Hi all,

Sadly, my university refused to provide a laptop for me so I am looking to buy one. I am doing PhD in tissue engineering, first year, so will be using the laptop for the next 3 years + writing up on it. Ideally I wanted to pay less than £1000... Does anyone have any good laptops they could recommend? Would be extremely glad!

Hi there

I think it would be quite unusual for them to buy one for you! Anyway - £1000 is a lot of money. Mine is a HP and cost around £400. It is excellent - very robust - definitely highly recommend that make.

Good luck

Mine is an Asus, cost about £350 I think (was a present). Could do with a better one, but can't give any more advice on which one! I would pay the most I could for it personally.

Some unis provide laptops when they can't give you desk space. Often you have to give it back afterwards; it's just a loan.

All of my colleagues had an option to order a laptop through our purchasing service. They went for Dell Latitude as it's the standard at our uni.

I was looking at Asus Zenbooks, I was wondering if anyone is using them?

I have an Asus Zenbook which I've had for a year. It seems pretty robust and fast and does everything I want it to. It has a few quirks (I find that controlling the trackpad isn't an exact science with it, and it sometimes does things I don't want it to, eg I try to click on something and it brings up a drop down menu instead!) but on the whole it is a decent laptop.

Get yourself down to cash converters or somewhere like that, they have decent ones (used) for a couple of hundred quid.

Maybe take a look here for some ideas and views:

Just buy a secondhand laptop on ebay. Find a spec with core i7 and minimum 8gb ddr ram. You just need to spend less than £200 and get a robust laptop.
If you have more money, I suggest to spend on ultrabook with screen at least 12 inch. The weight of ultrabook is so light. Find new ultrabook with minimim core i5 and 4gb ddr ram.