Laptop <£200

Rockbox · 12 Jun 2022 at 15:58

I'm the designated techie who finds friends and family laptops. I need 2 laptops, I assume for word docs and web browsing. The budget was originally £100. Getting them to £200 was a stretch. I found a nice Lenovo with Ryzen 5300u for £225, but even that's too much.

They're Apple's target audience. Buy phones/laptops/tablets for £100 and wonder why they're crap. "A phone's a phone, after all." Buy an £800 Macbook Air: "oh it's so fast."

Is it possible at £200? There was a Lenovo with IPS screen and Pentium Gold 7505 for £186.99 on HotUKDeals. I take it Tiger Lake U/Zen 4xxx at the minimum? I've used a tablet with Pentium/Celeron N, and it's currently gathering dust.

It's a surprise, so I can't ask the receivers what they want. The one requesting usually goes for large storage. I normally focus on CPUs, 128GB minimum to not cripple Windows and, after my last purchase, screens. The requester doesn't want me opening up a new laptop, so post-purchase upgrades are out.

While we're here, what's available at £100 that's not masochistic? Left up to them, they'd get whatever sponsored trash the rainforest showed them. I'd personally like to avoid the rainforest and auction site. Laptops on here start at £700, so out of budget.

Not fussy with brands, but over the years I keep coming back to Asus for cheap laptops. One of the HotUKDeals threads also ripped into Lenovo for their poor hinge design.

Rockbox · 12 Jun 2022 at 16:19

Eh, it's not so bad.

Their minimums are a lot lower than my minimums. Personally not a fan of laptops in general.

Rockbox · 12 Jun 2022 at 23:06

Are chromebooks really suitable for university students? I recommended them for a kid once. I have access to discounts, but the real price-savings seem to come from these random sales I hear about after they're finished.

Rockbox · 13 Jun 2022 at 08:22

lsg1r said:
will likely need a bit of 'branding' to not be an outcast

It's a shame that unis have become extensions of high school, what with the lack of guaranteed jobs and all. I imagine in a matter of years you'll have jocks studying sports science pushing nerds studying computer science into lockers.

Uni's not till September, so I'll probably wait for one of those £188 ips screen deals.

I'd obviously buy a proper laptop if buying for myself, and since I'm not paying, it doesn't matter if it becomes e-waste and the students get their own stuff. In an ideal world, you'd just give them the money and let them choose.

But I hate how laptops are outdated in a year, while an overclocked 2500k kicks on for a decade. They seem to depreciate in value faster than phones, and didn't come close to fulfilling their potential till M1/Ryzen 4th gen.

Rockbox · 14 Jun 2022 at 16:57

How important is RAM vs a CPU? Been a while since I used anything less than 16GB, but even then, a decent SSD should act as a pagefile. What good is saturating that RAM with cores weaker than my mobile phone?

I thought a Tiger Lake or Zen 2 core would be more important, even if it's 2C4T. But I heard that Ryzen laptops also dedicate 2GB to graphics, so is that something I have to worry about?

Rockbox · 16 Jun 2022 at 11:44

Rroff said:
TBH at £200 you are looking at like J4125 based devices with 8GB RAM and 128GB eMMC, 256GB if you are lucky - they'll do at a pinch for web-browsing and casual app use - in fact surprisingly well for most casual users - but won't stand up to any real gaming or heavier weight productivity tasks. If you look around there are some solid construction quality wise brands even at that price point for those devices, and some truly terrible ones...

That doesn't sound half bad tbh. 4 core, and eMMC's image got some rehab with the low-end Steam Deck. Which brands do you recommend?

I'm still looking out for those freak deals. Like the 8/256 Samsung laptop that apparently went on sale at Argos for £200. Maybe Prime Day will have some good deals too, although like I said, I don't like to pad Bezos' pockets.