Laptop for teenager

estelle123

My 13 year old daughter's laptop is dying. We need to get her a new one. She uses her computer for school work and other teenage things. She wants an internal webcam and mic. We can't afford more than £350.00. Can anyone recommend the perfect laptop for her?

donkey14

What is wrong with the current one?

An inexpensive Toshiba here: www. ebay.co.uk/itm/TOSHIBA-C660-1D7-640GB-15-6IN-LAPTOP-/330603265091

estelle123

We do not want to get from ebay. We want a computer where we can go to the shop and collect it.

santer_2

Another option

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/laptop/range/b940backtoschool.html

Maybe put together a list of must haves - do's and then e-mail novatech or pcspecialist to see what they have, both have live chat as well

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/hdcontacts.html

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/contact-us/

Browntoa

some of the 2nd hand shops like Cashgenerators and cashconverters have almost brand new Laptops with warranties ,

john Lewis 2 year warranty £299

http://www.johnlewis.com/231297503/Product.aspx

closed

dying or slow?

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2752490

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2436849

macman

Some more RAM and a 30 minute clean up could save you £350...

Hammyman

£350 gets you a poorly built stinking pile of poo that'll be lucky to see out the 12 month warranty if you are buying new.

However £350 on Ebay also buys a solidly built £1500 RRP Lenovo Thinkpad T or X series laptop that is a couple of years old or less with the balance of the Lenovo Next Day On Site Parts & Labour Warranty which is far better than anything any shop will ever offer - pick the phone up at 3pm and a guy is on your doorstep at 9am the following day with the bits in his hand with no quibbling or arguing the toss over whether or not you've done the damage. It'll also still be going strong another 3 years down the line, long after the bargain basement new one has been consigned to the bin.

GunJack

got to agree with hammy on this one ref. build quality....cheaper (and even into the not-so-cheap) models these days are suffering in the robustness department. Some of the ones I've fixed recently have been so flimsy Bear in mind a 13-y-o is not likely to be the most careful of users, something like a couple of year-old Thinkpad may well be a better bet, and getting spares a few more years down the line is not likely to be a problem either. Can't normally say that about a budget model....

Lakeuk

I would seriously consider buying on-line to make the most of your budget, I got a Samsung RV511 a few months back which I'm happy with which Amazon are selling for £350 plus it's eligible for Samsung's Back to School cashback offer of £50 so would work out at £300

Just noticed only downside - Amazon won't have it in stock till 1st Sept :eek:

It has:-
Widescreen 15.6" screen
3i 380M processer, 3Gb memory, 320Gb HDD
webcam/mic
sd card slot
cd rewriter
3 usb ports
VGA / HMDI ports
Network Port
WiFi/Bluetooth
Win7 Premium

Laptop

Cashback Details

Im_just_careful

Depending on the actual requirements I do wonder if a cheap "netbook" style laptop would do the job.

I bought a small HP "Netbook" style laptop from Tesco recently for less than £200 and it has a built in webcam.

It doesn't have the screen size of a "full sized" laptop but would suit my 12 year old son if I let him on it.

I don't generally let him near laptops unless there is a specific need for him to use it, I insist he uses a desktop machine. That way if the keyboard gets something in it or the mouse breaks it is a quick fix. He loves games and I somehow doubt a laptop would last long with him using it for games.

As for the old laptop, this may seem to be the wrong answer, but emptying all the files onto a seperate disk (Ideally a networked disk also known as a NAS) and adding some additional memory will probably fix it unless the problem is physical (fan gone or similar).

Even if you don't buy it from them Crucial (https://www.crucial.com) have a memory scanner which will let you know how much memory a machine has and how much it will take.

If the existing laptop is Windows XP and has 500 MB of memory or less you may have found the problem. I added 1GB to my XP laptop for £10 and performance was considerably better.