21-30k Laptop for basic usage

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CapriAnupam

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Hi all,

A friend of mine wants to buy a laptop for really basic usage.

I will post the requirements below.
  • What's your Budget? - Less than 30k. If a good laptop is available for even 20k, it would be fine.
  • What will be your primary usage for the notebook be? - basic usage... working on MS Office, watching movies, listening to songs, looking at photos.
  • What size and weight considerations do you have? - should be comfortable enough for the usage mentioned.
  • Any brand that you prefer, or any brand that you detest? - none as such. But looking for a durable, long lasting, good quality laptop.
  • Any other considerations? - not really.

I would personally like the laptop to be of good quality, with decent and latest specifications... so that it won't need upgrade for quite some while. Is it really worth it to think on the above basis, or for such basic usage, any cheap laptop will do?

My friend is not really knowledgeable about all this, and she looked on Amazon, and was about to go for laptops on offers like Dell for about 20k or so... but I guess you won't get good quality decent laptops at that price? If there are, do let me know the choices.

Storage atleast 1 TB will be good? Or, can settle for 500 GB or so too?

Any other things to be taken into consideration?

Please advice. Thanks :).
 
Asus Vivobook X541UA-DM1358D (Intel i3 7100U (7th Gen)/4 GB DDR4/1TB/Intel HD Graphics/DOS) - Silver
Rs 27,999

Drawbacks
1 - DOS - you need to install windows or linux on it. You can get windows 10 you know how, cause no one working on office will pay 5k per year for office 365 in india i think.
or for completely free - you can get linux mint xfce or ubuntu. You only have to set libre office to save as docx or whatever file extension MS office uses.

2 - 4GB ram
Windows 10 will run slow because it has only 4GB ram. After few months when she has another 4-5k, she can buy another 4GB ram and put into it to make the speed faster or she can buy a 128GB SSD to make loading of files etc faster. Either way, she will get speed boost. Personally, I think ssd will give better performance than 4GB ram because of its sheer disk write and read speeds.

I have a feeling the laptop overheats, so get a laptop cooler too.
 
Thanks for the suggestion, the specs look good.

Well, if Windows 10 32-bit is installed, 4 GB will be quite sufficient.

How are you Dell laptops?

Since her usage is quite basic, can it be considered to buy cheaper laptop with specs a bit older than what's latest? Or, should money be spent on the latest specs, even if it costs a bit more? She was looking for a laptop for up to 20K, but I don't think there will be any decent options in that range, right?
 
I bought the Asus Vivobook with 2GB Nvidia 920.
https://www.flipkart.com/asus-core-...aphics-x541uj-go459-laptop/p/itmevxwfubyjk5fz

Can do 3D gaming in a pinch (low settings for couple year old titles and high for older ones). Very fast for general Office/day to day usage. You could put in Openoffice or similar as needed.
This was on sale for about 26K on Flipkart, but is now 29K.
1) Only 4GB Ram and upgrading that is a PITA, need to open the entire back panel. Windows 10 likes 8GB.
2) Comes with Endless OS (Linux) - suggest installing Win10 (buy an OEM key) or buying the one with Win10 Home pre-installed. You cannot install Win7 due to UEFI3 issues. Would suggest getting the one with Win10 preinstalled.
3) Build quality is nothing to write home about. Seems cheap.
4) Good screen, very clear and bright.
5) Nice-ish keyboard with chiclet keys
6) Does not heat up, but when watching movies where the GPU (MadVR rendering or gaming) is used, you can feel the hot air flow out.
7) Excellent sound from the inbuilt speakers. Very clear at louder volumes and definitely worth it, if that's the intent. (They still won't beat a good pair of headphones).

I also have a low end Acer with a Quad core Pentium N3710 processor, that came with Win10 Home, but it is really slow for everything. Also, the HDD is REALLY slow, it takes a super long time to load anything, and the operating system. Once you have your application(s) loaded, things are OK, but the responsiveness is really bad. It could do with an SSD upgrade and a RAM upgrade. Being used for email/browsing.

