Ta

I'm looking for a laptop for the kids (one getting ready for his GCSE next year). Will be used mainly for browsing, music, some light games and gentle office apps. Never bought a laptop before, so looking for some sound advice. Willing to spend a max of 500. Looked at some Acer and Toshiba models...but really not sure. Can anyone recommend something worthwhile?

klal

Spend 500 on a 'refurbed laptop' with these people and they'll probably deliver it to you in a Rolls Royce or Bentley:

http://www.tier1online.com/Laptops

You can read about Tier1 and their products on their 'About' tab.

Thanks ExecLine. Taking a look now...

Being urged to update to IE8... Does it throw up any problems?

No problems with it at all . It's a big improvement on IE7 and far better than Firefox.

Thanks Optimist :)

i have upgraded to vista x64 biz,it comes with IE8,it is slow,very slow,and now have to use firefox,

any ideas how to get it to load pages faster,and sometimes its like 6 to 8 secs,

seems like there must be loads of checking of the web site by IE8 and AVG internet security,

scussy,

May not be the answer you wanted but I swopped AVG to Avast - with an apparent gain in speed. But I'm still on IE7.

TP

Scussy

Upgrade to Windows 7 RC.

I've "upgraded" to IE8 and have to say that there's precious little advantage over 7, as far as I can see. At first it seemed faster, but that has well and truly gone away - in particular, it can be horrendously slow opening new tabs, which I have a suspicion is related to the amount of network load at the time. I've found a couple of websites (bloglines for example) have slight glitches on it.

I've stuck with it so far, but am seriously considering going over to Firefox, despite loathing the general smugness of the Firefox community

TP, i have a year left on my AVG licenses,will look again then,

i think Vista BIZ can stay on laptop,was playing again last night with IE8 and was a lot faster,we shal see,

Just playing with windows 7 now, build 7100,on my backup PC,MB only let me use 2 Gb ram,says can use 4Gb but only the duel ddr,i have them but using them on my main PC,
so far looking ok with win 7 and 2 Gb ram,on and old 939 socket,athlon64 3800,

zzaxx et al: part of the problem with IE8 is that MSFT moved to conform to the W3C standards a bit more closely -- the result being that it doesn't always work properly with sites that were specifically built to work with IE's (non-conforming-to-standards) earler versions.

Firefox is far better in this (standards conformance) regard, regardless of smugness.

Do also try Opera. It's not smug, it's Norwegian. I use it a lot. I never use IE now, except when I have to because bits of Microsoft's site "censor" non-IE browsers from access. I think being dog-in-the-manger is worse than being smug. :-)

Talking of which, there are reports that some parts of Microsoft's site don't work with IE8 for precisely the reasons stated. Hoist with their own petard.

I'll stick with IE7. Thank you all. Not feeling too adventurous these days. :)

I am back on firefox,IE8 hangs too much,

I'm finding that Firefox, (v 3.0.10), has a tendency to hang on my machine. IE8 is perhaps a bit better in this respect, but I still prefer Firefox, ( I trust it more than anything that comes out of MS)

I have no problems with FireFox 3.0.10 on my Win XP IBM ThinkPad or with Opera 9.64.

I have to say that I haven'y used IE in years, except on the increasingly rare occasions when I found a site that wouldn't render with the other browsers.

I have a hunch that Google Chrome (which I don't use regularly) will also help to wean site builders off their tendency to build for IE only.

When we set out to build MoneyAM in 2002, we tried to make sure that it would work with all browsers at the time -- IE, FireFox, Opera, Safari etc). It's not that hard, it simply takes awareness and a bit of testing.

I keep getting a very annoying pop up from Party Markets.

It only happens on the MoneyAM site and is almost impossible to stop. It defeats Firefox and IE8 popup blockers.

It is so persistent that I wonder if it is a virus but can't find anything. Do other people have the same problem? has anybody found an easy cure?

opto,

That is an advert being run by us, however, you should see it only once per login session. If you are seeing it more than once, then you machine is not allowing the cookie it sets (to make it display only once) or said cookie is being deleted. if you allow session cookies, this shoudl cure the problem.

Ian

Ian

Well at least I'm glad it is not a virus. My cookie settings are not particularly strict but I still get the damn thing at least once a day sometimes more.

I know that you depend on advertising, but you should bear in mind that any advert that is so intrusive that people are prepared to spend significant time to defeat them can only be counter productive for the advertiser and the host site. For all that I know, Party Markets may be a good company that gives a really good service, but I will never have anything to do with them because of that advert.