Laptop or Chromebook

[bloodywhitecat]

My laptop has died. I need to replace it but haven't got a clue which is better, I will be mainly using it for downloading my photos from my camera, doing some editing with Picasa and for browsing the www. My budget is small, around £500. I am not at all tech savvy and have no idea what to buy.

My kids had chromebook and I have a dell with Windows10. I wouldn't get a chromebook. If you are not going to be producing much in terms of documents / spreadseets etc the chromebook is great. Now the kids are getting more homework my laptop is easier nad more intuitive for them to use.

The most important things are the disk type and the screen size. The disk should be an SSD. Most laptops still seem to be sold with an old fashioned mechanical hard disk and nothing slows a computer down more. I find a 15.6 inch isn't too big and isn;t too small, but you preference may vary.

For that sort of budget you are probably looking at a core i3 processor and 4GB RAM, but if you can find a core i5 and 8GB RAM that would be good. I would prioritise the RAM over the processor.

I mean for your purposes it sounds like a Chromebook is fine, and you can get them a lot cheaper than £500. I have one just for browsing the web.

Picasa might not work

Having the exact same dilemma. I was told that the Chromebook was a
Mac competitor? Is that true? Can you install Microsoft onto a Chrome?

I'm besotted with my Chrome book but it isn't really a laptop and winter everything a laptop will do, it's basically a Google device.
@WelshMoth no Windows on a Chromebook, that's kind of the point 😉

Winter should be won't do!

Picasa is no longer available. It was discontinued in 2016. If you want to run it you will need a laptop. It was never made available for Chromebook. You could, in theory, install VMWare on a Chromebook to create a virtual Windows machine and run Picasa in that, but that is way too technical for most people.

Even if you don't use Picasa, if you are going to edit photos you may need better graphics performance than a Chromebook can offer.

As others have said, a Chromebook won't do everything a laptop does. You are generally limited to Android apps and web-based apps on a Chromebook. So, for example, you can't install Microsoft Office. You can use the web-based version of Office but that has significantly less functionality.

A Chromebook will do what you want (internet and a bit of editing) but a Microsoft based (Windows 10) laptop will be more versatile, especially if you wish to try different programmes for editing etc.
Also Chromebooks tend to be a little light on storage so if you have a lot of pictures you will end up storing them on SD Cards or external storage.
PC World are offering a reasonable Dell for £459 tinyurl.com/yb3a549m