Help me get a cheap laptop in UK

I am looking for a cheap but great laptop. Something as cheap as possible but new.

It will be used for blitzmax stuff, word processing and the occasional guilty game.

Ideally it will also let me plug it into the car lighter socket in case I want to write somewhere remote for some space.

Just be careful if you get Vista to have plenty of RAM, decent CPU and a half decent graphics card (for BMax). Thing is that won't make it cheap any more. Maybe better to stick to XP and get more bang for your buck (or pound).

Aldi have a special on, if you can find any left, they tend to sell out a bit sharpish. Intel Core Duo, 2 gig of ram, a big hard drive and I think it was about £500. Maybe a bit under.

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/kl.aspx?bn=10481

Acer are pretty good for a low price.

keep em coming please! any more bargains out there?

AZUS are launching a mini laptop starting at $199 which has a small (4gb-16gb) solid state HDD and looks promising for simple stuff:

http://www.eeepc.net/

The 701 looks ok, but I am however gonna wait for the 1001 which will have a 10" screen @1024x768 and can have up to a 32GB drive.

I want one because its super portable (3hr battery) and comes linux ready. It will also run XP but obviously this will be extra.

tesco, staples and werent currys/pc world doing a sign up for orange broadband and get a free laptop deal a couple of weeks back

MikeT: That was a really bad deal. Orange are desperate for market-share in broadband. They have a lot of ground to make up since the awful experiences of many customers at the launch of the service and several months following.

You ended up paying more than the cost of a cheap laptop.

Just for an idea of what you can get for around £500 or less, visit http://svp.co.uk/products-list.php?cid=299

There are some fairly decent spec laptops there. Unfortunately, they all come bogged-down with Vista and I'm sure all sorts of promotional software but it's standard practise to format and start fresh when buying any cheap laptop.


D4NM4N: The 701 will run XP, albeit one of the customised versions of XP which has been stripped of non-essential stuff. Mind you, I bet you could squeeze a retail version of XP into 8GB storage and 512MB RAM.

Tesco are selling one for £299: http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-5655.aspx

I just helped a friend install their internet on that Tesco(£299) laptop. It was dire. It took an age to respond to mouse clicks.

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro which I use for all my Blitz Max development. The battery is crap, but at least it has a decent graphics chip for the price.