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I don't have a clue with IT.
Looking at the cheaper end of the scale.
Needed for a 12/13 year olds home work, surfing the www.
MS Office & Power Point have been needed for home work in the past.
Wireless colour printer too.
What spec should I be looking for?
Ta.
If you are iPhone and IPad users consider a printer with AirPrint that allows you to print from your phone etc. Very useful for assignment sheets, photos of textbook pages sent by friends when your child has forgotten them etc. .
Also check costs for replacement ink cartridges this seems to be where the money is. Also many printer companies make it very hard to use generic or refilled replacements.
Laptops are harder to go wrong with, you will most likely need an Office 365 subscription though for Word, Powerpoint etc. or one that has software bundled.
Not Apple dependent.
Google Cloud print works as well as Airprint
You'll be hard pressed to find a laptop made in the last ten years which doesn't meet those exacting requirements. Go to CEX or Cash Converters and have a look around.
Office: https://products.office.com/en-gb/office-online/
Can you get MS Office through the employer deal (that seems to be open to pretty much everyone these days)? Think it's around £12 for everything you'd need, so would possibly save you a chunk rather than getting it with the laptop
Printers - we picked up an HP printer for £69 with 9months free HP ink subscription, worth I think £8 month. No contract or tie in. Much better than the OMG costs of cartridges normally...
Argos ebay shop is well worth a look, 1/3 to 1/2 off full price for new and refurbs. I bought a "gaming" laptop from them last week, £375 vs £649. Listed as refurb, obviously never used in anger.
Get them to print their stuff out at school. Avoid the printer scenario, they all seem to consume ink at a disproportionate rate to page's printed.
Just asked my year 7 daughter and she is not allowed to print stuff out at school. Understandable as the cost for 1,000 pupils would be significant.
I would buy a relatively cheap HP Inkjet and sign up to their instant ink program. I pay about £2 per month and print between 40-60 pages with quite a bit of colour.
Re. laptops I think it is worth buying something reasonable as your kid will need it until the end of their school career.
I bought my son a Lenovo X131e with i3 processor when he was 11 and it lasted until he was 16 (and he breaks almost everything within days). This was a laptop designed to be rugged. The modern equivalent is the Thinkpad 11e
I would avoid the cheap Atom/Celeron based netbooks which have small (32GB) flash storage.
A good minimum spec would be an i3 processor, 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD.