Laptop for 11 year old for homework and gaming

[MyBoysHaveDogsNames]

Hi

My son has some money and I am willing to top it up a bit. So he could have a budget of around 400-500.

He would like a laptop for homework and that would also work for gaming. For example, Minecraft Java edition.

He has seen this one for £379 and I wondered if it had enough RAM and what SSD is?

HP 8 GB RAM 128GB SSD

Any advice gratefully received! Thanks

An SSD is a solid state drive. Less likely to fail and boots up almost instantly. About half of the SSD will be taken up by windows.

The RAM seems to be okay but more never hurts and you should be able to double the RAM for about £35 a local shop might install it for a small charge even PC World only charges £45 or so.

It would be wise to buy an external drive for data www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Extreme-Portable-SSD-Read/dp/B078SVRH4B/ref=zg_bs_430547031_7?psc=1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&refRID=CNTCG8ZATDWN44Z685M7

I'm not entirely sure but I think you need Minecraft for Windows 10.

Presumably for homework he would need whatever software the school suggests MS Office or LibreOffice if it is MS Office he can get a student edition at a sizeable discount.

You also need to check the graphics capability Minecraft requires at least GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 or AMD Radeon R5 series | NVIDIA GeForce 400 Series or AMD Radeon HD 7000 series.

Also worth checking is if he would prefer the trackpad or a mouse. I use a mini mouse on my laptops - an HP Wireless mouse is about £10.

The computer needs to have a wireless internet connection.

Thank you. That's really helpful. We will go shopping this weekend.