To ask advice on buying a basic laptop?

[Summersun200]

I’ve survived until the lockdown just using data on my phone, but now I really need to get a laptop and WiFi as will be doing some self employed work at home.
Only need a basic model, nothing fancy. Can folks recommend a basic laptop definitely under £400, hopefully nearer £300? Thanks

I once tried a free open source program as an alternative to MSOfffice - it worked great, and I enjoyed learning the new programs, some features were actually better than the ubiquitous MS Office.
After a few weeks, I discovered that recipients either couldn't open the documents, or if they managed to, they got complete gobbledigook. As it was mostly CVs and supporting statements, bit of a false economy.

Just @MigGril's point, if you need to take your Chromebook somewhere with no internet access then, assuming you have a decent phone with a reasonable amount of data, you can cast a wifi hotspot and connect your Chromebook to that. It is not quite as perfect as having a laptop with offline access to all documents, but I reckon it would be good enough for occasional use.

I pay Google about £10 a year for 24gb of memory in the cloud - personally I think that is not bad, and it means I can access my files on any device should I choose to.

My experience of home laptops has been that it is an expensive hassle keeping virus protection up to date. The only reason I keep our laptop going is for my DD to use certain Windows-only software, otherwise I would abandon it and switch fully to Chromebook.

I think Chromebooks are awesome for personal use, but I would not recommend one as a work laptop if you need Office...

Get more than 2gb of memory if you want to use Teams. I got my kids a £200 entry level pc from PCWORLD for homeschooling and it only just copes.

Reading with interest. Do you need antivirus on a chromebook?

Currys have offers on at the minute. I previously had a HP laptop and it worked fine. I’m thinking of buying another one I’m deciding weather to buy HP or Lenovo. Around £350.00. I think if it’s for work purposes OP I would spend towards your higher end of your budget.

We were issued with Chromebooks at work and find them a complete pain in the arse. Nothing on the work system (Word, Excel etc) seems to work properly on them, although that might be because everything's run through Citrix.

Plus they got us stupid weeny ones with a tiny screen and no number pad (50% of my work is numbers) and by the time I've expanded the view to a size where I can read it, I can only see a few lines of text.

If you're using spreadsheets, imo you need a decent size screen or a separate monitor. DP uses 2 monitors, because he's on spreadsheets and financial systems all day long.

@Hathorx that's great unless you live somewhere that has very poor internet connection. Where I work we don't get any mobile internet so that's a no go. Places like this are very common where we live.

Look at Lenovo or Dell, 4gb ram minimum, preferably 8gb or at least the option to add memory later.

You’ll need a built in video camera (which most have), Norton Anti-virus and access to MS Office suite.
Wireless Bluetooth headphones are useful if more than one of you trying to work in the same room.
Don’t get a chrome book if your WiFi is slow or glitchy, as it needs uninterrupted access to the cloud. Or if perfect MS Word formatting is important to you.

I have both a chromebook and a recently purchased HP all-in-one (Windows). The chromebook is fabulous; still going strong after 4 years. Zoom and other video call platforms (Google meet, Facebook) work fine, it can run Office 365 (the online version) and has inbuilt antivirus. I use mine regularly for PhD stuff. The only downside is you are limited with what you can do if you're not connected to the Internet. It depends on your needs, but I would definitely recommend a chromebook.

Forgot to add, I often write on Google Docs then transfer to Word on the HP..I haven’t had any issues with layout. Chromebook also runs Teams fine. My mum is working from home atm and uses hers for everything.

There’s definitely issues with google docs and word. Only a slight bit but when you need it perfect it makes a big difference. The Lenovo’s look cheap and fine

I bought a Chromebook for ds for college. They are much cheaper than standard laptops. Have a look at John Lewis.

Otherwise Dell is reliable for traditional laptops but may be a bit outside your price range.

I had a Lenovo tablet a few years ago until ds split water on it :( DH's work laptop is a Lenovo thinkpad.

