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I'm after a little advice please. I haven't bought a laptop for about 10 years as I have always been provided one through work and have a tablet for in the house.
However, my wife needs something for word-processing and general browsing but we're also about to get our 1st DSLR camera so part of the requirement is also a half decent screen for weeding out crap photos and potentially some light editing.
I have a 14" screen on my works Lenovo computer and it seems about right. £400 is absolute max and anything under would be great. Has anyone bought or seen something around this ball park recently? The amount of options on offer is staggering but really for us it needs to be reliable and have a decent screen. No gaming or anything - Got my XBoxOne for that.
Thanks in advance and apologies if already been done recently!
Cheers
Nick
lenovo ideapad 320s-14ikb is what my daughter is getting.
Aye - that looks like a good one and HD screen. Seem to be ranging from £300-400 online so trying to work out what is different about them.. must be slight model differences I can't quite fathom.
Dell outlet has some good machines at decent prices. Really great return/repair process when my daughters developed a bit of a fault too.
That's good to know on the aftercare, thanks tthew.
I bought a used (office based) laptop from our local Computer folk (Utopia in Kilmarnock).
12 months warranty, i5 processor, 8 gb ram - well within your budget and a nice piece of kit.
Ours is a Thinkpad T440 - I'd buy it again
Refurb dell/lenovo or HP elite
Make sure it has an SSD drive.
Although you can pick up a new 240gb SSD for less than £30 if you feel confident in swapping drives out and reinstalling windows.
Make sure it has an SSD drive.
This - I just got this HP laptop and bought a 1tb SSD so hopefully it should chug along nicely (haven't set it up yet) as it tries to deal with the huge amount of images we have stuffed on it.
Morgan Computers have a wide choice of refurb machines most under that budget. They are good to deal with and the warranty is good, but you are getting a second hand machine.
Standard laptop advice:
You'd have to try very hard to get a new laptop which isn't up to running Word and a web browser.
Get a known brand rather than some in-store random shite. Lenovo for build quality. Dell Outlet for bargains on 'refurb' machines which are as close to perfect as makes no odds.
Specific advice in your usage case:
For photo editing, more RAM good. Screen resolution is way more relevant than absolute physical size.
I'd be looking at something with an internal SSD and budgeting for an external HDD for photo storage (or, replacing the existing HDD with an SSD as @mattyfez says and getting a USB caddy for the HDD).
Also, think about your backup plans.