I have just been looking for a laptop for my son - he’s had an old desktop for ages and it won’t run half the stuff he wants so we thought we’d treat him. There was a budget but looking online I knew we could get something decent. Plus he wanted it urgently (don’t they always).

Because of this so-called urgency we stopped off at PC World first. I’d had a look on the internet so knew roughly what was available. We had a look around and decided on the Dell 1545 as it had the right specs to play Oblivion (a 2006 game) and looked nice and sleek like Dells generally do.

The salesman eventually came over and we started talking about it and how I didn’t want the add on Norton or TechGuy set up. We mentioned gaming and he immediately said it would not be good enough. No word of a lie - he actually said at one point that this Dell didn’t have a graphics card. Now, Oblivion runs perfectly fine on my daughter’s 4+ yr old laptop so I knew that a new, if not exactly high-spec, Dell should be OK. But no, he wouldn’t have it. I needed a dual-core processor and a better this that and the other. I ended up walking out.

I am now about to set up the Acer I bought from Comet, same price but slightly better spec with a similar glossy, dark blue lid.  The guys in Comet said that it would an older game no problem (thinking about it, daughter runs Sims 3 perfectly fine on her older laptop so I don’t foresee any problems).

Can someone out there vindicate what I think - that the guy in PC World was trying to pull a fast one; mother on her own with teenage son = easy target maybe? Or do Dell really sell laptops without graphics cards?