Laptops - £5-600 region what to look for? Any recs?

[Kiwi79]

Hi PHers,

Having always had laptops from work I am a bit off the ball in terms of what's good, what to look for. My other half just got made redundant and is having to return her work laptop so I figured I would get her one to help.

Thinking 256gb SSD minimum but what are the good brands these days, processors to look for? Her work on was Dell, Latitude I think (and actually looked pretty decent, many years back we had an ACER but was build quality was a bit cheap)

At this price point I'm guessing not enough for a decent tablet/keyboard surface type thing?

TIA

[imck]

Does it have to be new?

For £3-400 a decent ex-corporate Business Laptop
Lenovo Thinkpad T450.
Dell Latitude E7270.

Home User Laptops are generally lower quality. Batteries/Parts not as available and can be expensive.

Not going to get a decent new Surface. The Go is not great.
Refurb Surface Pro 5 might be an option. Don't forget the Keyboard.

[adsk]

I bought this a few months ago and it cost me £649, now £499.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085YM9K63/ref=cm_sw_r...

It's a premium metal case, good internals and for the type of use you are contemplating it's perfectly capable. It's been reviewed by several magazines and has done well against its price competitors.

Edit: The only thing I don't like about it is the webcam. It's build in to the keyboard and it can be quite tricky to get a decent view of your face when using it.If it's going to be used regularly for web meetings you might want to look elsewhere/avoid other laptops with similarly positioned cameras.

Edited by adsk on Sunday 2nd August 11:15

[GoodDoc]

imck said:

Does it have to be new?

I second that question.

I'm a Mac user, but I needed a dedicated Windows machine for a few tasks. I picked up a ex-corporate Lenovo ThinkPad T430 for less than £150 from eBay.

You probably shouldn't go that cheap, but I got a 3rd gen dual core i7, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD, and it's in much better condition than I expected for the price, (I even picked up an hot swap drive bay for £10 so I can swap the DVD burner with an hard drive when I need to). It's copped with all the tasks I've thrown at it, some of which were fairly heavy duty, and has ended up being used more often than I ever though it would, and has been a brilliant value for money PC.

£500 will be more than enough to get a more modern more capable version, and having used the T430 for the last year I'd rather spend a couple of hundred on a good quality 3 year old corporate laptop than a cut down bargain basement brand new laptop.

[ACCYSTAN]

Got to have a SSD hard drive.
The 256gb is about the right size , can always add an additional external SSD or usb drive if you need the extra space.

USB 3.0 drives are also helpful, USB 2.0 can be tiresome if you have lots of data to move about.

[51mes]

Quad core 8GB of ram and at minimum 256gb of SSD, Is where I would aim for. I think 12-14" is a good screen size and a 1920x1080 resolution fits that size of screen. I use an Asus USB monitor mb169 when not travelling light for more screen estate.

I've recently thankfully got rid of a tablet style machine for work, the love lasted until the first time I travelled with it, it needs a lot of flat space to use it, it's not something you can use the keyboard easily on the sofa, or on the fold down table on the back of a pendelino.

Cheap student laptops are that - cheap, as others have said one or 2 generations back business laptops will be much better and may come with windows 10 Pro rather than home..

[Kiwi79]

Some great advice, thank you. I think we might look at a 2nd hand Latitude then seeing as she liked that, just question of finding good sources of legit laptops (ebay for anything over a few hundred, especially tech has me worried). Wonder if she should put a cheeky offer in to keep it (we did ask if as part of her redundancy she could keep it but that was met with a no) I really hadn't realised how expensive now "business" level laptops were. Checked the specs on my current work laptop and it has 16GB Ram on an admittedly old Lenovo T460 which seems way more than most of the 5-600 quiders at PC World.

[imck]

Lots of Businesses selling refurb ex-corporate Machines on Ebay

1 Year Warranty on this one for example from a well known IT seller
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/14-1-Lenovo-ThinkPad-T4...