How much do I need to spend on a basic Office laptop?

[DimPrawn]

Make sure the screen isn't bog standard LCD TN panel. You need IPS or OLED unless you want washed out colours, terrible viewing angle and low contrast.

Trust me, spend on the screen for something you use all day.

[Fred Bloggs]

You might get lucky, I bought a new, unused full HD ASUS laptop in an opened box from John Lewis for GBP 399. Intel i7 processor 8Gb RAM etc, bargain.

[TonyF]

I can't see that on the perkbox site

I logged in and searched "John Lewis" - first result says "Save 5% at John Lewis and Waitrose (Digital Vouchers)"

[d000hg]

After some debate on form factor - I'm old-school and like 15" "proper laptops" she likes cute little ones - we went safe and got a Dell Inspiron 13". i3, 1080p, only 4Gb RAM (but user upgradeable), 128Gb SSD. The main toss-up was 128Gb SSD or 1TB HDD but I've seen how much faster SSD is; 256Gb would've been perfect but we plan to centralise our data so don't need much local space.

[BR14]

After some debate on form factor - I'm old-school and like 15" "proper laptops" she likes cute little ones - we went safe and got a Dell Inspiron 13". i3, 1080p, only 4Gb RAM (but user upgradeable), 128Gb SSD. The main toss-up was 128Gb SSD or 1TB HDD but I've seen how much faster SSD is; 256Gb would've been perfect but we plan to centralise our data so don't need much local space.

if there's a spare slot, stick another 4G in, and you can always fit a bigger SSD when it's needed.
Trim W10 down to just the stuff you need, or it'll take up 40+ Gig.














-=

[original PM]

After some debate on form factor - I'm old-school and like 15" "proper laptops" she likes cute little ones - we went safe and got a Dell Inspiron 13". i3, 1080p, only 4Gb RAM (but user upgradeable), 128Gb SSD. The main toss-up was 128Gb SSD or 1TB HDD but I've seen how much faster SSD is; 256Gb would've been perfect but we plan to centralise our data so don't need much local space.

You can get pretty tiny 256 Gig usb drives nowadays - which should sort all storage needs

my kids have both got 128 GIG ssd's in their yoga's not even close to hitting storage limits - mainly because everything the watch /do is in the cloud /online.

Office is not cheap mind you.

[cojak]

256Gb would've been perfect but we plan to centralise our data so don't need much local space.

How do you plan to do this d00gie? I’ve no experience of this but I don’t want to spend £2k on a 512Gb laptop next time.

[LondonManc]

You can get pretty tiny 256 Gig usb drives nowadays - which should sort all storage needs

my kids have both got 128 GIG ssd's in their yoga's not even close to hitting storage limits - mainly because everything the watch /do is in the cloud /online.

Office is not cheap mind you.

Office isn't bad on the 365 subscription if the whole family use it.

[d000hg]

How do you plan to do this d00gie? I’ve no experience of this but I don’t want to spend £2k on a 512Gb laptop next time.

A NAS for all media mainly

[rogerfederer]

If you do not need a professional microsoft office installation then look no further than mint linux with one (or all) of the various office substitutes. I was very impressed with the latest iteration of these office suites.

Mint is based on ubuntu, but unlike ubuntu is easy to adapt when coming from a microsoft windows environment. It's also very speedy on modern laptops.

You can try it using a USB live disk, to get a feel for it. My family all use this now and are glad to be rid of the windows resource hog.