Laptop recommendation

[dickie davies]

OK geeks, I'm looking for a laptop, budget less than £300
I've been told to stay away from e buyer as their returns policy is a nightmare

Suggestions please

 

[Pokes28]

What do you use your laptop for? If it is just for surfing and e-mail and nothing more, I've had great success with the in-laws with a chromebook. Sucker is light and fast, and but has a lot of limitations. If you need a normal windows laptop, then I'm probably not as much help for you on where to buy something.

 

[Bill Walker]

Dell.com

 

[Bigga]

Yeah, £300 is peanuts for a decent spec computer.

HP Stream for £179. It's Chrome-like, but you get a year's Microsoft 365 subscription for free.

 

[dickie davies]

It's for the lad when he's off to uni, so if there's a product anyone can suggest as I'm a techno no nothing

 

[Bigga]

First suggestion; increase the amount to pay for the laptop and it opens things up.

Your lad would be less likely to complain about his laptop a year or so into having it.

 

[dickie davies]

As I said, I'm a no nothing when it comes to technology and what's good, average or poor
There are ads at the top of this page for Microsoft products between £179 and £229 that state "everything you need"
You're telling me that's not the case and so I need to increase the budget
So what should the budget be and what products should I be looking at?

 

[che_don_john]

If your lad is using it for Uni work and maybe a bit of media stuff (ie. watching films, playing music, etc.) then this should do the job:

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.johnlewis.com/acer-aspire-es1-512-laptop-intel-celeron-4gb-ram-500gb-15-6-black/p1747863" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.johnlewis.com/acer-aspire-es ... k/p1747863</a>

Acers are very decent these days (I have an Aspire, albeit a higher end one as I bought it to play games a few years back).

This has a 500GB hard drive which is more than enough space for what he'll need.
The only downside to this laptop is that it's Windows 8.1, which I think is a crap operating system but unavoidable these days.

John Lewis are a decent retailer, too (think they still offer long warranties but you should check).

Furthermore, with the £70 left in your budget you can pick up a Microsoft Office (doesn't need to be latest, can be an older version for less) so he'll have all the stuff he needs for his uni work. Or, download a software called LibreOffice, which is a free alternative and does the same thing.

Don't bother buying an anti virus - download a free one instead (I use Avast and Malwarebytes together; AVG is also decent)

 

[Bigga]

As I said, I'm a no nothing when it comes to technology and what's good, average or poor
There are ads at the top of this page for Microsoft products between £179 and £229 that state "everything you need"
You're telling me that's not the case and so I need to increase the budget
So what should the budget be and what products should I be looking at?

Those products are internet based or have 2Gb memory and 32Gb hard drive max, so it really depends on what your son will be using it for. Most kids tend to use it as a multitasking tool, i.e., lots of pages open FB, general browsing, YT, music, videos, streaming, so you'll want a machine that can handle that.

If you know he won't interested in that and he'll just be doing uni work, those suggestions at the start are fine for now, but I suspect you're looking at, at least, £100 more for usable spec.

 

[tommcfc]

If you're willing to stretch your budget a little further..... <a class="postlink" href="http://www.alienware.co.uk/Landings/laptops.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.alienware.co.uk/Landings/laptops.aspx</a>