Student laptop and back up options

[dancemom]

Hoping for some advice

Went today to look at laptops for teen dd before Uni. She already has an iPad for notes so laptop really for essays and such. Uni course does not require any particular software and she will get a Microsoft package from Uni. Budget about £400

Advisor in Curry's recommended

www.currys.co.uk/products/asus-vivobook-15-x515ja-15.6-laptop-intel-core-i5-256-gb-ssd-silver-10242875.html

Hadn't heard of the brand but it seemed to tick all the boxes. Has anyone any positive or negatives about this brand of laptop?

Additionally, the advisor told me I would need to purchase and set up "recovery disks" or that they can do this service for you for approximately £50. Is this really the case? I don't remember doing this the last time I purchased a laptop but it has been a while.

Bump

Hi, a few points but not a complete answer. As a rule, ASUS are very highly thought of amongst the PC gaming community - there motherboards and (nVidia-based) graphics cards are amongst the best available and the build quality of their laptops is generally very good. The laptop in question is fine - not brilliant, not going to be great for anything demanding like modern 3D games that require fast smooth graphics but it should suffice for MS Office, the Internet and the usual writing / presentation stuff. Backup-wise, if MS Office 364 is purchased, the documents will be backed up onto the cloud. You can do this even without MS office. Equally Curry's has its own cloud backup service which can be purchased.

The point about creating recovery disks is interesting since this particular model doesn't actually have an optical disk drive as far as I can see. Typically the recovery disk partition is stored on the laptop and a combination of keys at boot up will enable the system to be restored from this recovery partition. It may be that Curry's meant "create a recovery disk onto a USB flash drive" that can be plugged in before boot up and will restore the PC to its factory settings. It's easy enough to do this yourself and indeed many laptops "talk you through this" during the initial user setup - otherwise go to setup, recovery options and it should be straightforward.

As I said, not a complete answer. The laptop spec is a couple of years old and at this price has a few compromises in terms of speed but it should be okay for the intended purpose. The same model is available via Amazon for less money but maybe the easy access to Curry's in the event of a problem might be a deciding factor?

... and apologies for the numerous typos. MS Office 364 indeed! (It's 365). By the way, there are much cheaper ways to get MS Office onto a computer than an annual subscription model. For example, look at software4students.co.uk. I have a fully licensed (by Microsoft) copy of Office 2021 Pro (5 users) that costs less than £40 and is a one off payment.

Asus are brilliant.

I have had many Dells, Sonys, Toshibas in the past and my current laptop is an Asus which I have had for around 3 years and it is by far the best laptop I have ever had.

My husband also has one.

You should check whether the university provides Office 365 to students. My daughter gets it free from her university.

I spent a similar amount on my daughter’s laptop but I bought her a second hand Lenovo with a better spec than the laptop you’re looking at. It’s heavy and the battery life isn’t as good, but she doesn’t carry it around, she just uses it for essays. I got it on eBay. But I think the Asus you’re looking at should be fine.

It's also worth looking at reports such as: https://www.techopedia.com/laptops/best-laptop-for-students-uk

and

https://www.bestproductsreviews.co.uk/student-laptops-under-500?targetid=dsa-41967981854&matchtype=&device=m&campaignid=12177553845&creative=494588387485&adgroupid=115816063606&feeditemid=&locphysicallms=9046529&locinteresttms=&network=g&devicemodel=&placement=&keyword=$&target=&aceid=&adposition=&trackid=ukallltop1111&mId=407-132-4411&trackOld=true&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9Zrn5tvTgAMVldtCh3bSwOFEAAYAiAAEgLUHvDD_BwE

There is a good one by Which.co.uk but you'll need to subscribe to see the results. To be honest at your price point, they're not pretty much all similar with a few different compromises to hit the budget.

*they're pretty much all similar

... oh for an edit function!

At DC's uni the students have their own account so everything is backed up on the uni's cloud/servers. When their laptop needed repair they were able to borrow one from the library and access all their work.

You guys are amazing! Thank you very much.

Yes she will get a Microsoft package through Uni so we won't need to purchase this.

Good to know the set up & recovery he was pushing isn't actually required.

I did see the laptop on Amazon for £50 cheaper but as it wasn't being sold directly from Amazon I wasn't sure if sticking with Curry's was a better option?

Thank you again everyone for your responses

That laptop is fine. It'll probably come with a bunch of stuff that she doesn't need installed, so remove that once she gets it to make it a bit quicker.

Don't get their "recovery disk" service. (whatever that is). The HDD is a bit on the small side, especially if her course will require her to keep large files like videos or lots of photos. Instead, just buy an external hard drive and tell her to back up her work on that.

That laptop is perfectly fine for Uni work.
As others have said, you don't need the extra recovery addon that they're offering. There will already be a Recovery feature built-in, it is standard with the Windows 11 operating system that's on there.

In terms of Currys vs Amazon. I would go with Amazon myself as I like their returns process, as it is far easier to deal with online if anything goes wrong during the warranty period. But personally I would only do so if the item was actually sold by Amazon itself. This model laptop as New on Amazon is sold by a few different 3rd party sellers, which you can see underneath the buy button.
Although, Amazon themselves are selling a few ex-returns on there for £249.99 - so that may be another option if you want to save a bit of money.