Please recommend a basic laptop - again!

Eliza_2

Oh no, just when I was thinking it's a while since a 'please recommend a laptop' thread, so now's my big chance, and someone else has beaten me to it. However here goes.

I've been tasked with buying a basic laptop for our parish council. Price is £250ish and the main criteria is that it must have a good clear screen! 15+. The majority of the councillors are elderly and don't use computers for anything so in order to drag them into the 21st century we need to make it as easy for them as possible. They are beginning to (very!) grudgingly realise that they can't do their jobs properly for the community without access and some training.

Otherwise it will be used for documents, netsurfing, accounts (basic Libreoffice stuff), no graphics heavy games, no tv, netflix etc or film downloads. No music. Just a few simple games to be used as teaching aids. Net access, other than the usual ethernet or wifi at home, will generally be using either a tethered phone or mobile dongle in the village hall.

I've looked at ebuyer, Amazon and one or two other sites, there seems to be a fair bit of choice but I could really do with some recommendations regarding brands and models. I last bought a laptop about 8 years ago so am pretty out of date myself!

Thanks very much.

Cisco001

any laptop can do the job...
For that budget, probably

HP ProBook 455

Fujitsu LIFEBOOK A555

Eliza_2

Cisco001 wrote: »

any laptop can do the job...
For that budget, probably

HP ProBook 455

Fujitsu LIFEBOOK A555

Thank you, yes that's the problem, there are so many to choose from. Have you used any of the above? The HP looks possible, the Fujitsu review isn't especially good. Will keep looking, if only there were only 2 to choose from it would be easier - as I'm making the decision for someone else and with public money, I don't want to make a mistake.

Cisco001

sorry, haven't use any of those. Just choose based on spec.
Those two are with better spec.

there is a HP 250 G4 with i3 5005u, 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD, at £250

It should be fastest as it has SSD, but I don't know if 128GB enough for you and I personally don't like laptop without maintenance hatch.

If you want to look for reviews on laptops, you could have a look at notebookcheck.net. It should give you idea on how good is the screen or general quality.

John_Gray

Once you have chosen your laptop, then consider how you are going to back up the data on it...

Budget £40-£70 for an appropriately-sized external USB hard drive, and look for a free program (such as Syncback) to do the copying for you. In fact, best to get two, so one can be taken off site, and you can rotate the two drives every week/month/as appropriate.

You might also want to get a hard drive imaging program, so you can recover the laptop's hard drive back to a (hopefully recent) point in time via a bootable CD or USB Flash Drive.

Buying the laptop is just one step on the way!

victor2

Ask around local businesses and organisations the council has some sort of connection with if they could donate an old laptop they may have spare. Obviously won't be the latest, but might still meet your needs and cost you nothing, although you might then upgrade the operating system and/or hardware.

megaginge

John_Gray wrote: »

Once you have chosen your laptop, then consider how you are going to back up the data on it...

Budget £40-£70 for an appropriately-sized external USB hard drive, and look for a free program (such as Syncback) to do the copying for you. In fact, best to get two, so one can be taken off site, and you can rotate the two drives every week/month/as appropriate.

You might also want to get a hard drive imaging program, so you can recover the laptop's hard drive back to a (hopefully recent) point in time via a bootable CD or USB Flash Drive.

Buying the laptop is just one step on the way!

It basically sounds like all they need is web access, pointless doing external backups. Recovery media or system restore would be more than enough.

Eliza_2

Thank you everyone, I'll follow up all of these ideas. A grant is available to fund the purchases from central government fortunately, so it will be nice to get something new. Personally I use dropbox as well as an ext hard drive to back up so hopefully that will be belt and braces enough. I may buy another to rotate as suggested though, good idea. Oh and I use gmail for emails so all should be retrievable in the event of a councillor accidentally pressing the delete button!

Thanks again

megaginge

Cisco001 wrote: »

sorry, haven't use any of those. Just choose based on spec.
Those two are with better spec.

there is a HP 250 G4 with i3 5005u, 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD, at £250

It should be fastest as it has SSD, but I don't know if 128GB enough for you and I personally don't like laptop without maintenance hatch.

If you want to look for reviews on laptops, you could have a look at notebookcheck.net. It should give you idea on how good is the screen or general quality.

+1 for this machine, I bought one for my mum. It's got a proper processor (i3 not a celeron or Atom) and SSD. It will be nice and fast and that's enough storage for browsing and a few pictures.

If you ever need more storage it's cheap to buy a USB pen drive to add another 128g or you can get a larger external hard drive if needed also.

HP machines are pretty good and unbeatable for your price point I would personally (Yes, it's very subjective) say ..

Eliza_2

Really helpful again, thank you. The machine will be used for all parish council documents, policy stuff, minutes, accounts and so on as well as the internet so any laptop should be fine.

Might even treat myself to a nice new one too if this is good, perhaps I should look out for bogof offers!

Thanks again.