Re: best budget laptop brand?

"Beck" <beck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4443d0eb$0$33896$ed2619ec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Looking for reliability - a laptop than can stay powered on almost every
day and used for up to 12 hours a day.

My current laptop is a Samsung VM series and has been used in that way for
5 years now. Its now dying a slow death so I need a replacement that will
equal or better those stats.

Price is important with a probable budget of no more than £500

My only real requirement is a good amount of memory (say 512) and a DVD
burner. Wireless internet not necessary as I have a pcmcia card (so
pcmcia port is a must). Screen size is not important, nor is widescreen.
The laptop will be used only for internet and dealing with digital photos,
this will not be required for gaming. Must include XP.

Now I am not looking to purchase yet, maybe in about 3 months. I know
specs and prices will change in that time so at the moment I am really
only looking into getting a shortlist of reliable brands to look into.
I have a Dell Inspiron 7000, bought in September 1998, that is still going
strong on original parts and gets almost daily use. I've popped in some
extra RAM and it now runs Win XP Pro quite happily from its 4GB drive.

I also have a Dell Inspiron 8000, bought in May 2001, and that is on for
about 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and sometimes for several days at a
time when doing some P2P downloads. I have replaced the hard drive, but only
because I dropped a powerful magnet on the keyboard which caused many bad
sectors on the original drive. I've stuck that in a USB case and it serves
me OK as a portable hard drive. So Dell gets a thumbs up from me for
reliability and longevity.


.

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