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Laptop advice

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Hi all, I have two daughters aged 16 and 18, one is in Uni and the other in 6th form, I am looking to purchase a laptop each for them.
Does anyone have any recommendations or know of any good deals available, I'm looking to pay around £2 - 300 each for them.
They would need Microsoft office installed for coursework etc....

Thanks in advance. :)

Comments

  • agrinnall
    agrinnall Posts: 23,344 Forumite
    10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    I'll leave it to other people to suggest hardware options as in my view that price range is too low to get a decent laptop.

    However, I think it's very unlikely that you'll find anything with Office included at that price. Instead you should check whether they can get free or cheap access to Office through their uni/school, and even if they can't as long as one of them (probably the older) has an academic email address she will be able to buy a 4 year subscription covering 2 PCs to Office 365 University for £60 (it may be a little cheaper elsewhere, I bought mine from Software4students).

    http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/pdp/Office-365-University/productID.260260600
  • Cisco001
    Cisco001 Posts: 4,137 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    Here are my picks, purely based on spec vs value. No comment on quality.

    Lenovo ThinkPad L440 14" Laptop Intel Core i3-4000M 2.40GHz 4GB 500GB Windows 8.1 Pro £300
    Read more at http://www.tesco.com/direct/lenovo-thinkpad-l440-14-laptop-intel-core-i3-4000m-240ghz-4gb-500gb-windows-81-pro/345-3721.prd#0dteXZJfzporWIVL.99

    HP 250 G4 Laptop £300
    Intel Core i5-5200U
    4GB RAM + 500GB HDD
    15.6" LED + DVDRW
    Webcam + WIFI
    Windows 10 Home 64bit

    http://www.ebuyer.com/724984-hp-250-g4-laptop-n1a92ea-abu?gclid=CJyQq6rh4skCFUETGwodOtsJMg#fo_c=951&fo_k=afed28c3b10a16502de2a5501bc742b0&fo_s=gplauk?mkwid=s_dc&pcrid=51467863979&pkw=&pmt=


    HP 255 G4 Laptop £240 after cashback. Consider this only you are happy with obtaining cash back.
    AMD Quad-Core A8-7410 2.5 GHz
    AMD Radeon R5 Graphics
    4GB RAM + 1TB HDD
    15.6" LED + Webcam + Bluetooth
    Windows 10 Home


    With the office, you can get free vision with Libreoffice or open office.
    If you need MS office, you can ask you uni daughter to get a student version, which will be £60 for 4 years for 2 devices.
  • jshm2
    jshm2 Posts: 475 Forumite
    Ninth Anniversary 100 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    They can get Office for free from their school/uni so don't worry about that. You're basically looking at an i3 or AMD A4 in terms of spec - i5 if it's cheap enough.

    Asus or Acer tend to produce good stuff in your price range,
  • macman
    macman Posts: 53,129 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    You don't say what your daughters want/need to do on their laptops? Any modern laptop will run office programs with ease. As above,you can download Libre Office for free and that will do the same job as MS Office, just change the defaults to save in Microsoft file formats. Put the software saving towards a better quality machine, as what you can get for £300+ is vastly superior to a machine at £200+.
    No free lunch, and no free laptop ;)
  • Thanks all for the responses, much appreciated. I will look at extending my budget to get them both better quality laptops but I'll also check out the above suggestions and ask my eldest daughter whether any will be suitable.
  • agrinnall
    agrinnall Posts: 23,344 Forumite
    10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    jshm2 wrote: »
    They can get Office for free from their school/uni so don't worry about that.

    You should be more careful about making such sweeping statements that could get people's hopes up unnecessarily. To the best of my knowledge Office is available free from some schools and universities, but by no means all. If it was the case that it's free everywhere then there would be little point in having the discounted licence that I linked to in my previous post.
  • wymondham
    wymondham Posts: 6,356 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Photogenic Mortgage-free Glee!
    agrinnall wrote: »
    You should be more careful about making such sweeping statements that could get people's hopes up unnecessarily. To the best of my knowledge Office is available free from some schools and universities, but by no means all. If it was the case that it's free everywhere then there would be little point in having the discounted licence that I linked to in my previous post.

    True, ask the school's IT dept first to see if this is an option...
  • agrinnall
    agrinnall Posts: 23,344 Forumite
    10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    wymondham wrote: »
    True, ask the school's IT dept first to see if this is an option...

    Which of course is what I suggested in post #2... :D
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