Can anyone advise on which laptop?

[Rhinosaurus]

Struggling here - we want to get our daughter a laptop for her birthday, so that she can use it for school work as she is starting to do a lot of coursework so would be using it for word, zoom, google classroom etc but she also wants to be able to use it to play Sims4, we’ve looked at the requirements and it seems to need quite a high processor speed hence a more expensive laptop. It is going to be the whole family contributing so we don’t have a bad budget, but can’t work out what spec we should be looking at as we don’t want to spend a lot and then find out she can’t use it for her game. Can anyone point me in the right direction re requirements - preferably a bit over the minimum requirements so it doesn’t completely grind to a halt or be outdated in six months! I’ve attached a screenshot of the minimum requirements if that helps.

An i5 is actually the middle of Intel's lineup. It's i3, i5 and i7. The video card is the tricky part. Most laptops come with a video processor on the motherboard (often an Intel one) and won't accept a separate video card. Hardcore gamers have historically used desktop PC's as they are easier to expand and upgrade than laptops.

There are laptops specifically for gaming, but they are crazy expensive (see Alienware). Get the best possible laptop you can afford (an i7 with at least 8 gig of RAM would be ideal) and it will be ample for schoolwork and should be at least usable for gaming. Laptops with an i7 processor often have better graphics processors than lower-end models.

Hope this helps.

@MissConductUS thanks for that, it’s the different processors we don’t understand but an i7 is good, we had no idea sims would need a higher spec, as it’s been around so many years

Even older games can be taxing on the processor as there are lots of calculations being done and some of the video processing can be offloaded to the main processor and memory. I bought DD a Dell laptop with an i7 three years ago and she's at uni now with it and it's still more than she needs. She does some gaming but I don't know what exactly.

Stick with a well known brand and read the reviews. Lots of tech magazines and website review laptops and do comparisons. My DH works in IT and he has always bought Dell machines for us.

Get a chrombook. Owt else she won't like as on a chrombook she can play games as well x

Chrome books are not good for gaming.

The cheapest.
I bought a Lenovo from Curry’s for about £250 two tears ago and it us absolutely fine. Used it for full time live teaching and all the lesson prep etc in the summer term and now the first half of spring term and is perfectly robust.