Birthday Present - Im lost!

Hi guys,

Its my stepdads birthday on the 14th and im trying to find a laptop for around the £500 mark. It is to replace his sony vaio which still runs windows 2000 !

The laptop will be used predominatly for internet access with the odd thing like word processing and opening attachments. This means it can be quite underpowered, but it would be nice to have a high quality laptop for this price.

Things im after:

* 14-16" screen
* Built in wifi
* High quality
* Thin as possible.

Ive seen some in PC world and Currys today just to get an idea of whats out there, but nothing took my fancy. Can you please help me out?

I would look at the Dell Studio 15 which is on a special at the moment, its a nice bit of with a decent build at reasonable prices imho.
There are a lot of laptops around the £300-500 prices in the UK have a really poor build quality with a feel that they were made in a sweat shop imho.

PC World I also particularly dislike as they employ people who do not know the products or understand them, they will also do anything they can to get out of supporting a product, I know this from bitter personal experience.

I ended up with a Dell XPS after looking at laptops myself, im naturally a Dell hater based on my past experience of their build quality however I must admit to being impressed with the latest range of products, they have a decent build quality. Its good to see a company taking steps to improve product quality and for that they should be commended

Thank you for the reply. I also hate PC world with a passion. Today I was told a bundle of lies including:

1. I need at least a dual core machine for internet browsing.
2. The reason for my poor wireless signal was because I didnt have enough RAM.
3. The harddrives in the Acer are the fastest money can buy!

I dont know why I bother going in there. Ill look at the Dell's - thank you.

Yep I do like the Dell laptops as well, I also think that acer laptops do have some good performance in them for their price, have a look at some of them.

PC World have lied to me many of times, I went in once browsing at the graphics cards they had in and got told that I would be able to play crysis at "superb" framerates on a 8600GT? Do they get trained at all.......

Brunel07 said:

...2. The reason for my poor wireless signal was because I didnt have enough RAM...

Click to expand...

Oh my god. Did you hit the sales person? I hope so

My mum had the msa.exe virus, which if was a problem when it first came out, but not now its easy to remove! So I was going to fix it for her but she needed it done same day as she needs the laptop for uni!

She took it to pc world £20 to remove the virus, and an extra £40 for more memory, which when I asked her she said it was 4gb of ram they put in but she was unsure!

So surely pc world should be explaining to customers exactly what they are doing with pcs, because if a customer doesnt understand whats happening then its pc worlds fault! p.s cant wait to visit her and see exactly whats in the pc as it has a 1.7ghz celeron, so pretty sure that wont support 4gb ram!

My first port of call for a laptop in the uk would be ebuyer, you cant fault there service!

PC World and Currys would be my last port of call for a laptop!