Good value Laptop?

[kiwicon]

good call....

if you are going to just give it to the kids for youtube vids etc then just give it a fresh install of vista.. just pull the drivers folder from it first..

C:\Program Files\TOSHIBA\TOSAPINS\

 

[greenacc]

Yeah i'll probably enlist some help from a mate for the upgrade and i'll help him with his Holden LOL!
Think it needs a bit more work than just a reload of Vista, hopefully it's not the end of processor or mother board that we're seeing already.

Funny this old thing has 2 hard drive slots so you could build a real beast out of it if you really wanted too.

 

[greenacc]

Can anyone recommend a better laptop than this for the price?
Officeworks sell this one. There doesn't seem to be anything better around even at the other places 'sales'.
Even though it's EOFY they all sem to be riding on the Govco tax break this year so aren't really discounting anything.
BAAH can't insert an image from phone but it's a HP-AC115TU 15.6"
1Tb 8Gb ?

 

[kiwicon]

Screen: 15.6-inch diagonal HD BrightView WLED-backlit Display (1366x768) good screen esp with brightview - only upgrade would be anti glare
• Processor: 5th gen Intel® Core™ i5 Processor 5200U (2.2GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) Should be OK from what you said you use it for - Intel are upto Gen 6 now, and Gen 7 maybe late 2016 early 2017
• RAM: 8GB DDR3L-1600 SDRAM (1 DIMM) Again 8GB should be enough, with only 1 dimm slot if you choose to upgrade to 16GB then your 8gb is chuck away
• Storage: 1TB 5400RPM Hard Disk Drive This is what will bottle neck the laptop - maybe look at a solid state drive and chuck this into an external enclosure for storage
• Graphics: Intel® HD Graphics 5500 this will be shared so your 8GB memory isn't 8Gb now
• Operating System: Windows 10 no choice really
• Connection: Wi-Fi 802.11 (b,g,n) / BT4.0 / USB3.0 / 2 x USB2.0 / HDMI / RJ-45 / 3.5mm These are pretty norm now aday's - other than AC wifi
• Dimensions: 24.3 (H) x 384.3 (W) x 254.6 mm (D), 2.19Kg again normal
• Warranty: 1/1/0 so 1yr parts, 1year labour 0yr on-site so you will need to take to service centre..upto 3yr sould be SWA
• Webcam: HP TrueVision HD Webcam with integrated digital microphone Id presume 720p webcam - could be wrong..
• Extra: SuperMulti DVD burner this is a bonus, in a year or two you wont even see a DVD ROM, their fazing them out..

Food for thought..

 

[greenacc]

Hi, Thanks for the detailed reply that's exactly the kind of stuff I wouldn't have a clue about.
So by the sound of it the Hard drive is the biggest issue. When would this bottleneck become obvious? I know startup is slower with a HDD but would I notice it when surfing the net and doing simple things like that ? I assume it could be upgraded to an SSD later if we wanted to boost it?

 

[kiwicon]

for surfing the net etc it will be fine, if you were doing spreadsheets / databases / report writing / CAD work etc then it would need to be upgraded...

And yes you can upgrade to a solid state drive later if wanted.. You'd only need a small SSD - say 256GB - which arn't that badly priced if you were to keep all your photos / video's / pirated movies on an external..

 

[greenacc]

Sweet, but as for HDD's are there different speeds or are they all slow ? Is this a particularly slow one?

 

[kiwicon]

Yes this is particularly slow.. the faster the disk spins, the faster it can read/write to the disk. 5400RPM is the slowest.. 7200RPM is the minimum a desktop PC uses.. then there is 10K and 15K drives - these are mainly seen in servers, pre SSD.

faster RPM's = lower latency
SSD = extremely low latency and faster transfer rates as there is no spinning platter.

 

[CoffeeMonster]

And no mechanical arm swinging around to read the data. It can read or write to anywhere on the drive at any time. So fast, so worth.