Too 4K-ing expensive? Five full HD laptops for work and play

Dell Inspiron 17 7000

It’s not the cheapest full-HD laptop around, but Dell’s Inspiron 17 7000 still represents good value for money. The main attraction is the large, 17.3-inch full-HD touchscreen, which is bright and bold, and ideal for watching films and TV programmes at home. It also provides a terrific view of all the Dell bloatware that pops up on screen every few seconds telling you to "back up this" and "download that" all the time.

The Inspiron has enough power to handle more serious work as well, thanks to a Haswell Core i7-4510U processor running at 2.0GHz (3.1GHz with Turbo) that racked up scores of 2511 and 2840 points in the Home and Work suites of PCMark 8.

Its 16GB of memory will help out with photo- or video-editing work, and the 1TB hybrid drive provides plenty of room for storing all your music, photos and videos. There’s even a GeForce GT 750M graphics card that will let you indulge in a spot of casual gaming as well. It comes with a DVD drive which could prove handy here.

The Inspiron weighs a full 3.3kg, so it probably won’t leave home very often, but it managed to last for bang-on five hours when running PCMark 8’s battery test, so it’ll see you through a few episodes of Game of Thrones before it needs a top-up. Our review unit cost £849, but you can trim that down to £779 if you don’t mind opting for 8GB of memory and a conventional hard drive instead.