The best educational laptop ever?

[zag]

I've been buying laptops for 10 years now in education and gone through a lot of brands and products.

 

Basically we need a laptop for teachers that is robust, cheap, thin and quick to turn on. We already give them an option of an iPad if they want so have no interest in touchscreens or frankenstien windows 8 machines

 

So is this the best "standard" laptop ever?

 

 

http://uk.insight.com/en-gb/productinfo/laptops-and-notebooks/0001796403-00000001

 

Its £334 quid and works really well, very quick to boot and the best thing of all is they seem very very solidly built for such a lightweight machine. Not had a single one break yet.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

It being an Acer, I'd be nervous about the 1 year Warranty. Did you get a bolt on to extend it?

[chazzy2501]

you have to look at the laptop 3 years after you bought it to know if it was really any good. Most of mine were not. (the old Acer Travelmate T212 was the most robust!)

[sparkeh]

Guess Acer changed a lot since we last used them? Our experience was that their machines were garbage.

[Ex-MGSTech]

Guess Acer changed a lot since we last used them? Our experience was that their machines were garbage.

 

Ditto Acer were not good!

[sted]

Guess Acer changed a lot since we last used them? Our experience was that their machines were garbage.

 

we used to think that but after moving to hp its amazing how many of those die out of warranty and acers while never fast/well built still work years later when the hp's they replaced are long dead i keep thinking its time to give them a go again

[zag]

It being an Acer, I'd be nervous about the 1 year Warranty. Did you get a bolt on to extend it?

 

Time will tell I guess. We've bought 200+ of the previous Acer TimelineX models over the last 3 years and not had many problems.

 

I've never used a warranty, we buy a few extra machines with each order to use as spares. Its mostly better value than paying for 3 year warranties assuming the build quality is OK in the first place.

 

Acer always used to have a problem with backlights dieing, but this model doesn't seem to have that problem (yet)...

Edited April 15, 2013 by zag

[Millgate]

 

Its £334 quid and works really well, very quick to boot and the best thing of all is they seem very very solidly built for such a lightweight machine. Not had a single one break yet.

 

I could beat the price is you wish

[Reverend_Dan]

Another avoid for acers by me last batch died without fail 1 year 1 week.

Our HPs have been great however the probook's are worth the extra wouldn't buy any cheap ones

[Quackers]

We have over 200 Acer laptops here, they are rock solid reliable laptops. We still have 2 laptop trollys from 2006 with 2006 Acer travelmates 4222's still in them and running fine. Just batteries now struggling to hold charge. I can count on 1 hand the amount of Acers that have died. The 50 or so HP's we bought in 2008/2009 have all been binned now (HP 550/530/6720s) ranging from constantly over heating, freezing and onboard LAN just giving up.

[CommodoreS]

At the same spec - perhaps 0.25kg heavier and a much cheaper £241.65 these Fujitsu AH512's are good value:

Fujitsu AH512 Lifebook - Laptops | Ebuyer.com

 

They also have a good battery life, and most parts on them are quite high quality ones made by other manufacturers.

 

As for warranty, at this price its cheaper to save money on warranties and just buy a brand new one if it breaks and is unrepairable.

Also remembering the warranty does not cover the screens and other accidental damage which is more likely to occur, rather than hardware failure after 2 or 3 years.

[witch]

I had a good look at the Fujitsus at BETT and was pleasantly surprised by the build quality.

[Modey]

Have bought many laptops over the years and Acer have been pretty good. Not perfect, but I don't think any laptops ever will be unless you are prepared to buy Toughbooks for a couple of grand a pop. I do remember us having a lot of Fujitsu laptops when the laptops for teachers scheme first kicked off and the build quality was very good, but they were quite expensive compared to others.

 

We generally go for as cheap as possible now to get maximum value for money, spending extra per unit doesn't seem to pay off in longevity terms. Also until teachers have some personal investment in keeping their laptop in good condition, they are always going to get hammered (obviously there is the odd exception to this, from one extreme to another).

[zag]

At the same spec - perhaps 0.25kg heavier and a much cheaper £241.65 these Fujitsu AH512's are good value:

Fujitsu AH512 Lifebook - Laptops | Ebuyer.com

 

They also have a good battery life, and most parts on them are quite high quality ones made by other manufacturers.

 

As for warranty, at this price its cheaper to save money on warranties and just buy a brand new one if it breaks and is unrepairable.

Also remembering the warranty does not cover the screens and other accidental damage which is more likely to occur, rather than hardware failure after 2 or 3 years.

