New Laptop to run small business - any recommendations.

[MadameGazelle]

Hi, my old laptop has finally given up the ghost so I'm looking to buy a new one to run my small home based business from. I need MS Word and Excel, social media, and internet - nothing flashy. My budget is anything up to £400 (ideally around the £250-300 mark) I've always gone for something with a Pentium processor in the past but wondered if the other processors (which seem to make the laptop cheaper) will be enough for what I want my laptop to do. TIA :)

[Cindy34]

Anything you buy around that price point will be fine.

Problem I foresee is your need for MS Office. That could be rather costly, so look into the cost of that and what operating system it requires.

[Cindy34]

www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/382084/microsoft-office-and-the-death-of-upgrades

worth a read as it compares the subscription based office, to the license version, to the older full product version.

[NetworkGuy]

If you've no really special need for MS Office (eg MS Access) then I'd suggest trying out LibreOffice or OpenOffice. You should find versions of both for whatever machine you end up with.

OpenOffice was started a while back, and funded / supported in part by Sun Microsystems, but Sun was bought by Oracle, along with all trademarks etc, and some of the 'free software' developers (often Linus users) were concerned that Oracle would perhaps change this to a licence-based suite or into a fully commercial {costly} suite, so went off and set up LibreOffice {which is Free of course} but offers WP, Spreadsheet, Drawing, Presentation and DB facilities (I'm using v4 on a not-so-new iMac that I bought on Ebay for about 150 quid last year).

Just check out the features before deciding to buy Microsoft Office - or see if you can install a version on whatever you have available to you and how well you get on with it... should be capable of opening most MS Office files you've created, and you are unlikely to regret saving yourself quite a bit of cash.

Just off to read the article in PC Pro now...