£300 budget - what can I get?

Soldato
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My father is looking into getting a cheap laptop to use for controlling a Raspberry Pi when he is out and about, and I was wondering what is considered good in this price bracket currently? It has been a long time since I have looked at the laptop market and I have no idea about cheap budget laptops so if anyone could offer some advice I would appreciate that. He says he'll be prepared to go with a refurbished one if it is in good condition as well.
 
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My father is looking into getting a cheap laptop to use for controlling a Raspberry Pi when he is out and about, and I was wondering what is considered good in this price bracket currently? It has been a long time since I have looked at the laptop market and I have no idea about cheap budget laptops so if anyone could offer some advice I would appreciate that. He says he'll be prepared to go with a refurbished one if it is in good condition as well.

A refurbished business laptop like the Dell Latitude E7450, £300 should easily cover a 5th gen i5 with SSD.

You can get brand new HP 255 G7, Ryzen 3 laptops for £300 but the quality is really poor compared to the Dell latitude.
 
Soldato
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You can get brand new HP 255 G7, Ryzen 3 laptops for £300 but the quality is really poor compared to the Dell latitude.

I've got one of those its actually a really good laptop, quality isn't bad at all obviously nothing compared to my xps13 but not bad! I upgraded to 16gb ram and a 512gb m2 though, the screen is VA and a lot better than TN that you usually get on these budget laptops, i payed 340.
 
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Soldato
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Would either of these laptops be good for just surfing and a bit of work using MS Office? My Samsung R60+ is about 12 years old now and really slow, even with an SSD and due to the processor it will only run W8.1.
 
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Would either of these laptops be good for just surfing and a bit of work using MS Office? My Samsung R60+ is about 12 years old now and really slow, even with an SSD and due to the processor it will only run W8.1.
There's no obvious reason why a Core2Duo system (my best guess) would'nt run Win10 just fine. With an SSD and 8GB ram (you should be able to pickup 2nd hand at a nice price).
But it's not going to be lightening fast either way.

A £300 Ryzen laptop - get 1080p screen, 8Gb Ram and an SSD as mandatory min specs, and it'll be fine for any "normal" laptop use.
 
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