What To Buy: Q35 or Q45

As I have commented elsewhere, the new Q45 is looking very interesting but question marks over its battery life have me looking at the predecessor - the Q35.

The Q45 with 2GB RAM & 160GB HDD is £750
The Q35 with 1.5GB RAM & 160GB HDD is £740

The spanner in the works comes when you consider "second hand but unused" Q35s, which come in around the £550-650 mark.

 

I decided I am going to go for the Q45. After putting some of my finance degree to some use, it works out that equivalently specifying the Q35 works out only £40 cheaper (for an unboxed version at that).

I will be ordering it tomorrow afternoon unless somebody gives me a good reason not to!

I of course will bring you the review once it arrives.

 

Some thoughts:

Q35: Slightly thinner, more style (if the red one), probably ahead on the battery life.

Q45: Newer chipset, faster GPU, RAM upgradeable to 4GB.

I haven't seen the two side-by-side to be able to compare the displays but there is a chance that the Q45, being newer, has a slighly better display than the Q35.

John

 

It seems easier to just get the Q45 at the moment, and of course the review will be quite helpful for others... it is out of stock in most places.

 

PCPlus have a review of the Q45 this month. I haven't had chance to read it yet, but I'll summarise it when I do

 

I'm going on holiday on Sunday so I really need to get it sorted ASAP... I wish these choices were easy to make!

 

At Laptops Direct they are now both the same price. Does that add to your confusion?

I think you prefer the Q45 and value the better potential performance over the Q35's probable slightly longer battery time.

I'm sure that you've already been though the Q45 thread looking for problems. I can't remember anything serious.

John

 

Ok...to summarise:

They had some "initial misgivings about the viewing angles" of the screen, but were "pleasantly surprised by its performance" and described it as "impressive", "in all but the most unforgiving of lighting conditions".

They were very happy with how the machine coped with heavy system loads, at one point running all of the apps in the MS Office suite whilst downloading HD movie trailers.

The weren't impressed with the built-in speakers.

In terms of battery life, I don't know how (or if) they tested, but they quote 6Hrs.

Their final thought was that the machine is "Flexible, but not fun.".

Note to mods:
If quoting magazines is unacceptable on the forums, then please accept my apologies, and remove any offending material

Cheers
Neil

 

My 2p worth is that the Q35 is over powered as it is for a light-weight compact notebook. The fan is large and the noise is a bit too intrusive at home when it picks up speed and the Q45 might be worse with more power. I doubt the screen's are different and the Q35 has a very nice screen.

 

If you get an unboxed Q35 for £650 you can add a 2GB DIMM of ram to boost the memory up to 2.5GB. 2GB sticks aren't all that expensive as well now and you should be able to pick up a compatible one for roughly £70 so you would working out cheaper in this case. The Q35 does have good battery life but I have no idea how the Q45 stacks up. Both the machines are excellent though.

 

Where have you seen the un-boxed versions around?

 

I personally haven't seen any open-box versions but Google is slowing that you can get £60 off the Q35 at Currys using a discount code.

John