Laptops, any brands to look at or avoid?

[boyse7en]

My girlfriend's Laptop is not behaving itself. Its a Lenovo about 3 years old, and it just takes forever (i.e. 20 mins) to boot up, randomly adds or removes desktop icons, forgets log in details and a myriad of another annoying stuff.

So, looking at replacing with another Windows Laptop but not sure what to look for spec-wise (I'm mac based. Unfortunately the laptop has to Windows to run a piece of accounting software)

It will be mainly used for her book-keeping business. So she runs Sage on it, plus spreadsheets in Office, emails and web browsing, and thats about it.
Budget is up to £400. Will I be able to get something that will do the job for that?

[zedx19]

Sounds like it just needs Windows reinstalling on it, nothing wrong with the hardware. Get the recovery disc out and give that a whirl, costs nothing and you'll probably find it'll work fine after that again for a while.

[GlenMH]

sounds like the hard drive is going kaput. Make sure you have a backup of all the important stuff on there TODAY!

[ArsE92]

...and then put an SSD in and it'll feel like new.

[fluffnik]

GlenMH said:

sounds like the hard drive is going kaput. Make sure you have a backup of all the important stuff on there TODAY!

Exactly my thoughts, Lenovo kit is generally pretty solid.

[14-7]

ArsE92 said:

...and then put an SSD in and it'll feel like new.

This. Did it to my 6 year old laptop 2 years ago and it still flies along. Boots up to usable Windows 10 in 8 seconds.

[Funk]

14-7 said:

ArsE92 said:

...and then put an SSD in and it'll feel like new.

This. Did it to my 6 year old laptop 2 years ago and it still flies along. Boots up to usable Windows 10 in 8 seconds.

Yep. Best £80-100 you can spend.

[daemon]

14-7 said:

ArsE92 said:

...and then put an SSD in and it'll feel like new.

This. Did it to my 6 year old laptop 2 years ago and it still flies along. Boots up to usable Windows 10 in 8 seconds.

+1

One of my laptops is 9 years old and running Win10 on an SSD. Flies along.

[daemon]

Funk said:

14-7 said:

ArsE92 said:

...and then put an SSD in and it'll feel like new.

This. Did it to my 6 year old laptop 2 years ago and it still flies along. Boots up to usable Windows 10 in 8 seconds.

Yep. Best £80-100 you can spend.

Even less. £59 will buy you a Kingston or Sandisk 240GB SSD from Amazon. I've seen 240GB decent branded drives for under £50 too.

[Funk]

daemon said:

Funk said:

14-7 said:

ArsE92 said:

...and then put an SSD in and it'll feel like new.

This. Did it to my 6 year old laptop 2 years ago and it still flies along. Boots up to usable Windows 10 in 8 seconds.

Yep. Best £80-100 you can spend.

Even less. £59 will buy you a Kingston or Sandisk 240GB SSD from Amazon. I've seen 240GB decent branded drives for under £50 too.

True, although I'd always go for Samsung out of personal choice and 250Gb is the minimum I'd get away with. A 250Gb Samsung Evo 850 was about £80 on Ebuyer last time I looked.

[souper]

I have a Lenovo z580 i5, & boy what a pile of pooh it is/was.

Be very aware that Lenovo white-listed the parts that can be changed or swapped in/out.

This means if the part is not on the Burnt in Bios list and does not have a Lenovo FRU number even if the part is the exact same part if the FRU number is missing that part will be rejected.

I was lucky with swapping the hard drive to a SSD, but the appalling dual wifi/bluetooth card was terrible down to single digit speeds.

Trouble is Lenovo only had 4 wifi cards on the approved list all rubbish and out of date. The Bios/Uefi is locked down and the ability to swap was non existent, to fit a late model Intel AC wifi card mean't replacing the Bios with a hacked modded one, this involved using tools that are often disguised as virus's. Even when you do get the correct software my virus scanners are screaming your loading a virus.

Backing up the original Bios was non straight forward it took a lot of googling (days) and trial error to get the correct working links and Bios before I could finally use my laptop how a once £500+ laptop should run.

Not only Lenovo white-list laptop hardware, before you start buying upgraded parts make sure your laptop is not white-listed and if it is make sure you can get the correct tools Bios to enable success.

[wiggy001]

boyse7en said:

My girlfriend's Laptop is not behaving itself. Its a Lenovo about 3 years old, and it just takes forever (i.e. 20 mins) to boot up, randomly adds or removes desktop icons, forgets log in details and a myriad of another annoying stuff.

So, looking at replacing with another Windows Laptop but not sure what to look for spec-wise (I'm mac based. Unfortunately the laptop has to Windows to run a piece of accounting software)

It will be mainly used for her book-keeping business. So she runs Sage on it, plus spreadsheets in Office, emails and web browsing, and thats about it.
Budget is up to £400. Will I be able to get something that will do the job for that?

