Home Laptop

[penfold]

I am looking to replace my wife's laptop which is pretty old now. As she mainly uses it for basic work (she is a teacher) preparing resources and general home use. I am not looking to spend a lot of money. However, I don't want to spend about 300 only to have it be as slow as a brick in 2 years time. So I have a budget of about 500 which I hope will get me something good enough for 5 years. I haven't looked at laptops for a long time and my computer is 10 years old so I am not up to date on the latest needs. As far as I know I want 16GB Ram, 500GB HDD, Windows 11. Other than that I am not sure. I see there are mostly i3 at this price, but assume this would be a bottle neck in a few years.

 

What kind of minimum requirements should I be looking at these days?

[mavhc]

Firstly you don't want a HDD

 

https://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb&brandid=3&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7Udb7h0KOjqNebwmHc4hFNENT7wCmna2vsn8%2bI5ke4ErI93KyxMzFasTOI9QEBzxRji2ejmuPL6msHBATAStWLBPL%2fmDreMBWqPqp3Fx3qrrz%2bH8HfEwh01o8nV47JjRcJG4c05MDaaMtooe7Qzm7XNIFTY%2fdIZBGwtWY9PuNjdsjYUAvw0sdoerlQOH4xF0azH6eMVF8eNrg4utvttPHzf%2ba8bKCDzWh7KdLrroOmxRQBRT7NgzFBUdYLnTcLs%2bL1BG1xuL6XCsPbRs9BYyv7x98dEa8%2bbvGu1IWqd2yJcd3B3gHSWxseeUmpLVuwZYyQk3j5Y46wysoz1tXbUH%2fHe2O8PdKSV9EE%2bdczmhixwqmoYxS8zLpNsWcXnPZ28pT%2bfVzt95PcTu%2b%2fqvZHRBYWCohhdgO1ewOrP6KLPWFSHWrvh5SVSOyOhxxtupBVoyqM%2bw%3d%3d

 

Vostro with 8GB ram there, upgrade it yourself to more later when ram is cheaper

[Alex0x7F]

We're on a tight budget and have been replacing teacher laptops with these from Amazon renewed. They meet W11 requirements and have a very nice chassis + keyboard.

Had around 15 in the last month or two and I can't fault them. 256GB SSD but all work is stored on O365.

 

Dell Latitude 5400

[MartinT]

I bought a truly excellent refurbished Lenovo L380 laptop for £199 from this eBay shop, including Windows 11. Worth a good browse.

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/str/thebestlaptopdealsaround

[Norphy]

You can get refurbed Dell Latitude 5420s on eBay for between £250 and £400. 11th Gen Core CPUs, generally 16GB RAM and NVMe SSDs. That's the model I use for work and it's good enough for Windows 11. I see it being good for another four or five years, easily.

 

Stick to business line laptops (Latitude, Thinkpads etc) and you're golden.

 

/edit You can get 5430s for not much more! 12th Gen instead of 11th, but that's the generation Intel started using P and E cores, so you should get better performance and/or battery life out of them.

Edited May 10, 2024 by Norphy

[penfold]

Firstly you don't want a HDD

 

https://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb&brandid=3&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7Udb7h0KOjqNebwmHc4hFNENT7wCmna2vsn8%2bI5ke4ErI93KyxMzFasTOI9QEBzxRji2ejmuPL6msHBATAStWLBPL%2fmDreMBWqPqp3Fx3qrrz%2bH8HfEwh01o8nV47JjRcJG4c05MDaaMtooe7Qzm7XNIFTY%2fdIZBGwtWY9PuNjdsjYUAvw0sdoerlQOH4xF0azH6eMVF8eNrg4utvttPHzf%2ba8bKCDzWh7KdLrroOmxRQBRT7NgzFBUdYLnTcLs%2bL1BG1xuL6XCsPbRs9BYyv7x98dEa8%2bbvGu1IWqd2yJcd3B3gHSWxseeUmpLVuwZYyQk3j5Y46wysoz1tXbUH%2fHe2O8PdKSV9EE%2bdczmhixwqmoYxS8zLpNsWcXnPZ28pT%2bfVzt95PcTu%2b%2fqvZHRBYWCohhdgO1ewOrP6KLPWFSHWrvh5SVSOyOhxxtupBVoyqM%2bw%3d%3d

 

Vostro with 8GB ram there, upgrade it yourself to more later when ram is cheaper

Lol, HDD - didn't even read what I typed!! :confused:

 

I did mean SSD, but I have 8GB on my work laptop and find that I am constantly out of memory

[jmak]

We're on a tight budget and have been replacing teacher laptops with these from Amazon renewed. They meet W11 requirements and have a very nice chassis + keyboard.

Had around 15 in the last month or two and I can't fault them. 256GB SSD but all work is stored on O365.

 

Dell Latitude 5400

The most recent one of these you can afford. As per other posts, the 5420 with 11th Gen is fine (it's what I have), but having hands-on with those, and the more recent ones, battery life is noticeably better with the 12th gen and later Intel chips.

Lol, HDD - didn't even read what I typed!! :confused:

 

I did mean SSD, but I have 8GB on my work laptop and find that I am constantly out of memory

I bought a 5430 for my OH with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD as that was much cheaper than the spec I actually wanted, but no point in paying Dell prices for upgrades. I did spend a bit more, but I reckoned the extra £100 on a 5 year on-site warranty was worth it.

 

Dell business outlet store is my go to for personal purchases.