New laptop required

[mdk1]

Hi all,

No1 daughter is off to Uni in September, need to get her a laptop for doing work on.

now as the Easter sales are coming round seems like a good time to buy.

just don't know what to look for, can I get something decent for around £400 or do I need to increase the budget more?

any advice greatly received.

[LHVRS]

What will she be using it for? I would highly recommend a chromebook.

 

[amwphotos]

I always go onto the Dell outlet website and look there Dell outlet

 

Here's one that meets your price, is an i7 processor decent ram and hard disk, a dvd drive (handy  to watch movies) Inspiron 15 inch

[gullyg]

Personally I'd say get a i3,i5 or i7 (i3 is fine for most stuff imho) and as an absolute must a ssd not hdd. 

Edited 5 April, 2017 by gullyg

[Rustynuts]

1 hour ago, amwphotos said:

 

Here's one that meets your price, is an i7 processor decent ram and hard disk, a dvd drive (handy  to watch movies) Inspiron 15 inch

 

Stick the vat on and it's a hundred quid over budget.

[amwphotos]

33 minutes ago, Rustynuts said:

 

Stick the vat on and it's a hundred quid over budget.

Ah, damn, didn't realise they priced without vat. There were various i5 and i3 at £300 ish so +vat it would be on budget.

 

At that price i would go for i5 if possible or i3 at least, 8gb ram, ideally separate 2gb graphics. SSD hard disk would bump up the price whereas a 1TB 'normal' drive give plenty of space for photos, music etc.

 

The 15" Inspiron are pretty good, not super thin or light but powerful and reasonably priced. I have one with i7 processor and do loads of photo and hd video editing with it.

[RainbowFire]

Mike, whatever she gets, make sure she understands the importance of making at least one backup of her work, preferably two, on separate devices. Watching people cry because they've "lost everthing" isn't fun.

 

As for the laptop itseld, I'd say most things out there are going to be suitable, so I'd be looking at different things: students will sit in bed doing work, with the laptop sitting on their duvet.....this will obscure the cooling. So something with a lot of venting would be good. Heavy-duty graphics will be pretty much irrelevant if she's not a gamer. You don't need 2GB to watch Netflix. You'd also need to factor in whether or not things such as Word/Excel are required, and therefore needing to be part of the bundle. (Although if you're still in Cliffe I'm sure we could arrange something *cough* *cough*) Something fairly sturdy and a known brand, and very very much a good bag to put it in. I see far too many in Tescos bags (even from teachers!) Sods law says that the bag will break and the laptop will be unusable at a critical moment in the course (hence the backups ) An SSD helps battery life, is faster and with no moving parts, physically more robust. You pay for this though: you get less GB for your £.

 

 

[Aspman]

Realy she needs to think about how it will be used. Will she be taking it to lectures, does it need a good battery life, will she be typing a lot on it or would she want to use a stylus to make notes.

 

In general i3 is plenty for normal day to day work. In fact really any recent laptop will work, Intel Celerons are best avoided.

Chromebooks might well work for her, might depend what office suite she likes to use although MS Office is available for Android.

 

You might want to take her to a shop to try out the various keyboards if she thinks she will need to do a lot of typing. Or add keyboard, mouse and monitor to your budget if she'll be doing a lot of proper work. Keyboards on laptops and Chromebooks can be really terrible.

 

Whatever she's doing educate her to backup important stuff. The last thing she's want is losing years of work because a laptop has broken.

 

She could even use one of the compute sticks to turn a TV into a computer. that would save space if it's an issue.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html

 

[mbames]

Don;t forget a reasonable resolution screen, unless she will be using it with an external monitor for the majority of time....

[mdk1]

Thanks for the advice guys. Lots to think about. 

She already very good at backing up her work.