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

[Fred Bloggs]

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.

My own experience, I like Linux Mint too, but it can be either very difficult or practically impossible to get some common printers and/or scanners to work. From my own research, HP devices seem to have good support but Epson support poor. I gave up trying to get my Epson scanner working which is a real pain at times. It took three days to get the Epson printer working.

[css_jay99]

what about the dell outlet store?. they do occasional discounts on the home and business range. Or there are loads of 13" business grade dells/lenovo on ebay that just seem to work for ever ...

[Hobosapien]

If considering used/refurbished then may as well get the best business laptop in the world, the Lenovo Thinkpad Twhatever for a couple hundred quid.

Plenty available from reputable sources with a 12 month warranty. Can easily upgrade the ram and bang in a second SSD.

Only worry would be state of the battery if need to use it unplugged regularly. If mostly plugged in then a moot point.

[d000hg]

Too late now but that's actually not a bad shout. I might look that route when I need to upgrade, for my sporadic laptop needs

[kaiser78]

Don't buy Dell - their laptops are so slow to startup and switch between applications, even with the larger RAM sizings.

[css_jay99]

Don't buy Dell - their laptops are so slow to startup and switch between applications, even with the larger RAM sizings.

There is an Alienware 15R3, Inspiron 15 7000, Latitude e6230 (i think) and XPS 15 L502x in the household. All great builds (imo). Ok, the last 2 are sluggish but that's because they are very old machines running windows 10 on mechanical drives. The other 2 with SSD's are pretty fast

[d000hg]

Don't buy Dell - their laptops are so slow to startup and switch between applications, even with the larger RAM sizings.

I don't think that's true. Ours isn't and I doubt Dell buy special slow i7 chips, etc.