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Time for a new laptop for the daughter, the Mrs and I don't really know what to look for, I spend my online time on an iPad and she uses whatever machine her work gives her.
Price range is £250-400. Should we stick with local Argos/pc world/John Lewis or are much better deals available online? Mainly to be used for GCSE school work but photo/video storage will no doubt be high on a 14 year old girls wish list.
Thanks in advance.
Budget for backups. External USB HDD / cloud storage. Otherwise you'll have a bad day when the HDD dies and she's lost all her photos and coursework for the last three years. Far far more important than "which laptop".
Beyond that, stick with brands. I like Lenovo for build quality; Dell are also well regarded (it's what I bought myself) and there are often bargains to be had in their Outlet store.
I should of said we already have a separate hard drive, but will be looking into cloud storage for more important bits.
I've seen a couple of Lenovo's but didn't know much about the brand so it's good to know you regard them high.
didn't know much about the brand
Every work issued laptop I've ever had has been a Lenovo. Solid, no-fuss machines.
I've seen a couple of Lenovo's but didn't know much about the brand so it's good to know you regard them high.
Multi-billion dollar company that bought out IBM's laptop division a while back. Doubled sales since. I would put them up near the top depending on the model you go for.
Thanks all, that's the sort of feedback I needed. I'll research some Lenovo's tonight.
This is one I've been considering that would fit within your budget
We got the one ebygomm links to for our son for university. Looks fine for basic Office and surfing stuff.
^That one only has a 128GB SSD for storage, most of which will be taken up by the OS, so I would think you would be wedded to cloud storage / wifi for anything substantial (photos / music / picture heavy documents or presentations).
128GB for the OS? Wut?
Most of... roughly speaking... in round numbers...
Windows 10 + updates + page file + restore points + office, etc. must be close to 60GB of the ~120GB formatted size of the SSD, but I bow to your superior knowledge 🙂
That one only has a 128GB SSD for storage, most of which will be taken up by the OS
My laptop has 1.5 GB virtual memory, a 3.2 GB hibernation file, and a 6.5 GB system restore file. The Windows installation is 15.7 GB. That adds up to less than 30GB, which is nowhere near "most" of 128GB. Office is not part of Windows, it's a separate suite of programs that must be installed separately, just like other programs. Windows and Office will run fine on a 32 GB hard disk, although there will be very little room for documents, so if you have a large media library, you will soon fill up a 128 GB disk.
Bigger drive especially if music/pics/video will end up on it, periodic parental disc clenaup (good luck with that) as thinks like update files add up and if it's school work a lot of download this, make this etc docs full of images will start taking up space.
Everything important to the cloud on creation
https://www.google.com/drive/using-drive/
https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/11
Both Google Drive and Dropbox will keep older versions of the file so learn how to retireve them!
Small, decent battery life and dare I say dull looking to be less nickable.
Set yourself up as Admin and them as not to limit any catasrophic screw up with dodgy downloads/click here for type stuff
Apart from that something like a dell in the outlet or something solid from the high street