[Closed] Best laptop for around £300?

Acer Swift 1 or a Lenovo Ideapad 3series off Amazon?  If the seller is genuine then it’s normally pretty safe to buy off there

https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/laptop/best-budget-laptop-2018-3214583/

Your specs aren't very demanding so pretty much anything will do. Just get something with an SSD and it'll run pretty quickly.

Sorry, not a recommendation for, but one against.

I bought an HP Pavilion the other day. All good except, the touchpad when lightly tapped, sounded a bit like a crisp packet. Research online suggested it was a common fault. Avoid.

I ended up going Dell Inspiron and upping my budget a bit. Happy with it so far.

Sub £500 I'd always advise just going to PC World, John Lewis etc. and just trying them out. At that price range the spec is all much of a muchness so differences come down to things like screen and keyboard which are a more personal choice (I hate glossy screens and tablet keys for example).

If you find one you like then google reviews of it and if mostly positive buy it...

thanks so far folks

what the hell is SSD? ive noticed the hard drives are now only 32gb or 128gb?? what gives?? I thought standard these days would be 1TB

all the RAM side of things I understand, and most are around 4gb-8gb which is pretty quick combined with a i3 processor but ive absolutely no idea what the 32gb harddrives are all about? that's lets than my phone!

ideally john lewis would be good for the 2 year warranty, had a dell one before so will look into that also

SSD is a ‘Solid State Drive’ - a hard drive that isn’t mechanical that requires spinning at high speed to write your data. More akin to storage on modern smartphones. Bit like the difference between an old floppy disk and usb. These older hardrrives  tend to be much slower to access all that storage, but the older harddrives can be found on the cheaper laptops (I know because I have one!) SSD is the way to go. It means your laptop will be quicker in almost all areas from boot up to saving items etc.

storage is a swizz I agree. Go for more if budget allows. Avoid anything approaching 32 gb- the operating system will take up about a third remember. Usable storage will be much less as a result- just like phones...

cool ok wow, things have changed then! just thought 1tb was the minimum nowadays

so sorry for being dumb, but if its got 128mb hard drive (even in SSD) how has it got more storage than a 1tb?

128mb isn't even any where near a gigabyte, let alone a terabyte? 128mb doesn't sound like a lot of storage for a laptop at all (unless im missing something completely here!?)

that acer1 looks spot on for the needs it will be used for and argos have them for 299 which is bang on what wanted to spend 🙂 just need to figure how to get office now without paying 100 quid a year subscription!

I kept an eye on Dell outlet. This time last year I got an i5 with a 1080p 15.6" screen, 256 SSD and 8gb RAM for about 350 quid. Way over spec but a great price. If exp advice about SSD. If much rather have a smaller SSD than a larger spinny disc. Makes the device so much nicer to use.

so sorry for being dumb, but if its got 128mb hard drive (even in SSD) how has it got more storage than a 1tb?

it wont be 128mb, it will be 128GB. big difference...

still less than 1TB obviously but usable certainly. tbh a 1tb portable HD isnt that expensive and it might be worth having as an all important back up..

ps be careful using cracked/pirate Office software. you could easily bork your whole computer with malware that way.again, speaking from experience!

ah ive just kinda read up on it (and I wrote wrong above its 128GB not MB)

so Is the consensus that 128gb is plenty of storage space, not that there will be anything major on there, just work docs etc, and I guess music etc from iTunes?

assume that will be plenty?

acer 1 ticks the boxes for the needs

had a look on dell too as that was where the last one was from, but cant see much for 300 quid

I kept an eye on Dell outlet. This time last year I got an i5 with a 1080p 15.6″ screen, 256 SSD and 8gb RAM for about 350 quid. Way over spec but a great price. If exp advice about SSD. If much rather have a smaller SSD than a larger spinny disc. Makes the device so much nicer to use.

great deal that!

128GB SSD will be fine if you're only going to be using Windows OS and Office software and will still give you space to save your office files.  If you're going to install more software or want to save photos, music, video on the laptop then you'll probably want 256GB SSD.  A lot of people keep the 128/256GB SSD for software only and store all their working files on an external drive.

so Is the consensus that 128gb is plenty of storage space

As per wwpaddler, it's ok if you aren't going to be adding much software, but for data storage it's not enough. The reason that you expected 1TB is because a 1TB hard disk is cheap but when people started demanding SSDs then a 1TB SSD would be too expensive so they put much smaller capacity SSDs e.g. 128GB. With the trend to cloud or other external storage this is less of an issue for many. Personally I bought a 128GB SSD to replace a 1TB disk and I find it a struggle to stop it filling up with software, but I have quite a lot of work stuff on it - VS, SQL Server etc. All my data - photos, music etc. goes on external drives.

great cheers for the advice - really appreciated seems im way off the mark with tech these days!

I think for the use it will get, which is literally just work related docs (not anything major either, just docs etc)

if anything music wise it will be streamed via spotify etc and videos watched on youtube/Netflix I cant actually think of anything else she will need other than office installed on it

Ive seen openoffice is free and looks pretty much like Microsoft version so im sure that will do and you can import word docs/ excel so it looks good to go on the acer swift 1

as you say if it turns out we want to use the laptop for more (thinking football manager etc) then I could always just buy an external harddrive for that purpose)