Recommendations - Sub £500 student laptop

[Boom78]

Evening all, my daughter needs a laptop for A-levels/uni but I simply haven’t got a clue when it comes to latest laptops. I’m guessing it will need to be light, good battery life, windows, 14”,Budget £500 tops.

Anyone got any recommendations or ones to avoid?

Ta
B78

[SteBrown91]

Tbh the models and variants change that often I have no idea on specifics- but I would stick to the following:

At least an i5 processor (or similar spec AMD)
At least 8gb of RAM
Make sure the hard drive is SSD.

Stick to the main brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) and you can’t go too far wrong.

[d_a_n1979]

Boom78 said:

Evening all, my daughter needs a laptop for A-levels/uni but I simply haven’t got a clue when it comes to latest laptops. I’m guessing it will need to be light, good battery life, windows, 14”,Budget £500 tops.

Anyone got any recommendations or ones to avoid?

Ta
B78

I'd personally recommend an M1 MacBook Air; something like this:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285816369855?itmmeta=01...

We bought one for our eldest niece for her last year in Liverpool Uni doing nursing as her Window's laptop was just useless; it was a HP IIRC - constant issues and even in warranty it'd go back to Scan, get fixed apparently and then still have issues... She gave up in the end and I lent her my M1MBA for a few weeks whilst we were on holiday and it ticked all her boxes; so we bought her one

She had a budget of £500 (we bought it for her, she's more important things to spend her money on like nights out )

It's been faultless for nearly 12 months now

[Percy Cushion]

You can get a MacBook Pro over seven years old for around £250 - £300, just install the latest OS and Windows if it doesn’t already have it. It’ll last longer than a new laptop.

[Jamescrs]

Lenovo think pads and idea pads are both pretty decent in my experience, I’ve had my own since 2018 and it’s still going strong though I did update the old Hard drive for a SSD at some point in the past.

I bought my daughter an idea pad for her school work and it’s been great too.

I have a Thinkpad from work which is also great despite being loaded with various pieces of commercial software which are generally a pain but that’s my companies fault not the laptop

[Boom78]

I’ve actually got MacBook Air of my own. It’s pretty good but not sure about buying second hand one though.

[beambeam1]

Boom78 said:

I’ve actually got MacBook Air of my own. It’s pretty good but not sure about buying second hand one though.

Loads of them for £615 in great condition on the CeX website who also throw in a 24 month warranty. It's a no brainer.

[seyre1972]

beambeam1 said:

Boom78 said:

I’ve actually got MacBook Air of my own. It’s pretty good but not sure about buying second hand one though.

Loads of them for £615 in great condition on the CeX website who also throw in a 24 month warranty. It's a no brainer.

Or refurbished direct from apple themselves

Apple Refurbished

I’ve had an refurbished 27” iMac - was still going strong after 7 years (just been replaced with a newer M2 Mac Mini and a larger screen) iMac been reinstalled to be given to a charity.

[Boom78]

As much as I like mine I’m just not sure on an M1 air for my daughter to be honest. The lack of standard USBs, price, weight, non windows, MS office compatibility, metal finish plus they can be a ball ache to use (maybe that just me).

I will take a trip to curry’s and John Lewis to see what they’ve got.

[d_a_n1979]

Boom78 said:

As much as I like mine I’m just not sure on an M1 air for my daughter to be honest. The lack of standard USBs, price, weight, non windows, MS office compatibility, metal finish plus they can be a ball ache to use (maybe that just me).

I will take a trip to curry’s and John Lewis to see what they’ve got.

They're extremely easy to use; they work straight out of the box; they don't have constant issues/updates like Microsoft (as I've found in the past inc my wife's Surface which is utter crap at the best of times)

You can get USB C hubs to connect everything to without issue/not expensive

All my Macs have MS Office on them; it works perfectly well and just as good as an Windows laptop etc

It may be that you find Mac hard to use, but you can't tar them for everyone else on your basis

Since I started working for the company I do 2 years ago; there was only me on a Mac, all my colleagues in Dublin had Windows laptops; they've all had numerous issues with the platforms we need to use for the work we do and constant hardware/software issues. They've all got Macs now & not one of them has any of the issues they did in the first place

[richhead]

Jamescrs said:

Lenovo think pads and idea pads are both pretty decent in my experience, I’ve had my own since 2018 and it’s still going strong though I did update the old Hard drive for a SSD at some point in the past.

I bought my daughter an idea pad for her school work and it’s been great too.

