Ideas for some decent, sturdy laptops?

[sidewinder]

I realise this topic has been covered thousands of times...but I'm going to cover it again.

 

We have laptops. They are only used for exams and for pupils who have trouble writing. We have a grand total of 8. 3 different types, 3 different chargers, 3 different ages.

 

Honestly I could probably fit SSDs and get them running so much better but then still some are very tatty with crap battery life. There is money for them to be replaced (old ones will be reused elsewhere)

 

For less than £500 what would people recommend? I usually always buy Toshiba which are fine but its always hard to know about a specific model without seeing it (keyboard quality, how comfortable it is to use etc).

I've looked at the suppliers we usually use for desktops (Very, Stone, Novatech) and laptops come out far more expensive for the same spec and no real advantages I can see? It's not like they're super rugged for education or anything, they're just customised with a mass produced chassis.

 

I realise with most vendors I'll have to buy SSDs on top which is fine.

[localzuk]

@VeryPC_Colin_M would be able to give you a nice price on some of their ThinBooks. Its what we use now. £500 will get you a very nice laptop spec. Don't go by their web store price, education prices are very different.

[sidewinder]

Yeah been in conversation with Colin, was going to get a quote anyway

[3s-gtech]

We have laptops that are only used for exams, we also use the same type in classes for students that have access arrangments so there is continuity and familiarity. We have stuck with Lenovo B series units for this, all the way from the B570 up to the newest B50-80. Just bought five now - £300 (including cashback) for Broadwell i5 with 4GB RAM. Stuck my own SSDs in. For budget laptops they are resilient with good keyboards and parts are cheap and easy to source. I have been very happy with them. They're also a model that is specifically designed to ship with Windows 7 still, which suits us.

[Jamoire]

We've pretty much always gone for Stone / VeryPC laptops. Never had any trouble with them. As localzuk said, don't go off the web site prices you get much better pricing going through an account manager and if you want an extended warrantee you can get them for next to nothing compared to most of the big brands.

 

Novatech, Ergo etc use pretty much the same Clevo chassis as well.

 

We found a big advantage of them is all the models we've had over the last 6-7 years all use the same generic 19V chargers so are easy to swap between laptops and cheap to replace. Stone have always been very reasonable priced to get hold of replacement parts as well if anything does get damaged.

Edited November 5, 2015 by Jamoire