Surface Laptop Go

£15

£15

£15

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My 15 Yr old son wants to get the Surface Laptop Go. It'll be for homework (so office apps), a bit of coding (he's going to college next year to study a computer science related course) and some light gaming/browsing.

He's played with one at Curry's and has done his own research and really likes it.

But before I get the card out, I'd appreciate your thoughts on possible alternatives, or is it OK?
 
Personally, I'd say it was underpowered. The main problem will be the limited disk space with a max of 256GB which bumps the price to £899 and doesn't seem good value given that the RAM is also limited to 8GB. There's a rational review at https://www.theguardian.com/technol...sing-the-sweet-spot-keyboard-battery-software

I wouldn't buy anything with less than 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD unless it's user-upgradeable which the Surface ranges certainly aren't.
 
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It's a poor substitute for SSD as it's slow and has to be a separate volume. 128GB for C: just isn't big enough and 256GB would be marginal for the OP's use case. I have a Surface Go 2 tablet so I know....
 
You cannot do any gaming on a surface go or surface pro. Unless you are using a service like geforce now.

I'd recommend getting a proper laptop. Just because it will have bigger screen. It will be chunkier but if you are using it for homework and coding that means hours and hours spent looking at fine details. If it was just for web browsing and watching Netflix then a surface go is good.

I have actually owned 3 of them now and I really like them but all I use them for is a quick 5 minutes at a time to do a simple task here and there or for long haul flights and movies / shows. My work also gave me a surface pro which is far better but also 3 times the cost.

If I needed a proper machine I'd be looking at a proper laptop from the likes of Lenovo.
 
I have a surface go and laptop and I barely touch it as they're not really work machines. More like a convenient travel item but as your main workhorse I'd avoid.
 
ikra said:
I have a surface go and laptop and I barely touch it as they're not really work machines. More like a convenient travel item but as your main workhorse I'd avoid.
Click to expand...

Have to agree with that. I've got a Surface Go which I maxed out with CPU, RAM and SSD .. the limiting factor is and always has been the poor Pentium CPU (4415Y) that it shipped with. Makes doing anything intensive very difficult/sluggish. Even with a barebones Win10 install and heavily tweaked - does me fine though on the random uses I have (sitting at friends, needing a laptop rather than a phone or diagnostics)
 
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