Laptop Deals Round Up – April 2012

Toshiba Satellite Z830-10N

 
What we like – Looks great, 128GB SSD, USB 3.0, Best value ultrabook

Best deal – View deal at Ebuyer.com

Details – Unlike the Asus UX21E the Toshiba Z830T-10N hasn’t tried to replicate the lines of Apple’s popular Macbook Air. Instead, Toshiba has opted for a more contemporary design which combined with a premium magnesium chassis looks superb.

The only other Ultrabook in this price bracket at the moment is the Acer Aspire S3, we’d go for the Toshiba simply because it uses a proper 128GB SSD drive as opposed to combining a cache storage area with a traditional hard drive. The S3 does have a faster processor but the SSD drive in the Toshiba compensates for this.

Key features include:-

SSD Drive – SSD stands for “solid state drive” and refers to a type of drive that contains no moving parts. Unlike traditional hard drives that house a spinning disk SSD drives store data on silicon chips. The result is much faster read, write and access times which greatly improves system responsiveness.

Lenovo S205

 
What we like – Small and light, more versatile than a Netbook

Best deal – View deal at Amazon.co.uk

Details – At just over £300 the Lenovo S205 represents an affordable alternative to the current batch of Ultrabooks hitting the market. It’s not as powerful as an Ultrabook but it’s AMD E450 processor can cope with everyday tasks, HD playback and low resolution gaming and is considerably more capable than most Netbook processors.

It’s 11.6″ screen runs at the same 720P resolution as most Ultrabooks so whilst you may be sacrificing processing power you won’t be sacrificing screen space. It’s the perfect choice for users that perform light computing tasks on the move and can’t justify the high cost of an Ultrabook.

Asus X53E-S1330V

 
What we like – Fast i7-2670 CPU

Best deal – View deal at Comet.co.uk

Details – The i7-2670 CPU used in the X53E-2670 CPU is a true quad core CPU capable of processing 8 threads simultaneously and has a maximum clock speed of 3.1GHZ. When it comes to CPU intensive tasks such as 3D rendering or video encoding there’s nothing on this page that comes close to the sheer grunt of the X53E-1330V.

And at under £550 the X53E-1330V represents fantastic value for money and it suited to those that will make use of it’s processing power but are on a tight budget (students perhaps).

For most, an i7 processor is overkill and the X53E-1330V has to make do with integrated HD3000 graphics. For this reason, the Inspiron R above is a better choice for the majority of users.

Apple Macbook Air 11.6

 
What we like – i5 CPU, 128GB SSD, HD Screen

Best deal – View deal at Amazon.co.uk

Details – Apple’s second generation Macbook Air’s finally have the processing power needed to match their looks. This results in a far more satisfying experience than the original Macbook Air which frequently struggled to keep up.

Due to the popularity of Apple’s products prices rarely stray far from their RRP’s. However, we feel the 128GB 11.6 Inch model represents the best value for money at the moment and would advise against buying the 64GB model. Even relatively light users will quickly need more than 64GB of storage.

The best price we could find was at Amazon.co.uk but this product is also available from John Lewis at a slightly higher price but includes a 3 year warranty and 90 days phone support. Apple’s aren’t cheap to repair and can hit your pocket hard should something go wrong outside of the warranty period so it’s worth factoring this into your final decision.