7 top laptops to buy in 2015
Currently with so much laptops choice on the market, finding the perfect laptop computer for your needs can be hard. Please take a look at our 2015 Laptop Buying Guide for tips on how to choose the right laptop if you having trouble deciding what you want.
Multimedia and general-purpose laptops
These are the laptops we think present great value for money for students and families who want to be able to browse the web, send emails, write documents, watch movies and perhaps play a few games.
Asus EeeBook X205TA – a brilliant bargain Chromebook beater
Asus EeeBook X205TA is the super cheap answer to Chromebook. Costing just £180 and coming pre-loaded with a year of Microsoft Office 365 personal and 1TB of OneDrive storage it looks to be amazing value. normally with ultra cheap laptop, things fall apart when it comes to build. Yes, this is an all-plastic machine but we reckon it’s one of the best-looking netbook-style devices ever made. Performance is perfectly reasonable, too, as long as you don’t push it too hard. It’s happy to browse the web, edit documents and play videos, which is about as much as you should expect from it.
Dell Inspiron 15 5000 – A top-notch general purpose laptop for students and familes
In the Inspiron 15 5000, Dell has rekindled our love for the basic general-purpose laptop. Not only does it have the signature Dell build quality and a reasonable screen, it also has a surprisingly powerful processor and even squeezes in a dedicated graphics chip. Not only that, it survived more than six hours in our Dell latitude d530 battery burn test, which is important for working on the move.
Ultra-portables and hybrid devices
Super slim laptops are great for chucking into a bag without much thought, and many of them offer reasonable performance and great battery life, too. Meanwhile, laptops that split or fold into tablets at a moment’s notice are a versatile and cost effective way of getting the best of both worlds.
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 – Third time lucky for the premium hybrid tablet
Microsoft has had two bites of the tablet/laptop hybrid cherry and has seen moderate success with both its devices. However, with 2014’s Surface Pro 3 we finally saw the firm master the art, with its devices division putting into action the lessons it learned from the first two Surface iterations. What we have here is a refined, sleek tablet combined with a great keyboard (at extra cost) and stylus. This, combined with a wide range of specifications means it has real mass-market appeal.
Apple 13-inch Macbook Air – Apple’s super thin laptop just got even better
Macbook Air has always been one of the slimmest and lightest laptops around, but this year’s model now has an even lower price and 18 and a half hours of Apple a1281 battery life. Our only real complaint is that its screen isn’t quite as good as we’d expect for a laptop in this price range, and we’re particularly disappointed with the lack of a full-HD panel.
Asus Transformer Book T100TA – The definitive budget two-in-one laptop
Asus Transformer T100TA has redefined what we can expect from a sub-£300 laptop. It’s far from the most powerful device on the market with its Intel Atom processor, but if you’re after the ultimate in flexibility combined with great built quality and reasonably long battery life, you should absolutely pick the T100TA.
Gaming laptops
You pay a premium for the portability of gaming laptops, but they offer freedom to gamers that a 15kg desktop PC simply can’t match. You can play Splinter Cell on your sofa, Fallout at your friend’s house and LoL at a LAN party without being constrained by the size of your rig.
Acer Aspire V15 Nitro – Stylish design and great performance at a surprising price
Acer hasn’t released a proper gaming laptop in years, so we we curious as to how it would turn out. It was a pleasant surprise, with a wonderfully-built 15.6in chassis with a textured lid and matt black wrist rest. The Full HD screen is one of the better panels we’ve seen on a laptop and its Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics card make it a capable multimedia and gaming machine. It’s slightly cheaper than its rivals, too, although the model we reviewed lacks an SSD, which may put some people off.
Chillblast Defiant 2 Mini – A petite powerhouse gaming laptop
Chillblast’s laptop is a superb 13-inch gaming system with a powerful quad-core Core i7 i7-4710MQ processor and a super fast 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics processor. It not only manages to combine all the speed and power of larger gaming systems into its smart 13in chassis, but it does so at a competitive price without any compromises in performance.
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