Recommendations for an affordable workhorse laptop?

[Drumdelgie]

Hello all! I work from home as a researcher/editor and my laptop is in the process of rapidly dying - so I urgently need some recommendations for a new machine!

Ideally I'd hope to keep the budget to under £500. It doesn't need to be fancy as I mostly just word process but it would be nice if it could occasionally stretch to a bit of photo editing and light gaming.

Most of all I'm looking for something that will be reliable and, if possible, last me for 3-4 years with minimal fuss.

Any recommendations for models or brands that have served you well recently?

I've been working in IT for 20+ years and I always recommend either Dell or HP. Good solid machines with decent components and their prices are pretty reasonable.
One thing to check though is the size of the hard drive space. A lot of modern laptops have small hard drives (20-30gb) as they expect you to store things in the cloud nowadays. Laptops with larger hard drives will cost more though.