How on earth do you choose a laptop?

[Liveinthepresent]

DH needs a new laptop - he is a freelance worker so it's for work and home. We have iPads so it only really gets used for MS office stuff and photos. His old one is so huge it isn't actually very portable - it's 8 years old.
He has about £500 of Amazon vouchers to spend - but we have no idea what brands or spec to prioritise on ?
His last one was recommended by a colleague so we didn't do any homework.
Can anyone point us in the right direction pleas?
tIA

I'd advise looking on ebuyer, get one with a SSD disk - quieter, more robust, faster. See how much that eats out of your budget and then spend the rest on as much memory as you can. Rest doesnt matter much these days I don't think. Oh and decide on size, 14" often too small and 17" can be a bit chunky for portability.

Excellent advice thanks so much - at least we have something to start us off .

Also separate back-up. NB SSD are 5 times the price of HDD and not worth it yet.

Sorry carol what exactly do you mean by separate back up ? We use passports for all photos etc but sounds like you may mean something else ?
Point taken re SSD !

We bought an SSD 17" lenovo laptop from ebuyer before xmas for a new employee for 300 quid. I've been using it too and its excellent. The only reason to spend more these days I think is if you need a gaming graphics card. For Office, internet browsing etc, any windows 8 or higher laptop with a decent sized hard drive and amount of RAM is more than sufficient for anything apart from high graphics processing needs. SDDs are still more expensive, because they're better, but not 5x.

For backups you can buy an external hard drive or NAS to connect any laptop too, sure, but most people back up to the cloud now as you don't have to maintain any extra equipment. I have an office 365 subscription and use the free storage for all my file storage now including all my photos. I also copy the whole lot to a NAS periodically but I don't think there's any need to these days.

caroldecker
NB SSD are 5 times the price of HDD and not worth it yet.

SSDs are absolutely worth it! They massively reduce boot and wake times, help every program (and the OS) load and run quicker, draw less power as there are no moving parts extending the battery life and again due to no moving parts, are much less susceptible to data loss if the laptop is dropped. It's practically a no-brainer.

The general combination (on desktops/towers) is a SSD for OS and programs, and a larger HDD for content; if it's mainly a work laptop and not used to store movies and other large content (or if cloud storage is used) then the HDD isn't necessarily needed at all.

and much quieter!

Thanks for the extra info - and interesting you mentioned Lenovo as there are quite a few of these on Amazon.
Good point about back up I think we need to set up a cloud thingy once he has the new machine.
We are a bit behind the times!

Be careful about only backing up to the cloud - if you ever stop the subscription you have only 30 days (for Office 365) to access your files and move them to a new place. I would also have a local back-up.