High Performance Laptop for only £500

I was recently asked by a customer to recommend a new laptop that would be able to cope with their heavy usage needs. My thoughts immediately turned to an Intel i5 or i7 powered laptop with 8GB of RAM. I am a big fan of Asus laptops as their build quality is superb.

Looking through the range I discovered that many of the i5 and i7 laptops were very expensive and did not represent good value for money. Many of the Intel i3 powered laptops start from around £300 and are supplied with 4GB RAM. The Asus X55C is a particularly good example.

I decided to upgrade the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, also increasing the RAM speed from 1333MHz to 1600MHz. I removed the supplied 320GB hard disk drive and replaced with a 128GB solid state drive that can deliver speeds up to 500MBs per second. I also loaded Windows 7 instead of Windows 8.

The result? A laptop that boots in only 15 seconds after pressing the power button! 

And the cost of all this? Only £500. A MacBook Air which boots in around 10-15 seconds, starts from £849 and for this you only get an 11" or 13" screen. The Asus is supplied with a 15.6" screen. A MacBook Pro with 15" screen retails at £1499 and isn't supplied with a solid state drive.

So if you want a truly high performance laptop for an excellent price then please get in touch!

Windows 8: First Impressions

I've used many different computers and operating systems over the years, everything from an Amstrad to your latest generation Samsung Galaxy tablet, Windows 3.1 to Mac OS X 10.7. Without doubt, the best of these operating systems is Windows XP. It is beautifully, simple and easy to use, above all it's quick! Even on systems I would consider to be under powered it still performed admirably.

Earlier this month I had to setup a new Asus X501A that a customer had recently purchased. An aesthetically pleasing laptop, with an Intel i3 processor and 4GB RAM, excellent value for money at around £350. The one drawback however was that it came installed Windows 8 as its operating system. I've recommend many similar spec Asus laptops to customers in the past, all of which have run Windows 7. I was amazed at how much slower 8 appeared to be than 7. Everything took five times longer than normal and it was full of superfluous menus and warning messages.

I should say at this point that this was not the first time I had used Windows 8. An evaluation copy has been freely available online from Microsoft for some time now. The first thing I immediately took a dislike to was the new Metro interface. I recommend you read the Wikipedia article for more information on Metro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language). It seems totally unnecessary on a desktop or laptop computer. I'm certain it works brilliantly on a tablet though. The traditional desktop environment is still lurking underneath the Metro interface but the Start button is no more.

In conclusion, I see no reason to upgrade from Windows 7 to 8. In fact if you're considering buying a new PC or laptop I recommend you do whatever you can to ensure it's supplied with 7. If you're interested in an alternative operating system to both Windows and Mac OS take a look at Ubuntu. A free operating system used by over 20 million users: http://www.ubuntu.com/