You can pickup a win8.1 tablet for about £85 to make a TV into a smart one with twin screens if you want. Quad core celeron with 2g RAM is going to be quicker than the processors they put in TVs. All you need is a dvi to mini/micro dvi cable.
I like my 22" screen and 5.1 speakers. The laptop is in a case under my desk. I think ...
Only 22"? The laptop is plugged into a decent monitor when I'm at a desk.
Not sure if it has already been mentioned, but also worth considering is what version of operating system (i.e. Windows) the laptop comes with. Buying it separately or upgrading later is very expensive.
I personally wouldn't touch Windows 8 (or 8.1 - the current offering with pretty much all Windows-based laptops). Windows 10 that is supposed to be much better is due sometime in the summer. I am planning to buy a laptop as well, and am holding back until then.
There isn't any point in missing a bargain if you see one, win 8.1 works fine and the upgrade to win 10 is free later this year.
If it's worth buying anyway, you can always buy it and then put Linux on it as well as keeping the Windows OS. Than you can slowly ignore the Windows.....
buying a Mac you could aviod both windows and linux :-)
It is very nearly 8 years old as is the desktop. I have never liked laptops too much.
>
Another probably daft question.
What do the panel think of Chromebooks?
One of my customers is a big fan. I saw one in PC World today & it will work with Word & Excel & was very light. We have Virgin 4G broadband at home.
snip
But I would still have to pay for the OS. Linux is free, in two ways.
Much more limited than a laptop.
No, that comes free with a Mac.
Free in the same way windows is free with windows PCs?
No, free even for upgrades, unlike with Win until just recently.
Their equivalent of Office is free too.
The intel based ones (as opposed to the ARM ones) can boot linux, or run linux in a chroot environment in parallel with ChromeOS.
No.. its included in the price of the hardware. Upgrades are only free until Apple decide your hardware is too old and that they want you to buy new hardware, then you find the upgrade wont install. This happens even when the hardware is actually quite capable of running the upgrade as can be seen on youtube where people have hacked the upgrade to run on hardware to old to run it.
You have to remember Microsoft develops and sells *software*, Apple gets
*hardware* developed and sells it. (They don't develop much hardware themselves.)
Could you elaborate please :-)
I'd agree with that. Wife has one and she prefers it to a full laptop, for basic shopping/browsing etc. But it is based on saving everything to the cloud, convenient in some ways but tends to tie you into the Google ecosystem / file formats etc. There *are* work-arounds, but if you are used to Windows / Office it is more stuff to learn. They are light, quick to fire up (but her battery is now very limited so needs to be on mains most of the time) and they are really most useful when you have a wifi connection.
There are places where they could be excellent (schools in Africa, say) but for my money they are not as convenient as a cheap android tablet (plus keyboard, if you want one). They might still have a price edge over a full laptop but TBH quite decent small laptops without optical drives are no longer that expensive.
And that is much more limited than any laptop which can do all that and much more as well.
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