Which basic computer?

[CheeseEloise1]

DS is always using my computer as he loves doing Word and Excel documents and does a lot of his homework on the computer.
I would like to get him a basic computer for his 11th birthday. Nothing fancy but something good and reasonably priced. I would like it to be a laptop.

I wonder if a Chromebook might be the right thing. Would he want to play games or anything on it? Would he need to make extensive use of it whilst offline? This one for example is a Which? Best Buy.

He would need to use the online versions of Word and Excel (which are excellent) or their equivalents in Google (which are brilliant for collaborative working although I guess he's not doing group projects yet).

That looks brilliant Tribpot. Is it easy to access the online versions of Word and Excel. Are they free or do we have to pay? I have already got Office 2015 on my computer. Is he able to save things on the Desktop of the Chromebook? I want it to last a good few years.

Yes, as far as I know the online versions are free - have a look here.

You don't really use the Chromebook to store stuff, you save it to the cloud (Google Drive, OneDrive). But you can plug in a USB stick and save a file out to that if you needed to move it somewhere that you couldn't do from the cloud. You can read more about Chromebooks in general here.

With a Chromebook you get 100 gbyte cloud storage free for the first year.

The office apps are free. One useful thing is if you set the password for Google drive you can use it from your devices as well. So copy pictures from phone to Google drive then to computer.