Laptop value

[Coontang]

Good morning (near afternoon) guys at CodJumper! Hope everyone's well.

I've been looking at a new laptop for a longlonglong time now and I've finally got some money to buy one and I think I'm going to treat myself for doing well at my GCSE's so I've got three main options for buying a laptop:

-Buy online
-Buy instore at major retailer
-Buy instore at local seller

In my local seller's shop I can get a fairly powerful refurb (eg. Phenom x3 with 3gb ram...) for around £250. But I don't know specifically what makes a laptop powerful or value for money. I'm not sure about buying at a major retailer as I think they bloat the price of the product too much.

Online I've been looking at eBuyer.com for deals and at around the maximum of about £350 (obviously, less with still good performance would still be nice!). I want it to be nice and speedy for most everyday applications such as Chrome, booting up, runs videos at 720p smoothly (which my computer fails!) and some casual online games - browser games and such, nothing too hefty. I'm just sick of being tied down to using my computer in my bedroom, especially as we're getting a new 3 piece suite downstairs which looks hella comfy!

If anyone has any recommendations I would much appreciate help on how best to spend my money. Once again, looking to spend no more than around £350 unless the deal is AMAZING. If I don't need such power I'm not too bothered about getting it for the sake but I would like it to last a while and still be nice and quick.

Is it worthwhile buying refurbished or will I be disappointed? Is it worth getting an i3 or would a core 2 duo be good enough? I'm coming from a 2ghz old desktop with DDR1 Ram, so using virtually any computer these days seems fast!

[IzNoGoD]

Spend a bit more on a new amd fusion APU (cpu+gpu on-a-chip), and put in an ssd. This is a killer combination for the money, although an ssd is quite expensive (buy an optical bay and do a self-install, much cheaper than buying it already installed from the manufacturer, and you can keep your harddrive, but not your dvd/cd drive)

Refurbished means refurbished battery, so unless you only use your laptop at one place and dont travel/plan to travel, it might be the way to go.

Local resellers charge more as they are a " middle-man" and have to rent a shop. Online resellers dont have those extra expenses.

Also, 4gb is almost standard nowadays.

[Coontang]

I got the laptop refurb from my local laptop store, more than fast enough for what I'm needing (Incase you're wondering, it's a Phenom x3 at 1.8ghz, and it has 3GB DDR3 Ram, 320GB hard drive etc...). It may not be the best laptop I could have got but I couldn't get a better one without spending more and I'm more than impressed with it's performance. The triple core is extremely noticeable, as I can and have ran tons of fairly intensive programs at the same time (as an idea, I mean virus scanning, downloading, on video call on windows live and watching a HD video on youtube). That's just a theoretical idea of what I can get without slowdown - realistically I never use this much at once, but in case I do, there seems to be no slowdown whatsoever. It even runs Call of Duty 2 fairly well on DirectX 7, along with Trackmania Nations, so it is fairly competent in that department too, and for the price I am extremely impressed it can do this and I have the portability of it too!

Battery life seems to be around 2-3 hours under intensive use and about 3-4 under regular use. It gets 5-6 in all departments in the windows scoring thing, with 3.9 in Aero graphics (but strangely around 5.1 in gaming graphics). There could have been alternatives but I think for me this is more than enough and the triple core is something I am very fond of as well as the huge boost in RAM from my older system - applications which sometimes hung and froze or worked extremely slow on my desktop now work flawlessly on here. Just need to keep it nice and clean and not clog it up too much with shitware.