Overall, there are some options from Dell, Asus, HP, Acer and Lenovo at the 30 to 32K price point, and they all have similar specs, i3 6006, 4GB Ram, Win10Home, 1TB HDD.

Edit : For a 20K budget, suggest getting a Pentium N4000 series, will be slow, but will get the job done if all that's required is browsing/documents. Or maybe an AMD APU (will run hot).
OR, there are a lot of used laptops available on Olx/Quickr (do a face to face deal), where dealers sell used laptop imports for low prices. You can buy a 2nd gen i3 for 10-11K and an i5 for 13-14K, upgrade the HDD and RAM, and you should be good at much less than 20K.
 
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As suggested by @6pack , a SSD will make a huge difference. I went that way (added RAM too) but SSD is THE big deal. El cheapo laptops would fly with a SSD. Keep in mind screen quality would suffer at lower end. Vertical angle of comfort viewing would be quite low.
 
CapriAnupam said:
Thanks for the suggestion, the specs look good.

Well, if Windows 10 32-bit is installed, 4 GB will be quite sufficient.

How are you Dell laptops?

Since her usage is quite basic, can it be considered to buy cheaper laptop with specs a bit older than what's latest? Or, should money be spent on the latest specs, even if it costs a bit more? She was looking for a laptop for up to 20K, but I don't think there will be any decent options in that range, right?
Click to expand...

Sorry for the late reply. For low power laptops only Intel is fast. Don't even look at AMD. Their mobile cpu's are very bad in performance.

It's always better to get the latest cpu based laptop. Cpu's come out every year and get outdated in 2 years. So if you get a 6th gen, it is already a year and a half back now. Close to end of lifetime. Does it make a difference? I say yes. The new cpu's eat way less power and are faster than the older generation. If people find 7th Gen slow, then imagine how 6th gen or 5th gen processor speeds are. The lower generations have much less graphics capability and battery life too.

The 20k laptops are very low end and not worth 20k. You can try and install windows 32 bit on them but it will go at a snails pace. Pulling out each hair from our head would be faster imo. Plus on newer laptops with USB 3, you cannot install windows 7 or XP because they don't have drivers for usb 3 or new generation cpu/ graphics chip etc. Besides windows 10 you can only install any linux version on it. Linux will be much faster than windows because it has less crap running in the background and you will have close to 3-3.7GB free out of 4GB ram. Most of these have even storage soldered into them along with ram. In the end these laptops are a waste of money.

I think its better to get latest 7th gen cpu than try to save 7k on older gen cpu. Your friend can always get it on 3/6 months EMI or something.
 
Jambumali said:
As suggested by @6pack , a SSD will make a huge difference. I went that way (added RAM too) but SSD is THE big deal. El cheapo laptops would fly with a SSD. Keep in mind screen quality would suffer at lower end. Vertical angle of comfort viewing would be quite low.
Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more. The hard disks they're putting into the low end laptops are painfully slow. Also, my Acer R11 has a horrible viewing angle, but the Asus I just bought has a very nice screen with good viewing angles. Just a difference of a few K and it's night and day.

6pack said:
The 20k laptops are very low end and not worth 20k. You can try and install windows 32 bit on them but it will go at a snails pace. Pulling out each hair from our head would be faster imo. Plus on newer laptops with USB 3, you cannot install windows 7 or XP because they don't have drivers for usb 3 or new generation cpu/ graphics chip etc.
I think its better to get latest 7th gen cpu than try to save 7k on older gen cpu. Your friend can always get it on 3/6 months EMI or something.
Click to expand...

Actually, the Pentium is quite fast for day to day tasks, it's just slightly slower than my old Q6600 (which was still serving me fine till a couple months ago). The culprit is the low RAM (4GB with super slow hard disk), else I'm sure it would be very snappy for browsing etc. However, that entails an extra expense, and instead of the hassle, better to get an i3 instead. I do think that 4GB is not sufficient for these OS's these days, they're bloating up more and more.