First thing I would do is run a virus/adware scan and cleanup using Windows Defender, Malwarebytes and CCleaner. Looks more like dodgy crap on the laptop rather than poor hardware.

[anonymous-user]

souper said:

I have a Lenovo z580 i5, & boy what a pile of pooh it is/was.

Be very aware that Lenovo white-listed the parts that can be changed or swapped in/out.

This means if the part is not on the Burnt in Bios list and does not have a Lenovo FRU number even if the part is the exact same part if the FRU number is missing that part will be rejected.

I was lucky with swapping the hard drive to a SSD, but the appalling dual wifi/bluetooth card was terrible down to single digit speeds.

Trouble is Lenovo only had 4 wifi cards on the approved list all rubbish and out of date. The Bios/Uefi is locked down and the ability to swap was non existent, to fit a late model Intel AC wifi card mean't replacing the Bios with a hacked modded one, this involved using tools that are often disguised as virus's. Even when you do get the correct software my virus scanners are screaming your loading a virus.

Backing up the original Bios was non straight forward it took a lot of googling (days) and trial error to get the correct working links and Bios before I could finally use my laptop how a once £500+ laptop should run.

Not only Lenovo white-list laptop hardware, before you start buying upgraded parts make sure your laptop is not white-listed and if it is make sure you can get the correct tools Bios to enable success.

Thank you thank you thank you.
I had exactly the same problem with an otherwise superb Lenovo ultrabook
I eventually dumped it. I couldn't believe that it restricted the use of perfectly food wi fi cards

[GoneAnon]

I have a similar question on a Dell Inspiron about 4 years old.

It won't update to Win 10 because of an incompatible something but I'm not sure what - bluetooth or wifi, I think.

If I did a fresh install on a new SSD, would I be able to fix this at the same time?

[Huntsman]

I have a failing Acer, the replacement I bought last week, another Acer, was crawling, 1.6ghz processor with 4mb RAM. So I took it back and all credit to PCWorld they refunded me no bother.

Reading this thread suggests and SSD is a good idea, what processor? Its just for web surfing, writing reports in word that are 10 to 15 pages and running a very small database.

2.4ghz processor and 8mb ram?

[ArsE92]

Huntsman said:

I have a failing Acer, the replacement I bought last week, another Acer, was crawling, 1.6ghz processor with 4mb RAM. So I took it back and all credit to PCWorld they refunded me no bother.

Reading this thread suggests and SSD is a good idea, what processor? Its just for web surfing, writing reports in word that are 10 to 15 pages and running a very small database.

2.4ghz processor and 8mb ram?

Any i5, 8GB RAM, SSD.

[Thorburn]

Huntsman said:

I have a failing Acer, the replacement I bought last week, another Acer, was crawling, 1.6ghz processor with 4mb RAM. So I took it back and all credit to PCWorld they refunded me no bother.

Reading this thread suggests and SSD is a good idea, what processor? Its just for web surfing, writing reports in word that are 10 to 15 pages and running a very small database.

2.4ghz processor and 8mb ram?

Honestly, for that kind of usage the CPU won't matter too much - for similar stuff I normally set people up with a Lenovo B50-80 or G50-80 (Core i3, 4GB), fit a SSD and put the 500GB drive it ships with in a USB caddy to use for backups.

My main laptop is a ASUS Zenbook UX305CA which has a Core M3 processor (lower power version of the i3, 0.9GHz base clock, turbo up to 2.2GHz), with a decent SSD and is a nice responsive little machine. An SSD is the critical thing for most users as you watch what the PC is doing and they are always just waiting on I/O and things loading.

Edited by Thorburn on Sunday 31st July 12:20

[Jw Vw]

Lenovo machines generally very solid. SSD hard drive definitely worth looking into.

[Huntsman]

Thorburn said:

Honestly, for that kind of usage the CPU won't matter too much - for similar stuff I normally set people up with a Lenovo B50-80 or G50-80 (Core i3, 4GB), fit a SSD and put the 500GB drive it ships with in a USB caddy to use for backups.

My main laptop is a ASUS Zenbook UX305CA which has a Core M3 processor (lower power version of the i3, 0.9GHz base clock, turbo up to 2.2GHz), with a decent SSD and is a nice responsive little machine. An SSD is the critical thing for most users as you watch what the PC is doing and they are always just waiting on I/O and things loading.

Edited by Thorburn on Sunday 31st July 12:20

Thanks. I wonder why the Acer I bought was so bad. It was crawling and task manager said CPU was 100%
constantly.

[davepoth]

Huntsman said:

Thanks. I wonder why the Acer I bought was so bad. It was crawling and task manager said CPU was 100%
constantly.

Probably the bundled virus scanner, or Acer bloatware.