laptop suggestion - price range up to €1500

pawrick

Hi, been trawling the forums for past few months trying to narrow down what I'm looking for and i just want to see if anyone has any other thoughts.

Budget - up to €1500 approx but preferably closer to the €1200 mark

Intended use - general use, some games, photography editing with raw files - this is the main reason for upgrading as my current laptop just isn't powerful enough.

Mobility - needs to be portable but weight not a major concern as I will seldom be traveling with it.

Already own a Sony Vaio FE11H for some years and am more then happy with it. screen quality is excellent and it has worked perfectly.

I want a lap top which is a good all rounder and will have some lastability. also one which doesn't look crap tbh.

one I have my eye on is the Sony VAIO FW41ZJ/H

http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/Sony%5FVAIO%5FFW41ZJ%2DH%5FLaptop%5FVGNFW41ZJH/version.asp?PID=1038

but obviously not from this store seeing the reviews on this site already!

thanks for any suggestions

Voodu Child

HP Envy 15?

Its certainly powerful - it has a quadcore mobile i7 processor. And it has a high-res screen which might be a plus for photo editing. The GPU is very good, a little bit above midrange so could handle some casual gaming. And its pretty slim and light - about the same size as a Macbook Pro and styled similar.

Only caveats are that it will have very short battery life (on account of the quadcore) and it doesnt have an internal optical drive (has two HDD bays instead).

Overheal

At face value HPs are great. But to be perfectly honest, I would not buy a second one until I tried another vendor. Theyve not only gotten bad marks on review sites with end-users versus all other manufacturers, but its the little things. Shoddy chat support and poor cooling design: I would need to take apart the laptop right down to the motherboard in order to properly clean the heatsink. Whereas other vendors are intelligent, with a 2-screw openahatch solution.

When it isnt giving me hardware related grief though I love every inch of my pavillion right down to the keyboard and trackpad. The 12 cell is also remarkably intelligent the way its been arced to act as a keyboard stand. And most of the hardware issues I did have, were nvidia's fault.

The Envy linked above looks good. The CPU seems a little underclocked though. Otherwise it has a great looking GPU and RAM, and an especially snappy HDD.

edit: Oh. its a quadcore. Nevermind. That looks fairly bril.

leninbenjamin

if you're thinking of an FW, have a look at Argos, sometimes they have pretty good deals on them. Friend of mine picked one up there recently for about €200 less than all other retailers at the time.

As for the HP, great looks, great specs, great price. Like Overheal I would be wary though. More power equals more heat, and in such a slim case it could cause problems down the line. That wouldn't stop me buying one but just do you're research on them before you buy.

Voodu Child

I don't think that HP has 1920x1080 anyway, looking at the HP site. Amazons specs must be a typo, it only has 1366x768 going by the HP site. So I wouldn't recommend it any more for photo work.

pawrick

cheers everyone for the info - that HP looks class but yes been reading mixed reviews of HP's recently. will keep pricing around for the vaio there are a few new models coming out in nov so might drop in price around then.