I am looking for one or both of the following types of laptop. I do not know where to start in terms of detailed spec or pricing. Assistance anyone?
Laptop 1. For me. 14" screen, reasonably light and powerful, but only so that it works quickly rather than needing it for gaming. To be used for basic business and browsing purposes and some TV/YouTube watching. Spend no more than £500? Will require MS Office. I do want SSD drive.
I have seen an Acer Aspire 3 A314-31 Pentium N4200 4GB 256GB SSD 14 Inch Windows 10 for £280 but is that good enough? Or is an HP 240 G6 Core i3-7020U 8GB 1TB 14 Inch Windows 10 for £335 better even though it has a HDD?
Laptop 2. For my student son. Will need 15.6" screen both otherwise I suspect similar spec to me. SSD drive. Also want to spend no more than £500.
Is this any good? Lenovo V130 Core i5-7200U 8GB 256GB SSD DVDRW 15.6 Inch FHD Windows 10 for £430.
All available at Laptops direct in their sale..
Thanks.
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I would steer well clear of the HP, I bought one recently, with the 1TB non SSD drive, and its slower than a slow thing in a traffic jam, and infested with unwanted "do all these things in the background using the slow hard drive" "helpful" HP stuff.
Avoid.
The rest looks OK.
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Buy Office 365 Home instead of office software for the computers. $80 USD per year total for, 6 users/devices, the Office suite and 1TB cloud storage for each user.
You can still download the software to work offline.
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Students get Office 365 Education for free, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, and classroom tools.
If all you want to do is browse, office etc any Intel i3 or equivalent is perfectly adequate. It will likely come with 4Gb memory - add another 4Gb for £20-£25 from Crucial etc. The supplier of the computer is likely to ask for a lot more if buying it in a shop.
I have bought Acer & Lenovo laptops for many a year - all good for 3 years+ - issues later with screen hinge linkage & dead keys.
As a present for my 70th my sons bought me an all singing & dancing HP - 3 years later all well - slowed up of late but the latest Win 10 release + AVG +CCleaner brought it back to as new.
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My last replacement was a "renewed" Thinkpad T430 i5 with 16GB ram, 240GB SSD, and the 1600 x 900 screen (some have lower res screen which is also not very bright). Cost £325 IIRC. Starts in 10-15 secs, plenty fast (core i5 3230M).
Probably still available on Amazon. I rang up the vendor to ask if it had a DVI connector. They said no, but sent me a dock with one FOC!
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If you will be taking your laptop out and about on-site I'd go for something like Manatee's refurbed Thinkpad.
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I'd agree with Kevin. We looked at the refurbed Thinkpads a few weeks ago after Mrs B convinced herself her Lenovo Ideapad 100 was no longer fit for purpose. I still think it was salvageable but you have to recognise you can't win
We ended up with a better Ideapad, better processor, double RAM/HDD from JLP at £199 as the 12" footprint and weight were critical.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Thu 12 Sep 19 at 20:10
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I bought an HP SSD drive laptop 18 months ago and I would hate to go back to the old days of slow starting. The HP is very plasticky but so far robust. My previous ASUS had a much more premium feel with metal and soft touch rubber but the hinge fell apart.
As you probably know budget and mid price laptops have moved away from touch screens. For a casual user like me that's a retrograde step and I miss that feature. So if it matters to you check that it has that capability.
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New Laptop required - Zero
