Recommendations for a basic laptop

[galapogos]

Hi guys,

My wife needs a basic laptop for surfing web/MS Office type of usage, so I need some help to shortlist potential models. Here's the criteria:
1. Price: <$1000.
2. Portability: The smaller/lighter it is the better, she'll be carrying it around.
3: Battery life: The higher the better
4: Design: Simple, not flowery, not a big priority.
5. Performance: Not a big issue, a Core i3 and 4GB or more memory would do, SSD would be a bonus.
6: Brand: Not a big issue, but prefer it not to be Lenovo as we had a bad experience the last time.

Any recommendations? Do Ultrabooks go for <$1K nowadays? Or are regular laptops more worth it?

Thanks!

 

[melovelinux]

This one looks good

http://www.courts.com.sg/Products/P...INTEL-CORE-I53337U-4GB-WIN-8-V517153334G50ASS

 

[zXioNGz]

If you are looking at only HD screen 1366x768, there's quite handful of them available at that pricing, but for FHD screen 1920x1080, they are at least 1.2k and above, currently the culprit for higher cos is the screen resolution, not really inner specs

 

[galapogos]

1366x768 is fine. Remember this is for my wife for just surfing and doing MS office work. Portability and battery life are much more important.

 

[zXioNGz]

1366x768 is fine. Remember this is for my wife for just surfing and doing MS office work. Portability and battery life are much more important.

True, I'm also looking for 1 that's mainly for productivity like Microsoft office, but the problem with 1366x768 is that the amount of screen seen are so little and makes it kind of hard to do work imo. I'm also stucked at finding a good 13inch ultrabook, I'm looking at the i5 variants of ASUS UX31A

 

[brown19e]

head down to Best Denki or Harvey Norman... alot of laptops below 1k now. Just accompanied a friend down last week he bought the Asus Vivobook 11 inch for only 799SGD.

don't expect the best for performance though.

 

[galapogos]

Is there any point in waiting for the next PC show/IT show/whatever they call it? When's that anyway?

zXioNGz, was looking at the UX31A but that's clearly way over our budget.

 

[pcbaby]

Go check out the Asus S400CA, i think BD or HN is selling @ $999 now.

 

[zXioNGz]

Go check out the Asus S400CA, i think BD or HN is selling @ $999 now.

That one not bad, but for that form factor, at 1.8kg it's very heavy

the 11 inch S200 also not bad at 1.4kg only, but it's i3

 

[galapogos]

Thanks. Yeah, 1.8kg I think is too heavy. It's a 14" too, I think we're looking at 13" or possibly even 11". The S200 might be ok, i3 is sufficient for her usage, but how's the battery life?