laptop for under £300

Old_Git

I am looking a laptop for a friends son .His max budget is £300 .
The son is 25 and uses it for watching films and playing games .
But the games are not important .

agrinnall

Unlikely that a sub-£300 laptop will be good enough to play cutting edge games, so you need to tell us what sort of games he wants to play. Although personally I think a 25 year old should take responsibility for paying for their own leisure activities.

HappyMJ

Old_Git wrote: »

I am looking a laptop for a friends son .His max budget is £300 .
The son is 25 and uses it for watching films and playing games .

Games? He'll need to spend more than £300.

I spent £600 on this laptop MSI CX61-2PF and it's not good enough to run some games. It's got an Intel i7-4712MQ Quad Core Processor and 12GB of memory and it still runs slow when some games are running. The fan is also very loud distracting from the enjoyment of the game.

A gaming desktop would probably be a much cheaper alternative.

Old_Git

agrinnall wrote: »

Unlikely that a sub-£300 laptop will be good enough to play cutting edge games, so you need to tell us what sort of games he wants to play. Although personally I think a 25 year old should take responsibility for paying for their own leisure activities.

Please do not judge a 25 year old you do not know .
He is his fathers carer .His father is 55 and has parkinsons .
His father wants to buy his son a laptop for christmas .
The son has asked for nothing .

lets forget about the gaming .what can he get for £300 .

Fightsback

Old_Git wrote: »

lets forget about the gaming .what can he get for £300 .

Avoid celeron processors, dreadful. Look for something with an i3 processor or above, for example here

http://www.ebuyer.com/724984-hp-250-g4-laptop-n1a92ea-abu

or here:

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Products/cat/Laptops/refine/46562~144411

agrinnall

Old_Git wrote: »

Please do not judge a 25 year old you do not know .
He is his fathers carer .His father is 55 and has parkinsons .
His father wants to buy his son a laptop for christmas .
The son has asked for nothing .

lets forget about the gaming .what can he get for £300 .

I'd suggest then that the father gives the son the £300 and he can decide either to spend it on a sub-£300 laptop or add some of his own money to it to buy one that will do the things that he wants. It may not be as festive to give money instead of a gift but buying technology for someone else is fraught with difficulty.

HappyMJ

Old_Git wrote: »

Please do not judge a 25 year old you do not know .
He is his fathers carer .His father is 55 and has parkinsons .
His father wants to buy his son a laptop for christmas .
The son has asked for nothing .

lets forget about the gaming .what can he get for £300 .

You also said it's for watching films. I no longer use the laptop.

I've purchased an Amazon Fire TV Stick and it is excellent for watching films. Side loading Kodi on to it and I can watch almost any film or TV program after it's been broadcast or released on Blu-Ray/DVD.

That was about £25.

The Fire Stick is a computer. It's got a processor, method of input (a smart phone or the remote control), wireless networking, outputs to a TV.

henm2

There are these excellent refurbished Thinkpad X200 laptops for £84 still available http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WINDOWS-7-Lenovo-Thinkpad-X200-Tablet-Laptop-Core-2-Duo-Warranty-CHEAP-Webcam-/370916356683. I don't think it is suitable for games but is fine for everything else. Also does not have a optical drive for DVDs etc but most people rarely use that anyway.
I did add another 2Gb of RAM to mine for another £20 to bring it up to 4GB of RAM.

As regards films I also use Kodi which has been sideloaded on to a Amazon Fire Stick. The stick is then connected to your TV and you can then watch anything you want. The stick was priced at £25 during the black Friday/cyber Monday sales but has now gone back up to its regular price of £35. Kodi itself is free.
http://www.htpcbeginner.com/install-kodi-on-amazon-fire-tv/