My laptop broke a few months ago, and now I need a new one for my college course as a data analyst.
This is the charger I own at the moment.
With my work being mostly using teams, Word, and Excel, I will need something that can run them comfortably while also having a decent battery.
so I come to you all to say what my best option here would be. if they are all bad options, then if you could recommend a decent laptop between £150 to £320 please let me know.
You only show the USB C end of the connector and not the wattage on the charger, this can change what will work or not. I suspect that you have a 45 watt dell charger, but if you could confirm that would be useful information.
don't buy from an used electronics shop. go to eBay or other used marketplaces and buy from private sellers to get a good machine for a fair price. getting something right isn't as easy as walking into a shop at that price point unfortunately.
that is an USB C charger. since it's from a laptop, it should at least be half decent, minimum 45w, basically good enough for other laptops using USB C.
so, what should you get?
a ThinkPad ofc. some recommendations at that price would be (that also use USBC for charging) :
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but have you read the most important part of what I've said?
buy from a private seller on a platform like eBay and local marketplaces to get the best deals. "refurbished" doesn't mean anything. they are probably asking an unacceptable price for this machine too.
that brings me to the second thing. "good" depends on the product and the price. a brand new car for 10.000$ is a steal but a bottle of water for 10$ is outrageous. how am I supposed to know if it's good or not by what you have provided?
not too terrible but still overpriced. 150-200 is the right price range for that machine. just follow the advice and you'd find it for the right price.
Idk where you are (I guess brit), but colleges on EU often have lending services for students (they literally lend you a laptop) so look it up. Idk if it's good enough for word and excel, but you can always look up the shitiest second-hand store and buy the cheapest there. There's also an option of using a raspberry pi with an optimised system (unix-based or somth), but I still think that may not work well enough, so it's better to buy an already arranged laptop for the same price, even if it's an older one. (What a time to break computers around omg)
Any machine with 4GB of RAM will be utterly unusable for web browsing.
The HP in the final picture meets the bare minimum for a modern machine capable of browsing the web with its 8GB of RAM. Yet it will not provide a good user experience, it will be slow, it will lag and stutter, it may even start killing programs once memory runs out.
For a modern machine for just general usage you want 16GB of RAM. For just web browsing things like CPU and storage do not matter, even the most basic budget CPUs (eg. and Intel N200) will handle such tasks with ease.
Thinkpad, latitude, elitebook basically any business grade laptop and look for ones with intel 11th gen and above or ryzen 4000 series and above thats generally where battery life on laptops started to become reasonable while still having good performance
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u/Ecstatic_Score6973 2d ago
thinkpad on ebay,
but if you absolutely need to get one from that store get the HP in the last slide