TR Forums

Good day.

The wife has been using her little HP E-350 for almost 3yrs, however it does not have hdmi or usb 3.0 ports (it was low pretty budget) it did get a crucial M4 256GB ssd after the first time it fell. She has been complaining it has been getting slow, so I gave it a little tuning up and seems much better, not as good as when the SSD first went in, but whatever.

So budget it low ($500 max) since the new one will probably get dropped multiple times and have food and drinks spilt in it multiple times also.

So after reading TR's Kabini review, almost a year ago, http://techreport.com/review/24856/amd- ... u-reviewed the little A4 comes close to almost doubling the E-350 in a lot of things.

I see the A6-5200 Kabini boost the clock up 500 Mhz to 2 ghz vs. the A4-5000 and most notebooks with the A6 kabini are about in the $450 range and also seem rare. I would like to keep the power consumption to 25W or less, more for heat than battery life.

I don't need this for few months yet, so I was considering waiting for mobile Kaveri chips, since the Kabini is only single channel memory, but I can't really find any 'leaks' for those upcoming chips.

She mainly surfs the net/facebook and watches utube, netflix. I think a quick dual core would probably be better suited than a slower quad for this purpose, but I could be wrong. As for Intel well sometimes it's better to stick with the demons you know well then the ones you don't.

Has anyone heard or seen any info on the upcoming mobile Kaveri chips? Not sure how long I will even have to wait?!?!

Edit - Also, the current HP bios is pretty limited/horrible, does Asus or any other manf. have better bios options for a notebook?

Have you considered a tablet? They're great for casual web surfing if screen size isn't an issue. You said you don't want Intel but the blue team is rolling out a line of Bay Trail hybrids you ought to consider too. AMD is still having trouble getting into notebooks, and as you noted their roadmaps of late have had a lot of question marks and assumptions.

Ya a tablet isn't out of the question, although it would probably be a surface pro two.

If you are not keeping to a low budget this time take a look at the Sony Flip. They are about a $1000 and are Intel based.
I've been keeping my eye on sales for one.
Seems the best mix right now of Laptop and Tablet.
I have the laptops that fold to tablet with the keyboard still exposed on the bottom.

I just picked up an Acer Aspire V5 last week while on sale ($550) for the family.

* A10-5757M (2.5Ghz / 3.5Ghz)
* 8GB RAM
* AMD Radeon HD 8750M (2GB dedicated)

For me, I decided it was more important to have graphics performance over CPU, and it never leaves the house, so I am not concerned about battery life.

The wife loves it, its thin and light.
Son loves it, plays games (at least Mine Craft) exceptionally well. Haven't had a chance to load something from my steam account yet.

The only cons I see at this point are the 5400RPM disk drive and the lack of a optical drive.
At some point I will swap in an SSD, and I have not touched a disk in years (thanks to Steam)...

What about Asus' T100 convertible? 10" screen, tablet or notebook operation, Win8.

anotherengineer wrote:

Edit - Also, the current HP bios is pretty limited/horrible, does Asus or any other manf. have better bios options for a notebook?

Why would that matter? The usage profile you stated doesn't require much in the way of tuning, and the fully integrated construction of a notebook means there isn't much you can or should be attempting to modify for day-to-day usage.

Arvald wrote:

If you are not keeping to a low budget this time take a look at the Sony Flip. They are about a $1000 and are Intel based.
I've been keeping my eye on sales for one.
Seems the best mix right now of Laptop and Tablet.
I have the laptops that fold to tablet with the keyboard still exposed on the bottom.

Have you been to microcenter and opened and closed one? I wouldn't touch it with a 39.5' pole. They feel like poorly made garbage and I'd be surprised if they last even a single year under a typical usage scenario.

No thank you.

I have been to a Best Buy (Microcenter does not exist in Canada) and checked them out.

Typical usage is not flipping back and forth continually. Which is what would stress it.
Also they tend to get abused in store.
I checked out the smaller model 13.3" and it felt flimsy
I checked out the 14" and 15.4" and they were fine.

As with anyone buying a laptop I always so give them a test drive at the local shop (don't buy sight unseen)

If you don't like the feel don't buy.

Go for a Chromebook. You'll get better hardware for the money, it sounds like it will better fit your wife's needs, and probably be a more enjoyable/easier to manage system for her (and, by extension, you ). You can pick up the Acer C720 for all of $200 (with a Haswell chip), a 4gb model for $250, or the touchscreen version for $300. Or wait a couple weeks for the Samsung Chromebook 2 to come out which you can get for $400 with a high dpi screen. Both will generally give snappier performance than equally priced windows machines, weigh ~3 pounds, and get 8.5 hours of batter life. They've got user management tools and remote desktop baked in too which might also ease your tech support on it.