USB3 is not the problem, but UEFI is, when trying to install Windows7. The system will crash at the install screen because of Win7 lack of support for VGA Int10h .

I'm not too convinced on the 7K savings when someone is on a budget (though I partially agree about the power savings and the new chip mindset). In my case, I got a deal for 6th gen i3, with additional 2GB Nvidia 920, so that meant the graphics memory wouldn't cut into the main memory, and it was for ~26K on sale, so I went with it. The 7th Gen was 35K (still is), for similar specs, so there was no point in purchasing it.

Check the CPU scores
My old Q6600
upload_2017-12-23_13-42-8.png


Core i3 6006 (6th Gen)

upload_2017-12-23_13-41-12.png



Acer Aspire R11 with Pentium N3710
upload_2017-12-23_13-44-30.png



As you can see, the i3 is the fastest, not surprising since it is several generations ahead of the Kentsfield Q6600. The Q6600 is faster than the Pentium by a bit, but the Pentium N3710 is still really fast for day to day tasks.

I'll try to do a disk benchmark between the Acer R11 with the N3710 Pentium (I believe it has a low power WD hard disk) and the Asus with Toshiba HDD. There's a large difference even between these.
 

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Apart from the 8th generation, the difference in CPU scores between the 4th to 7th generation is not going to be discernible in day to day usage in CPU performance. The 8th generation is a different thing, since it has more cores.
 
6pack said:
The i3 7100U single core scores are all in 3k range and multi core is in 6k range. They blow the i3 6 series out.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?dir=desc&q=+i3-7100U&sort=score
Click to expand...
Yes, but, speed and budget is never-ending. For example, the i5 is miles faster. One needs to reach a balance between their budget and the components that'll fit within their budget.
upload_2017-12-23_16-39-53.png


Disk benchmarks :
WD 2 TB Blue EZRZ series (Desktop 5400RPM)
upload_2017-12-23_16-41-12.png

Toshiba Laptop Disk 1TB (Asus i3 laptop)
upload_2017-12-23_16-41-38.png

WD Laptop Disk 500GB (Acer Pentium laptop)
upload_2017-12-23_16-42-33.png

We can see that the Laptop 500GB is easily the slowest, moreover, with caching etc, that speed really seems very slow in regular usage. SSD's will again blow these out of the water.
 
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In 30k budget all laptops will have good enough performance as far as internet and multimedia usage is concerned. Be it a 4th Gen or a 7th gen i3, they will all suffice. However there are other factors which should get our focus more than the processor.

IMHO, you have 2 options with which to go (no laptop will give both as far as I know):
1. A laptop with Full HD screen (Entry level Asus vivobook).
2. A laptop with an SSD (Acer swift 3, although it costs 35k, 1.5kg).
One gives you a visibly better screen and other gives you visibly better performance. Now its upto the OP to choose from.

Other things to look for are light weight (even a 300gm lighter notebook makes a world of difference when you gotta carry it everyday), battery life and ergonomics.

I'd suggest that the OP should check out all the models in person and make the decision based on that.
 
Shubham1401 said:
In 30k budget all laptops will have good enough performance as far as internet and multimedia usage is concerned. Be it a 4th Gen or a 7th gen i3, they will all suffice. However there are other factors which should get our focus more than the processor.

1. A laptop with Full HD screen (Entry level Asus vivobook).
Click to expand...

I mistakenly wrote that the entry level Asus Vivobooks don't have FHD, apparently the newer ones do in fact have FHD.
You're right, it's a toss up between what one needs.
 
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Wow... lots of replies. Thanks for all your inputs, much appreciated. I think she should definitely look to buy a laptop around 30k, otherwise it will just be waste of money.

I will have a look at the options available on Amazon.
 
