Laptop recommendations?

[cheesyfeet123]

I’m starting university soon so will need a laptop. I’ve budgeted around £300 of my loan, can anyone recommend something to me? I’m not tech savvy

From my own uni experience, I'd not go down a laptop route. With your budget, I'd say to get something like a Chromebook. Look for one that's got good battery life. The plus of a Chromebook type laptop is that they are really light. The drive storage might be comparable to a smartphone, but you get access to Google cloud storage. You can get them for under £200 so, if you wanted more storage and didn't want to rely on cloud storage, you could spend an extra £40 and get an external hard drive with 1TB of storage so you can back up at the end of each day. It's a good idea to have a back up anyway as you never know when a computer/laptop/Chromebook is going to die on you.

Am I right thinking with a chrome book you need internet access to backup your files?

@cheesyfeet123 Yes you do, but unis normally have wifi throughout the campus, so you can back up either at the end of a lecture or the start of the next one.

That said, backing up to an external hard drive doesn't require internet access.

What are you studying?

Look in CEX for a secondhand one. You can get something with really decent storage and processing for much cheaper. Look at how much memory and storage it has. Apps like Teams which unis might use for remote teaching need a decent processor to run them swiftly. Look for minimum 8gb, which you won't get for £300 new.

I’ll be using it mostly for essays, teams in event of another lockdown rather than note taking so a chrome book wouldn’t be good for me as my internet isn’t reliable. Why didn’t I think of cex?! Just seen a few under £100, obviously the less I spend the better. Decent warranty with them too. Brilliant, thank you!