need to buy laptop - confused with jargo

[Carole18]

Hi
My laptop is about 10 years old and is taking longer and longer to start. I really need to be brave and buy a new one but am confused with all the jargon. I need to be able to watch netflix on it, general browsing - nothing too taxing. Just wondered what ram/storage I should be looking for eg 4g/16g or more. Also want a laptop that doesn't take around 10 minutes to start in the morning. As prices vary not sure what I should what price range I should be looking at either.
Thanks in advance.
Carole

I was about to post the same thing so hoping for a bump here! Hopefully there's a lot of people looking at buying laptops due to having to work from home, so that might help in our quest!

Processors vary wildly. At the cheap end you've got i3 + various speeds in Ghz. Then there's i5 which are newer, faster and more expensive, but within that there's different generations, so 7th gen, 8th gen etc. The higher number the better/newer. So you might see 'Intel Core i5 9300H processor.' which means i5 9th generation

You need minimum 4gb ram which is most common. If you can stretch to 8 then I would, but I struggled to find one within budget.

Whatever you do, don't do what I did and buy a refurb from Dell. Despite it's guarantee and reasonably good spec (4gb, 1tb hard drive, can't remember the processor), within a month it got slower and slower and is virtually unusable. It was a cheap stopgap at around £250 but a total waste of time and money.

You're probably looking at around the £450/500 mark. You could research chromebooks instead which tend to be cheaper if it's just for browsing/netflix (they don't have a hard drive so no storage), but I don't know much about them tbh.

That's really helpful @Sparklfairy thanks

I definitely need a laptop rather than a chromebook but at least I've got an idea here about processors

As you start to research it'll become clearer. Just make sure you get the best spec power wise for your money. Sometimes you'll see lower spec but a slightly bigger screen for the same price and it just isn't worth it unless you're a graphic designer or similar spending 10 hours a day doing close up work! Hard drive storage size doesn't matter as much these days as so much is stored on external hard drives or the cloud, but processor and ram try and get the best you can.

Thanks so muc

Much