• I was a one laptop man until I turned 25 years old, something I take a level of pride in given society’s movement to upgrading their technology every 6 to 18months! In this piece I take you through my journey to buying my new laptop; the Lenovo u31.
• I had an Acer Aspire 5738Z just before I started university in 2007, it was 15.6inch and had a pretty good specification for its time (Intel Pentium Processor T4200 2.0GHz, 4 GB DDR3 Memory, 320 GB HDD). It lasted very well and I used it daily all the way through to early 2013. From then it was packed away in my flat and only taken down once a month to update music or software, it weighed 4.5kg so not the most mobile, plus the battery was shot so always had to be plugged into the charger!
• From 2013 until earlier this year I’ve been using a mix of I-Pad Mini, my girlfriends MacBook Air and my Acer laptop. I also have a company laptop – Dell Latitude E6230 – which I use daily for all work activity but I did not want to rely on it for personal use. This is primarily for three reasons (i) I already spend 60hrs a week working, I didn’t want to  be distracted by work e-mail or ‘to do lists’ on my down time (ii) I didn’t want to breach company policy (iii) due to company security you can’t use USB drives so transferring information wasn’t easy.
• All this lead to me to undertaking a 2 year half-assed investigation to get a permanent personal laptop replacement, which finally ended a few months ago.

Requirements 

• My requirements were broken down to 5 main things;
  • Compact – My Acer Aspire 5738Z laptop was 15.6inch screen and I found traveling with it difficult and a pain, even before the battery gave in. Another key requirement for me getting a laptop was I find my 8 inch IPad Mini too small, therefore I felt 11 inch laptop would again be too small. Finally, my work laptop is 13.3inch which I find works well without any hassle carrying it, therefore I was looking for 13.3-14inch screen.
  • Good Processor – I am a rather impatient person and find few things more frustrating than having a very slow running computer, therefore my minimum requirement was Intel i-5 core processor or equivalent.
  • Price – I was flexible, I wanted to spend my money wisely, I didn’t want to splash out £1,200 if it didn’t match my requirements but was willing to spend to get what I needed.
  • Storage – I have a 1TB External Hard Drive, therefore I wasn’t too concerned with solid state storage, especially with the significant cost reduction in cloud storage in recent years, however I did want to still store documents and music locally, therefore 128GB+ was my minimum requirement.
  • General Usage – 90+% of my activities on a personal computer are; social networking, watching sports or movies, creating and maintaining this blog, and the ability to open and update  documents/pdfs/spreadsheets etc. I am not a heavy gamer or a hard core developer (as much as I sometimes wish I was!)

OS Options 

• Apple Mac – Highly fashionable, high specification but for my medium/low usage requirements was it really worth the money? I decided that this time it wasn’t, although that might change in the future. Also I had a concern around how quickly I could pick up the Mac OS as I’ve always been a Windows man. If I had decided to go down the Apple Mac route I would have gone for a MacBook Pro 13-inch or MacBook Air 13-inch.
• Chromebook – I so nearly brought a Chromebook on multiple occasions, how can you argue with the cost? Favourite ones I considered were the Toshiba Chromebook 2 and Acer Chromebook 13. I like to say it was my performance concerns which made me opt against a Chromebook but if I’m really honest it was probably more a result of me being scared to live without Office and not yet being comfortable having my whole world on the cloud. They really are so cheap through, unless you’re going for a Google Chromebook Pixel 2015, you can get a quality Chromebook for £150-£220.
• Windows – The trusty old friend, the only OS I have ever used consistently (only seen Linux OS not used it!) and the one I’m most comfortable with. I’d also seen a number of friends having problems with Office for Mac when moving documents from Apple to Windows so this was definitely a contributing factor. I also love the variety you get with Windows Laptops, so many different companies making different style laptops with the same OS…although too much choice isn’t always a good thing!

Outcome & Review 

• Based on all the above requirements and options I ended up looking at a number of Windows Laptops: Asus ZenBook UX305, HP Spectre x360 and Dell Inspiron 15 5000 were probably the ones I spent most time considering, alongside the Chromebooks listed earlier.
• In the end I decided upon the Lenovo u31 which I brought in the January sales at John Lewis for £499.95 (although with my company discount I got it even cheaper at £299.95… actually £300 if you include 5p bag!), excluding an Office bundle.
• Here is the overall specification for the Lenovo u31;
  • Processor: Intel Core i7-5500U 2.4 GHz
  • Graphics adapter:
  • Memory: 8192 MB, PC3-12800 DDR3L 1600 MHz
  • Display: 13.3 inch 16:9, 1920×1080 pixel
  • Storage: Samsung MZRPC256HADR-000SO, 256 GB
  • Weight: 1.6 kg
• As you can see from the specification above this hit all my requirements pretty much spot on. Paying £300 for an Intel i-7 core laptop was a massive win for me and I was also swayed by its great graphics card. The storage and weight were more than good enough if not outstanding and the display size was spot on.
• Aesthetically, I also think the Lenovo is very stylish. It reminds me of the old white MacBooks from Apple, only a lot trimmer, the new(ish) Lenovo logo is a nice addition as well.
• I would also highlight that John Lewis’ Customer Service was excellent, not only when buying the laptop in store but the fact you get a 2 year guarantee with the laptop in case I face any problems or issues, fingers crossed it won’t be needed.
• My only slight disappointment is with the tracker pad, it feels somewhat clumsy and sometimes when typing I end up zooming in 200%, but perhaps that is just a time thing. I think the tracker pad on my Dell Latitude E6230 (work laptop) is excellent and obviously so is the Macbook Air one.
• Overall, I’m chuffed with my purchase and it makes me feel stupid for not diving in earlier to buy a replacement, it really has made things easier for me, and helped my relationship no end as I’m no longer constantly wanting to steal my girlfriends laptop for things the IPad just doesn’t work for! I wonder if it’ll be another 7.5 years before I buy my next laptop, or even if laptops will still be around when I do.
• That’s it from me, hope there has been some useful information in there and good luck to all of those on the laptop search at the moment!