I'm after a new laptop and need guidance.

[Oodlives]

I am going to university and my old laptop isn't really up to the job. It's 8, dodgy memory and crack all over

I'm after something not too expensive with a decent memory for word processing and video conferancing/video recording.

TIA

The Toshiba Satellite series are good value for money. They're available at Tesco, but if you get one from there do no let them talk you into buying Norton antivirus. Wait until you get home and download Avast free antivirus, it's better and uses fewer resources so your lappy runs quicker.

Thanks.

Also need to add light enough to carry around a lot and long battery life to my criteria.

More bumps the merrier :)

I based my recommendation on my own DCs. Ds has an HP laptop which gets damaged easily and is heavy. DD1 has an Asus notebook which is "so fucking slow it'd struggle to catch a cold", and DD2 has a Toshiba Satellite 660 which she describes a "smooth as a buttered bannister", a phrase she learned from me.

They all run Win8 and hate it. In fact, DS has wiped that to install Win7 and he's created a partition to run a Linux distro that he describes as "wonderfully smooth compared to Windows".

That's partially why I recommend the Toshiba, mostly I do so because it gets bigged up here quite often.

Thanks, you're the second toshiba recommendation. Where's good to buy from online?

I tend to suggest John Lewis, because of the guarantees:
www.johnlewis.com/search/toshiba-satellite-?_requestid=15144195

I've got the toshiba one but I now hate windows 8 , can't get it to do anything and my lovely shiny new laptop is shut back up as I don't want to use it :(

Stick with it. It takes a bit of getting used to but windows 8 is ok.

I need to buy office too which puts me off.

I will carry on deleting apps. I only want to do Uni work and video conferancing /recording.

I didn't care for win8 either, ood.

I used a third party app to get the start menu and desktop back, but I think you can do this more easily within windows 8 now

windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/desktop-tutorial
-Choosing where to go when you sign in

Maybe that will help

What's more with Linux you can get away with less spec than with Windoze. For best value and ease try Ubuntu with either of the lightweight window managers: xfce or lxde. Remember that you also get lots of open source software for free; LibreOffice exchanges documents with M$ Orifice as long as they're not bonkers complicated or use Visual Basic programming. If studying computing deffo Linux; the only sense in using M$ or Apple is if you specifically want to program those platforms (and even then you could develop .NET stuff using Mono on Linux).

Windoze 8 is composed of a blend of 18 different carefully-selected kinds of shite. The only way you can make something that bad is on purpose.

Your university is likely to provide you with a powerful antivirus software and possibly Office.

Don't forget also many companies give student discounts.

And don't forget insurance...