Simple laptop buying advice.

If you're not on a budget, buy a Mac and don't worry about the specs. 

Mac computers are the user friendly alternatives to PC's. They're quicker to learn, more intuitive, and less prone to failure. People may disagree, but I've been using them for over 10 years and they're my go-to solution for everything. 

If you are on a budget, let's keep this simple, if you've found a website that sells laptops, it's likely got some filters on it, here's what I'd set my filters to, if I was looking for the best value for money I could find. For each category, the filter I'd set is in bold. In order of importance. 

Select the Laptop/Windows option. 

Windows PC's do everything a Chromebook can, and more. Chromebooks used to be significantly cheaper, now that seems less like that's the case. Be on the lookout for Windows S though, it only allows apps to be installed from Microsoft marketplace. 

Number one priority

Buy a machine with an SSD (solid state drive not HDD, [hard disk drive]), 128Gb machines should be your minimum for everyday use. Bigger hard disk drives (eg 1Tb+) in cheaper machines are likely to have a speed rating (eg 5400 or 7200rpm), these are normal HDD drives, not SSD drives and I'd urge anyone to avoid them nowadays. The speed benefits of an SSD are primarily what separates the budget machines apart. Some machines have both, which is ok. 

RAM

8Gb should be your starting point. Try and avoid 4Gb if you can, but deselect this option to bring the costs down, 4Gb is ok for home learning.

Processors

i3, i5, i7 etc, these are the processors to buy if you can stretch to a machine with one in. Or Ryzen chips (3 or 5 are good starting points). Celeron and Athlon are the lower end, so machines with these in should be much cheaper, if you're looking at machines with Celeron or Athlon processors, look for the speed rating, the higher the number the better. 

Screen and size. 

This is down to personal preference, 15" Laptops look great, but can be a handful, and quite heavy. Go for Full HD and get the highest resolution screen you can, if you want the best screen technology OLED offers outstanding clarity and depth, but LCD is much more common. 

Brand

The big names are Asus, Acer, Dell, Microsoft and Lenovo. I'd personally avoid Huawei at the moment (although they make great machines) because of the uncertainty with American business and UK data infrastructure. 

Finally

Look at the reviews, especially the negative ones. If a machine has a high number of reviews but a low score, I'd avoid it. If a machine only has a couple of reviews and the negative ones are a variety of reasons - for example, couldn't connect to wifi, couldn't transfer files over bluetooth, it's possible those might have been one off's that they'd have encountered due to a lack of knowledge, check other sites for reviews by putting the model number and 'reviews' into google.

I hope this is useful, let me know if there's something I've missed or that's confusing. 


 

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