A Windows laptop at that price is likely to be pretty unusable in a years time. I'd be seriously considering a Chromebook if I were you. Lenovo are pretty good as others have said.

Hope you knowledgeable people don't mind me bumping this..
DD has just heard they'll be half remote learning and half at school. She's 17. We're in Italy. Prior to the summer, with total distance learning they were on Zoom and she used her phone as I was also on Zoom on the laptop.

Now it's going to be Meet rather than Zoom. Am I thinking a Chromebook will be OK? She's asking me for "a cheap tablet but with a keyboard"

I'm ploughing through Amazon (am in Italy so that's where it's going to have to come from)

I have an Office 365 subscription on my laptop and phone and her phone for anything that absolutely needs Office but the school has moved pretty much 100% to Google given the free nature! (I pay for extra storage for me but that's all)

Ta!

Mines a reconditioned Dell off Amazon. £109 with Microsoft Office on it. Looks brand new.Total bargain. I just went for the one with 96% positive feedback (there were a few doing them ).

For work I've used HP, Dell and Chromebooks all of which are great work horses.

For my own personal use I have a MacBook Air on which I have Microsoft word, excel, powerpoint etc.

Chromebooks are great - I'm currently typing on one! They are online-only though, you need to be connected to wifi to use them. If you have an Office365 account, you'll be able to access Word/PowerPoint/Outlook (I have my own but I can also access them via my university login as well). You get a host of Google programs too, such as Docs and Slides. They're not as beautiful as MacBooks (I've owned one in the past), but they are really functional, sturdy and have fantastic battery life. If she's in a dodgy Wifi area, she can contact it to her phone. They're great for video call and I've used mine on Google Meet, Zoom, Skype and Teams.

You can of course download documents you're working on onto a USB port to work off line if you get a Chromebook or any cheaper laptop with less storage space. It just depends how you need to use it really.

@MinnieJackson

@XDownwiththissortofthingX what's SSD?

Sorry, just seen this.

SSD - Solid State Drive.

It's basically a big memory stick that replaces or compliments the older, mechanical style hard drives. They are far faster than traditional HDD's because they don't rely on moving mechanical parts to read the data, so they are ideal for installation of your Operating System and other programs and applications you use frequently or those that constantly access the disk drive storage.

PC's with Windows installed on an SSD usually hard-boot from cold, to a usable, stable desktop within 10-15 seconds, whereas a mechanical drive can be upwards of 30 seconds to a minute. They're far faster, and less prone to damage and degradation. The main drawback is that they just don't have the massive capacity of mechanical drives, so you usually have to either run a combination of both, or buy one of the larger SSD's which are vastly more expensive than mechanical drives of the same capacity.

Righty ho. A Chromebook sounds pretty good then. I'll peruse Amazon including the reconditioned which I hadn't thought of!
Thanks!

I want to buy my dd a laptop for Christmas. She really only wants one to play roblox and minecraft on. Do chrome books allow these games to be downloaded? I’ve read mixed reviews, some say you can’t play roblox on chrome while others say you can....

I’m totally confused & can’t afford to buy the wrong thing!

If you go with Windows over Chromebook, make sure you get one with plenty of memory. I bought a a cheap HP a year and a half ago which I thought would be fine for basic use but it now doesn't have enough space on it to download the latest Windows updates.

Chromebook fans, are they fairly intuitive? I've got to help my tech-phobic mil buy a new laptop (her old one is Windows) and I'm impressed by the plaudits for them on here but would she find it easy to use after using Windows? Also, if her internet dropped out, would the computer 'find' it again pretty easily? I suspect that she would get flustered if it suddenly lost most of its functionality due to being offline and would struggle if there is more than one step to getting it reconnected.

I got my kids Lenovo laptops for about your budget in lockdown. I got my own last year for more like £550 and it's obviously quicker but they're great computers. Touch-screen, fold back and you can use them in tablet mode. We have Lenovo in school, which is why I went for them.