Boring advice needed

[TheJimi]

A friend has asked me for recommendations of a sub £500 laptop - preferably sub £400.

Despite me trying to convince her just to buy the new M1 MacBookAir and be done with it, pointing out this will be her second 400 quid laptop in two or three years.

I'll be honest, I'm kinda lost here, partly because I'm not really seeing anything that I'd be happy to buy with my own money.

Anyone willing to offer some recommendations?

[crofty1984]

What's it for?
To be honest, for most people's use I'd just go for the size of screen and colour they like. I know HP are meant to be rubbish.
I have a Lenovo Yoga that is pretty good for day to day use.

[nikaiyo2]

What does she use it for ?

I would say a Chromebook if she can get away with it!

I bought a £199 CB, on offer admittedly, to take on holiday instead of an ipad pro, its great for web browsing media consumption.

Edited by nikaiyo2 on Monday 23 November 11:07

[TheJimi]

Microsoft office, spotify, internet and and streaming - was her answer.

I did wonder about a chrombook myself. Kinda occurs to me that she'd get better kit with a chromebook for the equivalent money.

Only snag is that offline functionality is limited with chromebooks.

[S6PNJ]

Dell refurb store - search by screen size and processor, pick cheapest. Any of those systems will be fine - I'm on a > 8 year old laptop (i3, 6GB RAM, SSD) and it's plenty powerful enough for MS Office and web browsing etc.

[TheJimi]

Good call about the Dell refurb store. I'd forgotten about that.

Cheers!

[RizzoTheRat]

Another vote for the Dell refurb store, my wife and I both have Insprion 2-in-1's from there. Bear in mind the quoted prices are ex-vat though.

[toohuge]

If the existing laptop is only 2/3 years old, what's exactly wrong with it and what is a new one going to achieve?

If it's got a spinning hdd and 8gb ram in it, a change to SSD plus a full win 10 reinstall with make it more than useable and cost about 30 quid...