn't *give* them away to charities (too old/low spec despite having been high-end toughbooks when purchased). I don't play games or have significant computing needs either, and changing to linux was not an option as that's actually what I always did the day I got the thing home. Changing to FreeBSD perhaps :-).

To the OP, although changing hard drives is often one of the simpler tasks with a laptop (where the "hard drive isn't soldered to the motherboard as with the new breed of Apples), manufacturers don't make it as easy as they used to. Sometimes popping the body open can be fiddly. Sometimes there are multiple little film ribbons to be removed. If the hard drive bay is not trivially accessible, try googling your laptop and "hard drive replacement" to see if there are helpful youtube videos etc. Lay out all the screws in a logical order and have a decent spudger handy :-)

Fan maintenance also often easy and earns you many brownie points from friends whose MacBooks have been driving them nuts for months.

Edit: other complicating factors: drive height: Not always the same. Fortunately if the drive is screwed into a caddy this shouldn't be a problem if the newer drive is slimmer than the old one. Older drives tended to be 9.5mm. newer ones, especially SSDs, should be slimmer. Also note that older operating systems weren't so good at dealing with SSDs. Someone who knows more about windows can probably comment more but a quick search suggests TRIM only supported from Windows 7
 
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[Then use the old HDD in the caddy for non-essential back-up. [/QUOTE]
What's the point of non-essential back-up? If it's non-essential, delete it.
 
Gwylan said:
Hard drive in the 4 year old, much used, lap top is making noises that would really make me anxious on the boat.

Sounds of metal on metal or similar.

Backed up the vital stuff to a memoory stick and looking at the future.

As a general rule, for security reasons, it does not go on the boat - we have a tablet and paper charts for that sort of stuff.
Suggestions for a lap top that will run the usual word processing, publisher or similar [biggish files being manipulated], spreadsheets and do the internet stuff.
Budget say £400 including operating system [or is that too optimistic?
Click to expand...

I will never ever buy a new laptop again, I found a great company in Cardiff We Will Fix Your PC, he sells laptops as well as repairs, a very genuine guy, amazing support if you need it. I am just a satisfied customer of his.
In addition he has a repair service for iphones to.
 
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