Second hand laptop, refurbished, second user or budget buying advice.
How
to get a great deal on a cheap laptop in 2014
What you should look out for
in a budget laptop
Buying a budget laptop inevitably means compromising somewhere.
But if you must go cheap, just make sure the compromises won't make you rue
your choice too soon after purchase.
Compromises can be the
looks, the feel, the attention to detail that makes you want to connect on a
more emotional level. Or it could be in the build quality, the choice of
internal components or the available options for connecting the laptop to all manner of peripherals – and don't forget
for connecting to the world at large through wired or wireless networking.
Unless you go for real bottom-dollar shelf fillers, the one area
where you're less likely to feel the pinch is, perhaps surprisingly, in program
performance. The Wintel world was built through the 1990s on a cycle of
upgrades, new versions of Microsoft Windows and Office treacling a PC and
forcing people to chase hardware upgrades.
That gravy train ground to a halt first with the Windows Vista
debacle in 2007, which over-reached the cyclic software bloat too far even to
captive Windows users; followed by the universal mass migration to mobile
computing started by the iPhone in the same year, and hammered home by the
introduction of the iPad in 2010. Mobile computing demanded leaner software. Even Microsoft
got the memo, so that now, Windows 7 and Windows 8 can run on some 10-year old PCs
without such issues.
There are many other
ways you can be sold short though when buying a cheap laptop. Here are the key
areas to look at. (See all our laptops buying advice.)
Budget laptops buying advice: Design
Laptops are much more personal than desktops, and
typically owned and used by one person. They cannot avoid becoming as much a
statement about you as the clothes you wear.
We can't tell you what fashion to follow, but be aware that cheap
laptops are rarely catwalk models. They may use cheaper, lumpier plastic
components, or simply be designed by people with no aesthetic sense, so be
prepared to deal with something that's been not so much hit as battered into
submission by the all-powerful ugly stick. It's not just about thicker-than-hoped
chassis either – high-gloss black plastic has been de rigeur in some consumer
electronics lately, a facile attempt at emulating piano black lacquer, and good
only for preserving greasy fingerprints for posterity.
Design considerations also span into the engineering, so pay
attention to points like the hinges, keyboard, access hatches and ask yourself
if they look like they'll survive continued use or abuse.
Budget laptops buying advice: Materials
Premium-grade materials
often serve a purpose. Take aluminium alloy, chosen for its strength, lustre,
resistance to corrosion and malleability. Cheap laptops are nearly universally
plastic constructs, and while that's not in iteslf a bad thing, it usually
signals fatter and heavier designs than notebooks fashioned from metals like magnesium, titanium
and aluminium.
Be aware that cheap laptop makes often disguise their use of
inferior materials by spraying plastic to look like metal. Not only is it
pretentious, it will look even worse after some gentle wear removes the
faux-metal paint to expose dark plastic below.
Budget laptops buying advice: Build quality
Look how well the chassis has been put together. Check along the
seams for air gaps, and see how well joined is the lid to the deck, for
instance. Keyboards and trackpads are common cut-back components, leaving you
with soggy typing or skittish mice pointers from low-grade capacitive
touchpads.
Budget laptops buying advice: Components
The Windows PC sales
machine was built on promoting internal components above less tangible aspects
like battery life and build quality. So laptops would be sold on the strength of namechecking an
Intel processor, the number of gigs of RAM or hard disk, and the size of
graphics card inside.
At the budget end, you may see huge hard disks included as they're
now so cheap. Solid-state storage makes life-changing improvements to your
computing experience, but don't expect to see any in the cheap category, or
rarely a small amount bolted on to speed up booting and program launching.
Displays are nearly
always gloss finished, as they look more impressive in showrooms against matt
screens. It's true they can have rich colour and even useful contrast ratio –
but only in a pitch-black room. Unless they have an expensive anti-reflective
optical coating – unheard of at the budget end – expect to see distracting
reflections, and to have to reposition yourself, your laptop or your curtains for proper viewing of what's on
screen, rather than what's behind your head.
Budget laptops buying advice: Performance
Don't be fooled by processor clock speed. AMD dropped out of this
race years ago and rarely lists the gigahertz figure in its marketing. The fact
is, a speed rating like ‘2.5 GHz' gives only the most rudimentary guide to
performance, unless given the context of the type and generation of processor,
and how many cores it includes, and any other go-faster tricks added by Intel
and AMD to keep the aged x86 architecture in business.
A laptop review should include a performance score, but unless
you follow the tech, a single number of, say, 3500 points in PCMark 7 is also
worthless. Look out for comparison tables in reviews that may let you gauge the
current possibilities together.
Graphics performance is
never great on cheap laptops – a decent graphics processor to enable
fast-running shoot 'em up Windows games is an expensive part of the parts
budget. Instead expect to find an integrated graphics processing unit (GPU)
inside the main chip. And these are getting faster every year. But cheap laptops don't usually have this season's Intel chip, so
will be behind the current-best anyway. For the most part, expect to do little
more than play basic undemanding games; or to drop quality settings to their
minimum to keep action reasonably fluid.
Performance is about
much more than how quickly your spreadsheet or DVD rip is rendered though.
Thanks to the iPad, people
now rightly demand longevity too, and the days of the four-hour laptop are now
behind us.
Except in the budget category, that is, where batteries are always
scrimped. So look out for tiny, inadequate battery packs. Batteries are still
relatively expensive so a manufacturer will do its best to give you as little
capacity as possible (and thereby aiding the laptop's ‘weight' spec too).
‘Performance' also stretches to connectivity. Specifically, Wi-Fi
wireless performance. Budget laptops are shackled with the most basic of
802.11n capabilities – the IEEE spec allows for three antennae to provide
half-decent indoor range and throughput enough to meet last century's ethernet
connections. But budget laptops may only have one aerial (sometimes rarely
dubbed ‘half-n'), which limits wireless performance further.
Budget laptops buying advice: Connections
Modern laptops now sport usefully fast USB 3.0 ports for getting
data in and out quickly. But budget laptops may still have part- or total
complement of slow USB 2.0 to save on the parts bill.
HDMI is now ubiquitous for video output, but gigabit ethernet is
far from a given – it's a way a manufacturer can save a few cents out of view
of the buyer.
Budget laptops buying advice: Software
Windows is no longer a
given, and the consumer is finally seeing more choice on the high street and
its online equivalents. Google is edging into the budget space with its
cheap-to-buy Chromebooks,
although these come at the high cost of personal privacy.
Macs are now more popular than ever before, albeit at the more
premium end of the price scale, leaving Windows as still the incumbent offering
on budget laptops. If you look around you may find Ubuntu laptops ready to buy,
skipping the Windows tax and providing a more secure computing option; but for
the most part expect to find unloved Windows 8 as your only choice, unless you
can track down older end-of-line Windows 7 machines.
Beware that Windows
laptops may have their low price subsidised in part by an obscene amount of
pre-installed software from companies who pay to be put there. Also known as
crapware, this includes software that pays kickbacks to the laptop maker when you sign up for expensive anti-virus
or backup yearly subscriptions. Cheap laptops may make you pay with your time,
as you spend hours trying to remove all the unwanted and obstructive software
dross. See our Group test: what's the best budget laptop?
By Hussain Akhtar
Source: www.pcadvisor.co.uk
