What laptop for £500 - and which broadband supplier?

[Karen182]

Hi - for a friend, not for me as I'm on a Mac - so am a bit out of touch with windows based laptops these days!

What laptop is recommended - max budget around £500, to be used for surfing the net only really. Doesn't want desktop due to space. High st shop if poss as not currently online at home (how do prices compare these days?).

Also I'm on cable broadband - but what is considered a good, reliable broadband provider that is non cable??

Ta

[turbogonebloke]

I'm generally High Street fodder too, only ever had one PC to my own spec (and as I didn't build that myself I barely qualify to even look at this forum never mind post on it), so on that basis I'd recommend the Advent 7108 from PC World, I got one for about £395 in the January sales but their price is about £500 normally. It uses an intel Celeron 1.46 GHz processor, has 512 Mb RAM, a 60Gb hard drive, etc, and with luck it will have XP that allows every peripheral she's got to keep working, unlike that new fangled Vista. If your friend is basically surfing it would do fine, mine is for business use and it's solid enough. I'm not a computer games freak though so if your friend goes in for this across the interwebby she might like to look for better graphics and something a bit faster with more RAM - but then the price will be higher. Don't know any non-cable Broadband suppliers, sorry

[Karen182]

Thanks for the suggestion It is just for surfing really, no games etc.

[jon h]

I just purchased a load of HP NX6325 machines for work. Nothing special, but good basic kit. They look soooo much better built that some budget machines, but cost me £450 each (ex VAT) and there is a £50 cash back offer on at the moment for a number of HP machines. 500meg of ram, 60gb HD, wireless, card reader (for digital cameras etc) plus all the usual stuff. To be honest, I am quite impressed with them. They will never blow the doors off with their performance, but good solit machines for general office work. Plenty of dealers out ther doing them, e.g. www.misco.co.uk

Jon

[CommanderJameson]

Nice second hand iBook off eBay? Your friend will then be able to surf without farting around with anti-spyware, anti-virus and all that nonsense.