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We havd Android phones, tablets and an iPad, however we'd like something to rip all our CDs, and transfer all our photo's from SD cards / phones / cloud to a hard drive. Therefore it needs to work with an external CD drive. We won'#t be editing photo's, just transferring files, and playing back music. Budget of £400 max.
Had initially thought of a cheap Windows laptop but salesman said a Chromebook would suffice, you get a better device for your needs for your money.
Is buying a Chromebook a bad idea? I have a mobile phone with unlimited data allowance for when I'm away from Wi-fi, but believe that for most of my use (file transfers and music playback / ripping) the Chromebook will be fine even when offline.
Don't think you get an app to rip cd`s on a chromebook. I could be wrong.
Good point, looks more convoluted than I thought
https://support.google.com/chromebook/thread/2738767?hl=en
In this day and age I reckon I'd either buy a Spotify subscription or torrent everything I own, rather than sitting there for hours on end feeding a big pile of discs into a drive.
What happens when you transfer all your photos to a hard drive and then the drive dies? Where's your backup going to be?
Don't you have any computers in your house at all?
We have an old laptop, TBH I'd go the Spotify route but SWMBO wants to rip the CDs anyway, and its her money.
100% what Cougar says.
MrsG82 wanted to rip her cd collection and also bought some huge wallets to put dvd's in. The wallets have sat in the footstool since she started maternity leave (Boy is now 2 1/2 years old) and she periodically swaps a handful of cd's into her car as that is the only place we use them after I added her onto my play music sub.
If you don't want to use Bluetooth or casting for music you could reuse an old phone and headphone jack as a 'jukebox'.
I really like my chromebook but for that i'd use some kind of Windows PC, even an old refurbished one would do fine, don't need to spend 400 quid. In fact more recent ones are unlikely to have a CD/DVD writer at all.
To add to my reply above. If you are dead set on ripping the collection then maybe consider a used/refurbed pc (use the tv as a monitor) and spend the remaining on a chromebook. For daily use they are hard to beat. You can then use the pc to backup photos etc.
Just awaiting delivery on a refurbed (not unused returned) Dell Latitude 6440 (4th Gen i5, 8GB) for £200 from Dell Refurbished (Dell's own site). I have a recent 1TB SSD that will go in so realistically it probably should be more like £250.
https://www.dellrefurbished.co.uk/laptops
Cougar also posted this https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ who I would also consider buying from but they didn't have what I wanted.
Disclaimer: I've never used that site ^^ myself so it wasn't a personal recommendation. I just tripped over it one day and they looked to be doing good kit like older T-series Lenovos at competitive prices.
Happy for the disclaimer - it was the subsequent conversation I had with them, the reviews (which I know can be suspect but generally mirror my experiences) and this - https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/about-us that convinced me.
Ah cool. Fair enough, I didn't realise you'd dealt with them (I'm not very good at paying much attention to usernames).
Huh, I didn't realise they were in Ribchester. That's a point in their favour, I do like a supplier to be within reasonable kicking distance (as Scan will attest to 😃).
I have a chromebook and an iPad.
The main thing I use the desktop PC for is anything to do with moving files around, especially photos. The chromebook just doesn’t deal with them well.
I recently got a second hand Dell desktop from eBay for not much over £200. Perfect for what I use it for. It even had an SSD and a fresh install of Win10. I added a couple of other drives that I already had too.