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I looked on Amazon for HP and Asus laptops with Core i3 7th Gen processors. HP doesn't have much choices at all. Amazon too doesnt seem to have choices for Asus.

I then looked on Flipkart and found quite a few choices for Asus laptops with range upto 34K. I will discuss with my friend that it would be better to go for a laptop with latest specifications by putting in a little bit more money. Lets see what she says.

Also, read in news that Intel processors have some serious flaw, and that OS patches will be rolled out, which will affect performance by upto 30%. That's a lot. Thinking whether or not to go for a laptop now?

But, it will be quite a while before they release new processors with the fault removed.
 
CapriAnupam said:
I looked on Amazon for HP and Asus laptops with Core i3 7th Gen processors. HP doesn't have much choices at all. Amazon too doesnt seem to have choices for Asus.

I then looked on Flipkart and found quite a few choices for Asus laptops with range upto 34K. I will discuss with my friend that it would be better to go for a laptop with latest specifications by putting in a little bit more money. Lets see what she says.

Also, read in news that Intel processors have some serious flaw, and that OS patches will be rolled out, which will affect performance by upto 30%. That's a lot. Thinking whether or not to go for a laptop now?

But, it will be quite a while before they release new processors with the fault removed.
Click to expand...

Have you finalized any model yet ??
 
No I haven't.

Don't know if she will buy a laptop yet.

Actually, she had told me her desktop was having troubles. I wasn't able to go to her house to check it. I did manage to go yesterday, and the desktop seems to be working fine. So, as long as it's working fine, she won't buy a laptop.

It's good though, considering the vulnerability which is affecting all CPUs right now.

But, I did look at Asus laptops, Vivobooks, and found some good options for Core i3 7th Gen. If had to buy, will finalize from those options.

8th generation of Intel CPUs have been out I think? Aren't they in the market yet? But, they too, suffer from the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability.
 
CapriAnupam said:
No I haven't.

Don't know if she will buy a laptop yet.

Actually, she had told me her desktop was having troubles. I wasn't able to go to her house to check it. I did manage to go yesterday, and the desktop seems to be working fine. So, as long as it's working fine, she won't buy a laptop.

It's good though, considering the vulnerability which is affecting all CPUs right now.

But, I did look at Asus laptops, Vivobooks, and found some good options for Core i3 7th Gen. If had to buy, will finalize from those options.

8th generation of Intel CPUs have been out I think? Aren't they in the market yet? But, they too, suffer from the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability.
Click to expand...

HP has Two 8th Gen i5... HP 15-bs145tu & HP 15-bs146tu.

I will be getting one laptop in the coming weeks for my uncle... But I don't think he would be interested in 8th Gen.... I have shortlisted i3 6th gen based HP 15q-BU010TU, HP 15q-BU007TU & HP 15q-BU004TU for him.. He is preferring HP over any other brand & budget is below 30k... I did not find many 7th Gen i3 in HP at that price point....
 
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Does your uncle have knowledge of computers?

HP has great quality. My cousin bought an HP laptop years ago, but it's still sturdy. So, I will prefer HP over other brands.

But, given a choice over buying latest specs and HP or other brands, then I would prefer latest specs personally.

Yes, given that price range, you won't find any good HP laptop with Core i3 7th Gen. That's why I had to look at Asus, which I think makes good quality laptops too. Atleast I would prefer it over Lenovo, Acer and the likes.

Although I don't have any personal experience with Asus, but I think it's products are good? Will appreciate if people post about quality of Asus.

Personally, I will suggest you to convince your uncle to go with Asus Vivobook. There are some good choices available in 29-34K range. Maybe you can convince him to put in a bit more money and go beyond 30K .. for about 2-3K or something, so that you get good specs with Windows 10 Home installed. Otherwise, go for one with DOS, and install OS yourself.

My view is that if you are buying a thing like laptop, which you intend to use over many years, then best is to buy latest specs, and if possible, put in the extra 2-3K. It will be worth it in the long run.
 
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