Does Anyone Make Decent Budget Laptops?

RBZ5416

My laptop use is little more than that of a tablet   keyboard. Browsing, Office, email etc. Don't need huge processing power, don't need full HD screen & happy with W10. Tablets are too restrictive & so is Chrome, so it needs to be Windows.

Tosh always used to make decent budget kit but of course they're no more. I've always been averse to the likes of Asus & Acer due to support typically being of the pigeon English type from someone on the other side of the world. Is this still the case?

So who makes solidly built sub-£500 laptops with a decent level of support?

psychopomp1

To answer your question "Does Anyone Make Decent Budget Laptops?", the answer is yes. Asus, Lenovo, HP, Acer etc are all decent brands and you can get good & stylish laptops for less than £500 such as this one from Asus:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-ZenBook-UX410UA-GV544T-Inch-Laptop/dp/B07FF9PY8Y

Re: phone support, your will get overseas phone support for nearly every major brand - its just the way of the world these days. It doesn't matter if you paid £2000 or £200 for your laptop.

You should really choose a laptop based on price/spec/brand/style/warranty length rather than what the manufacturers phone support will be like - there's a good chance you may not even need to call support. If you do need support, most (if not all) manufactueres have their own support forums which are excellent and then there's forums such as this or the excellent notebookreview.com for support.

Achraf

1.Acer Swift 1
2.Lenovo flex 11 (2018)
3.HP stream 14-ax010nr

Doyle

I have a cheap Lenovo.  It boots up and shuts down, and in between times doesn't throw mysterious wobblies or freeze, connects to the internet, and has done all of the limited range of things I needed a home laptop to do for the past 2 years without issue.  It would be rubbish as a work machine running multiple tasks at once, but for a home machine it ticks all of the boxes.

Achraf

just because you had 1 bad experience with 1 lenovo doesnt mean theyre all bad

in example the galaxy note 7  was literally blowing up while other samsung products are very durable and last for long

RBZ5416

Just to be clear, I have experience of a few Lenovo products & they seem to be on a continuing downward spiral of poor quality construction zero support. When the current one failed with numerous faults I was astounded to find that not only are there no local service centres any more, but none at all in the UK. So it had to go off to Germany where only one of the faults was addressed & that repair bodged. When the same fault returned a couple of months later Lenovo refused to repair as it was now out of warranty.

Their forums are a complete waste of time as not supported by Lenovo themselves & so many requests for help simply go unanswered. Nothing would inspire me to buy another of their products. So the purpose of the thread was to garner what sort of support is available from other manufacturers. The answer seems to be that it's all crap.

Trollslayer

That matches other comments on Lenovo, it seems they are going for the lower price end of the market.

Achraf

maybe thats how they make budget laptops with the best numbers
i currently have a more than 4 year desktop from hp this laptop for more than 2 years probably and theyre both doing very well though the laptop has  some dead pixels though

Trollslayer

It is always about numbers but personally I would go for something better.
Lenovo was originally a spin off from IBM and don't seem to have found the right niche.

psychopomp1

Not all Lenovo notebooks are of budget quality. Whilst not as good as the former IBM brand they took over, their Thinkpad X series laptops are superb business grade notebooks with high build quality. Not cheap though!