Laptop recommendations?

[Oneflewover]

Evening all. We need another laptop for the kids to do their school work on from home and I wondered if anyone could recommend me something around the £300 mark. I know absolutely nothing about it at all, so don't really know where to begin! Cheers.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

This is a simple guide that covers the basics I am sure others will add to it.

For me the main thing Is RAM buy the the one that has the most, next if its going to be mainly for home use get the biggest screen you can afford.

If you can get one with solid state hard drive rather than the old mechanical type that is a big plus.

If you are going to use it unplugged you need to look at battery life per charge.

I have an Asus laptop with 6 GB or ram and it does what I need I would say 4GB minimum.

 

[Oneflewover]

Thanks chippy, really appreciate that

 

[lupinehorror]

@Chippy_Tea gave good advice but i'd go with 8GB of RAM minimum. if it'll be running windows 10 it's a greedy OS as far as memory goes.

 

[obscure]

Speaking as someone who has being working from home for the past nine months one of the first things I obtained was an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. You can pick up monitors fairly cheaply second hand using a laptop on the sofa to watch Netflix's or browse the internet is not the same as using a laptop for 7-8 hours a day.

 

[Oneflewover]

@Chippy_Tea gave good advice but i'd go with 8GB of RAM minimum. if it'll be running windows 10 it's a greedy OS as far as memory goes.

Speaking as someone who has being working from home for the past nine months one of the first things I obtained was an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. You can pick up monitors fairly cheaply second hand using a laptop on the sofa to watch Netflix's or browse the internet is not the same as using a laptop for 7-8 hours a day.

Problem is I've been working from home for months, wife is now working from home and as of yesterday the kids are learning from home. Haven't got enough room for all those external screens and keyboards!

 

[Leon103]

Unfortunately due to covid and brexit the options are limited at present. I did manage to buy the wife a new one before Christmas. It was a Lenovo.

 

[kelper]

£300 is the budget, so 8GB is probably not realistic unless sacrifices are made in other areas. An SSD will make the performance snappy but good graphics performance is necessary to stream videos. My little ASUS Transformer does everything I need EXCEPT it won't stream video to the Chromecast on my TV.
eBay has a very good set of filters where you can specify screen size, memory and storage to see where to spend your money.
You might consider a computer shop for a recent, but used, machine. I'd suggest a 13" screen but compare that to what you have - it is the diagonal measurement of the screen. I'd recommend at least 100GB of storage.

Does the school not have recommendations or access to educational discounts?

 

[jof]

A word of caution on SSD drives.
Please remember to back up your data, as they don't last as long as spinning rust drives.

Although SSD drives have lives measured in many hundreds of thousands of write cycles, computers can easily use them up if you are running os or programs that write a lot of files (anything that writes continuous log files is particularly bad)

At work we had a whole batch die at about the 3 year mark. Mix of business spec HPs and Dells, so not just cheap laptops either.

 

[prog99]

At work we had a whole batch die at about the 3 year mark. Mix of business spec HPs and Dells, so not just cheap laptops either.

I used to build servers at work and it was scary how many drives arrived from the vendors still shrink wrapped doa. These were expensive hp enterprise grade ones too (spinning rust).

Back onto ssd drives, my current laptops one is nearly 8 years old but it was at the time the best one I could afford without bankrupting myself (£350 for 512gb).

 

[Obadiah Boondoggle]

This is a good website

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/
Just bought two from there and the service was good

 

[Chippy_Tea]

@Chippy_Tea gave good advice but i'd go with 8GB of RAM minimum. if it'll be running windows 10 it's a greedy OS as far as memory goes.

I originally posted 6 GB minimum but having looked at a few reviews I think he will struggle at £300, mine works fine with 6 GB.

 

[kelper]

My laptop has 2GB and is running the very latest update 20H2 with no issues. But more RAM is better.

Does anyone use a Chromebook? - I see 64GB is about the maximum STORAGE offered.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Speaking as someone who has being working from home for the past nine months one of the first things I obtained was an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. You can pick up monitors fairly cheaply second hand using a laptop on the sofa to watch Netflix's or browse the internet is not the same as using a laptop for 7-8 hours a day.

His budget is £300 if you add external screens and keyboards it's going to reduce the spec of the laptop.

 

[Oneflewover]

Thanks all. We've gone for a refurbished laptop to get the recommended spec within budget

 

[kelper]

Thanks all. We've gone for a refurbished laptop to get the recommended spec within budget

What spec did you get in the end?

 

[Appleyard]

Haven't got enough room for all those external screens and keyboards!

Buy a Gogirl Chromecast.

 

[Oneflewover]

What spec did you get in the end?

8gb RAM, 180gb memory, SSD, 13" screen

 

[kelper]

Excellent. Was it a well-known brand? Did it come with any extra software like Office? Was it in budget?

 

[Oneflewover]

Excellent. Was it a well-known brand? Did it come with any extra software like Office? Was it in budget?

Dunno, I passed all of your helpful comments to SWMBO and she did the deed