I have a Thinkpad from work which is also great despite being loaded with various pieces of commercial software which are generally a pain but that’s my companies fault not the laptop

i have an lenovo ideapad, it doesnt have a ssd it uses chips or some other magic, not the most powerful thing, but battery lasts about 9 hours, does word prossesing / surfing/ email just fine, and was about £150 new. Had it about 3 years with no problem .
Its all i need, and at that price almost disposable.
I will get another if it ever dies.

[CheesecakeRunner]

Normally I'd always say a Mac. But for this use-case and budget, I'd say just go and get whatever Dell sell for 500 quid.

[mmm-five]

richhead said:

i have an lenovo ideapad, it doesnt have a ssd it uses chips or some other magic, not the most powerful thing, but battery lasts about 9 hours, does word prossesing / surfing/ email just fine, and was about £150 new. Had it about 3 years with no problem .
Its all i need, and at that price almost disposable.
I will get another if it ever dies.

Probably an eMMC (basically a soldered-in type of SD card)...which is many times slower than a proper SSD (and depending on version could be as slow as a HDD)...but obviously cheaper too.

The problem with the cheaper 'notebooks' is that they also tend to come with tiny amounts of RAM, and Windows will try to use the eMMC storage as virtual memory when more RAM is needed. When this happens everything slows down. At least with an SSD the slowdown is not as great.

Depending on eMMC/SSD specs, the difference could be as much as 35x (i.e. 140MB/s for v4.5 of 250MB/s for v5.1 eMMC vs 5GB/s for a gen4 NVMe SSD).

[sly fox]

CheesecakeRunner said:

Normally I'd always say a Mac. But for this use-case and budget, I'd say just go and get whatever Dell sell for 500 quid.

I'd go a different path and buy from Dell Refurbished site - either on the dell site or via various Amazon marketplace sellers.
You still get a year guarantee, and are saving 50% on new.

I needed a windows machine to use some OBDII coding - got a decent 15" Dell for £160 delivered. Battery still gives 5-6 hours use, it's fast enough for any office app/ student use other than Gaming.

Buy her one this year, ebay it next year and get another newer one if she needs it etc.

[richhead]

mmm-five said:

Probably an eMMC (basically a soldered-in type of SD card)...which is many times slower than a proper SSD (and depending on version could be as slow as a HDD)...but obviously cheaper too.

The problem with the cheaper 'notebooks' is that they also tend to come with tiny amounts of RAM, and Windows will try to use the eMMC storage as virtual memory when more RAM is needed. When this happens everything slows down. At least with an SSD the slowdown is not as great.

Depending on eMMC/SSD specs, the difference could be as much as 35x (i.e. 140MB/s for v4.5 of 250MB/s for v5.1 eMMC vs 5GB/s for a gen4 NVMe SSD).

Oh i agree its not the last word in speed, But before it i had a high end work laptop, all singing and dancing, So i would imagine 5 years old now, had a ssd lots of memory etc, and i was using it for cad etc.
I dont use cad now and the ideapad works just as well doing regular things,
Just an option for a low cost machine, Not everyone needs a super fast machine was my point.
its abit like having a ferrari and only ever driving one mile to the local shop everyday, nice, but abit of a waste.
I would think i can do 95% of what my old one did on my new one just fine.
And it does actually start up faster. And the battery life is way bettter than any laptop ive ever had.
I use the ideapad for remotely engineering a hypercar in wec, all live data telemetry etc, and its fine for that.
In fact i have 2 of them going then, as need more screens.
But again not massively high computor power needed.Just lots of data.

[Shiv_P]

Percy Cushion said:

You can get a MacBook Pro over seven years old for around £250 - £300, just install the latest OS and Windows if it doesn’t already have it. It’ll last longer than a new laptop.

This is a ridiculous suggestion, a 7 year old macbook?

[Masiv]

https://www.hotukdeals.com/tag/laptop

Have a look here for current offers.

[C5_Steve]

A leftfield choice perhaps but my sister used a Chromebook for her entire time at Uni with no issues whatsoever. Worth having a look at unless she needs to use a specific piece of software for something as you have a bit more choice around that price.

[mikey_b]

I bought my daughter a refurb Lenovo laptop a year or so ago. It was superb - something very much like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0CZQW8THC

I've been so pleased with it that I'll be getting another later in the year for my other daughter's birthday.

[richhead]

C5_Steve said:

A leftfield choice perhaps but my sister used a Chromebook for her entire time at Uni with no issues whatsoever. Worth having a look at unless she needs to use a specific piece of software for something as you have a bit more choice around that price.

also a good idea, people very much over estimate how good a computer they need. The basic ones are better than the best from just a few years ago, and unless you are doing something special, mainly not needed