 

Sadly that looks about twice as thick as the acer I posted otherwise its a great deal.

 

I agree though with the concept of finding cheap laptops with good build quality.

 

High specifications on a laptop are pointless these days really.

Edited April 16, 2013 by zag

[maark]

I would avoid dell vostro - had problems with trackpads not to mention issues with getting decent prices.

Novatech have been pretty good.

Whatever you get putting SSD drives in will be biggest performance improvement.

[zag]

Yeh we put 128gb intel SSDs in all our new laptops as standard.

[sted]

Sadly that looks about twice as thick as the acer I posted otherwise its a great deal.

 

I agree though with the concept of finding cheap laptops with good build quality.

 

High specifications on a laptop are pointless these days really.

 

whats this obsetion with laptop thickness ive yet to see one even my 17" xps thats thicker than a decent sized book? Personally id rather have a thicker laptop with network/vga on the back rather than the hinge being the back

[localzuk]

Am I the only one who buys the business class of laptops then? All those listed here seem to be the budget ones - the HP 520/620, Dell Vostro etc...?

 

We buy the HP ProBook 6570b at the moment. Excellent build quality, mid range prices etc... I know a school which uses the EliteBooks too, but they are a little out of our price range - even though they are built to military spec for robustness.

 

One thing we have found though - HP seem to struggle providing laptops with SSDs as standard, so we buy the laptops and put SSDs in them ourselves - saves about £50 per laptop too.

[CommodoreS]

Like the OP said, no one will really know until 3+ years down the line how well that specific make and model of laptop has lasted, by which time it will also be obsolete. Never had any luck with Acer so tend to avoid them nowdays. Have recently been going for as cheap as possible brand name Core i3 Laptops like HP Compaq and Fujitsu.

 

There is not much difference between business class laptops and budget laptops, except at this time budget laptops are far cheaper, just as reliable and in most cases have exactly the same components inside, just with a different case on the outside.

 

Laptop thinckness has never been an issue - weight sometimes is. There is hardly any difference in weight between those thin laptops and thicker ones. If it is saving £75ish per laptop thats a lot of money and soon adds up, and IMO is not worth the extra cost just to have a laptop which is slightly thinner.

 

With microsoft education license pricing (being far far cheaper than commercial licensing), it is also far cheaper to buy a laptop with a standard windows licence and then buy a Pro upgrade license, rather than buy laptops which come with Pro licences.

 

I have a trolley of older Dell Vostros (About 3 years+ old now) and they have lasted incredibly well (The batteries are still going strong!), and were a good price at the time but now Dells pricing is all over the place and they do not have any UK call centres and it can be difficult to get hold of your account manager, and even hard to place an order.

 

Worst laptops I have come across are RMs with poor keyboards (keys missing all the time), the batteries don't even last 3 years before they need replacing and RM chip their laptops and batteries so you can only replace the batteries from them, and had an issue where they were out of stock of a specific battery for months just as all the batteries in the laptops had died and needed urgent replacement. Also not easy to get hold of spare parts like major brand laptops, and much too overpriced. Ergo are not much better - Just had a load of older Ergo laptops suddenly just stop working for no reason at all.

[SYNACK]

eep, Acer, another avoid in general, their build quality is still massively variable and while they may against all odds pull off a success every so often their proportion of abject fail is still something to be concerned about.

[zag]

whats this obsetion with laptop thickness ive yet to see one even my 17" xps thats thicker than a decent sized book? Personally id rather have a thicker laptop with network/vga on the back rather than the hinge being the back

 

Basically they are very portable and the teachers prefer the thin ones. This acer is about as thin as a VGA port so its awesome.

 

[zag]

Just seen this new Dell laptop aimed at Schools as well

 

Dell unveils business- and school-friendly 13.3-inch Latitude 3330 notebook

 

Looks nice, especially with the 128GB SSD included.

[edutech4schools]

Last load of laptops have all been Samsung. They come with free 5 year rtb warranty which BT business will upgrade to next day onsite fix for £20.

BT Business Direct - Samsung Series 3 300E5C Titan Silver Core i5-3210M Win7Pro 64-bit 4 GB RAM 500 GB HDD 15.6" (NP300E5C-A0CUK)

[sted]

Basically they are very portable and the teachers prefer the thin ones. This acer is about as thin as a VGA port so its awesome.

 

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but thats the least important dimension it hardly matters how thick it is within reason

[Giblets2]

Are you guys not bothered about having a 5GHz wireless adapter? When I buy new machines that's one of the first things I check, agn - not just bgn. Has anyone found any budget agn Intel i3/5 offerings?