Need new basic laptop

ididgetwhereiamtoday

Used from CEX should get you a decent spec for your money. With physical shops in most high streets and 5 year warranty. 

Also doing your bit for the environment with not buying new. 

You could trade in your old tech to get a bit more off too. 

giraffe69

If your budget is sub £400 then I'd forget about an i7 chip because that will break the bank.
For the requirements you stated an i7 would be over the top anyway.

Personally I find Curry's ok if you know exactly what you want but if you have to rely on their 14 year old salesmen then not so good!

Olinda99

I have no idea about price but laptops (and indeed desktop computers) seem to be divided into two types at the moment - those that are co-pilot plus laptops and those that aren't

The former supporting AI, recall etc

Perhaps you could research this via Google and decide if in the future you will want the AI features that co-pilot plus PCs give you and make your purchasing decisions accordingly

However as I said co-pilot plus PCs may be out of your price range anyway

Frozen_up_north

The specification the OP needs is a standard home/office laptop. They are plentiful and available from many sources.
Min spec is 8 GB RAM, 256 GB solid state drive. Intel i3, or i5 processor (or AMD equivalent).
15.6” screen. Slate grey backlit keyboard (not backlit silver keys, you struggle to see the letters).
Long battery life, min 8 hours.
Windows 11 Home (supplied as standard on most laptops anyway).

More storage space than 256 GB is not needed as you should be storing anything important off the laptop for resilience anyway. Extra storage and RAM is “desirable but not essential” and is relatively cheap.

Modern slim laptops do not include a CD/DVD drive, but they cost less than £20 for an external drive. Likewise, many lower cost laptops do not include an RJ45 wired LAN socket, if really necessary you can buy an adapter.

Asus or Acer are generally OK. This is one example from John Lewis:
https://www.johnlewis.com/asus-vivobook-16-laptop-amd-ryzen-5-processor-8gb-ram-512gb-ssd-16-wuxga-silver/p113522408

Doshwaster

cisko65 said:

Vitor said:

8GB RAM is a bit skimpy for modern apps and browsers, I'd go for 16GB but your budget may need to stretch to £399. Have tried John Lewis, you might got more sensible advice and less hard sell than from Currys.

Thanks, yes I think you are right. And a friend advised to go for i7 at least, to be on track for a few years. Another thing she suggested was to increase the budget for the same reason. John Lewis might only have the latest models. If I exclude Currys as well, I need to understand how to find reliable sellers online.

If budget is tight then an i7 is a massive overkill, especially if you aren't  going to be playing games. You will get more bang for your buck by spending extra on memory than a better processor

Also if the laptop will spend most of its time plugged into the mains and a monitor then battery life, screen size and weight aren't going to be important factors so you needn't go for the latest sexy thin models.

I'd be tempted to go for a refurbished/previous generation Dell or Lenovo as there will be loads of them around. Businesses buy them in bulk and then often sell them on before they are used.