www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk

The boss would like a new laptop. I've been looking at laptops online. It's more than a bit tedious.

So I'd like to call on the collective knowledge and real life experience of the assembled ladies and gentlemen and ask if you have a laptop that is quite good for not a lot of money and sharing that with the group.

Ideally it would have Office on it and be around £250-£300 max.

Bought my last one secondhand off ebay.

Decent spec HP running Vista business edition for £75, popped Open Office and AVG on it for free, and Bob's your uncle.

The only thing that would worry me about buying second hand is what might be on the hard drive. Even though the HDD is cleared there could still be images on there that could cause you problems if say you took it in for a repair etc.

There are plenty of sub £300 packages available and I have always had Compaq.

DWD

Lenovo gets my vote, solid laptops. HP or Dell otherwise.

I've had an Acer for 4 years and in that 4 years I've had no end of trouble, power jack I had to repair a number of times (I've basically ghetto wired it to the board now, mildly dangerous), went through several keyboards, a couple of track pads, screen hinges being held together by araldite, had a hard drive failure, wireless card died and worst was a number of bulging capacitors on the motherboard which were a nightmare to replace.

Acer are crap, wouldn't ever use them again. I'm primarily desktop based these days hence not getting rid/ upgrading.

Useful already - I'd not heard of Lenovo so I will have a looksy.

Not 100% on buying a used one from Ebay, I'm think bodily fluids etc..