Laptop ideas

[WeAreSailing]

I am about to start an Access course after many, many years since leaving education.

I need a reasonably priced, lightweight laptop that will fit in a backpack. Will also need with plenty of memory.

Apart from looking at John Lewis and Amazon no idea where else to go or best laptop to get.

Please can someone help?

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad from the 320 range. There are lots of variations, but mine has a smaller solid state hard drive, 8GB RAM and and an i3 processor. You might want one with a bigger hard drive, though I mostly put everything on Google Drive, and just keep a local copy of what I’m working on. It does me well for my job as a charity project manager working from home. Mine’s the 15.6” screen, but the 14” would be more portable. Mine doesn’t have a DVD/CD drive, so check the spec carefully if that’s important to you.

They’re not hard to find, but mine came from Laptop Outlet, via Tesco Direct before they wound that down.

You need to be clear on what you need the laptop to do. They are generally optimised in spec to suit a purpose (such as playing games). The good news from a price point of view is that it sounds very much like you will be using yours for completing assignments, research, and then the obvious internet use. This means that the graphics card is not very important, and that an i3 processor should be enough - 2GB of RAM would be plenty, 8GB would be overkill really. A solid state hard drive means everything gets up and running quickly, which is very nice to have. You's be surprised how many documents etc you can fit into fairly small hard drives, and don't forget that USB memory is really very cheap. Also, buy an external drive for backing up - I know you can use cloud, but just to be safe. Of course, the other option might be to use an external drive as the drive you store everything on - meaning you could use a computer at college and still access your work easily, if you didn't want to carry one around.
Sorry for rambling - there are just so many things to consider.....

I find the way that PC World classify their machines into “social”, “everyday” etc. quite helpful to match spec to the intended task, even if you don’t end up buying one from there.

Lenovo