UKH

I am looking to buy a laptop for work and, not being in the least bit tech savvy, I am finding the choice bewildering. I need it for editing Word documents using macros and track changes, and PDFs using mark up. I have no idea what kind of processing speed or RAM I would need for that. I would also use it for the usual kind of social and streaming activities. I don’t necessarily want the cheapest one on the market, but neither can I afford to spend too much so I was thinking of a ballpark figure of £500. I would be grateful for any easy to understand advice.

I have never had a problem with work laptops costing around the £200 to £250 mark. Word, excel etc don't need much to run.  More important to me is screen size. For years I have used a 15 inch laptop but I recently replaced the last one with a 17 inch and its great,  it's a HP off amazon that was £350. The extra screen size makes a big difference with multiple spreadsheets open though I do find I will always manage to fill any use able space. What I once did just on a 15 inch screen I now do on a 17 inch screen with a second 24 inch screen and still run out of space.

Eddited to add. https://www.amazon.co.uk/HP-17-ca0003na-17-3-Inch-Laptop-Graphics/dp/B07JK2...

I bought 4 of these for myself and 3 of my office bods. 

How will you be using it ? Dax makes a good point about larger screens but they are inevitably larger & heavier if you have to travel with the PC a lot. Personally I prefer a desktop PC in the office & a small (12" screen) but lightweight laptop for travelling

Any laptop that you buy at the moment will be more than enough for what you require and with a £500 budget you are spoilt for choice.

I have a 10 year old laptop bought from Tesco for £350 notes and it is still capable of doing almost everything that I want today. The only thing it can't do is play my 4K 120 frames per second footage from my cameras, but then such abilities weren't even a consumers dream all those years ago.

My only advice would be to either buy a laptop with a solid state hard drive or budget for buying a SSD drive and put that into your new laptop. Your laptop would be like sh1t off a shovel with functionality and speed.

Your decision really is a tradeoff between screen size, weight and performance. A bigger screen makes using the laptop a much nicer experience, whereas a lighter weight makes carrying it around far more convenient. Performance nowadays is generally plent above your needs but I would agree that, unless you're intending to store huge amounts of data on the device itself (rather than keeping most of what you're not currently working on in the cloud), an SSD (solid state drive) is definitely the way forward, not just for speed but for reliability too, since solid state drives are far more robust when it comes to moving around with them without having to shut the machine down properly before you do so.

My advice would be to determine the size and weight you're happy carrying around with you easily, then get the highest spec SSD machine you can find that meets your size and weight requirements.

Consider taking out a 3 year warranty. Laptops are prohibitively expensive to fix.

Also Office 365 seems a good deal to me -£80 a year for all the applications plus as much Cloud storage as you could wish for.

I use a laptop with a small screen (13 or 14 inches) in combination with a large separate screen on my desk.  This way you get the convenience of a smallish portable laptop for taking around with you but with a big screen when doing the bulk of your work at a desk.  It also means I actually have two screens running together when at the desk so can have different things open on each screen which is really useful.  You can get a 19-22 inch monitor for about £100 so left with £400 for the laptop.  This would only be sensible though if you do a lot of your work at a permanent desk, if you use the laptop on the go all the time then a bigger screen is probably better.

One thing to watch for is that with some of the really thin laptops the connectivity is not brilliant.  They use micro ports so you often end up with lots of adapters to connect to anything.  It is a trade-off between having the lightest possible laptop but with the inconvenience of having adapters.

I would also recommend an SSD harddrive.  Much quicker and less to go wrong as no moving parts.

I would kind of go with what john Arran said. Identify what you want most, then buy the highest possible spec for that for the money you've got.

I wanted a Mac with as much RAM as possible. I knew I would not be travelling that much with it, but also that I would want to move around in the house, so I went for a  MacBook with the biggest screen and as much RAM as I could get. The SSD came as standard, but I compromised on the size of that, thinking I would put everything in the cloud.

I've not regretted any of those choices, and three years later I am still very happy with it.

Thanks everyone for your replies, your input has given me a good start in what to look at and for.

I've got the 14" version of that, and while it is obviously a cheap laptop (very plasticky) the build quality seems decent, the keyboard is good and the battery life a good few hours - very pleased indeed with it for the price.

Unless you're gaming, almost any laptop on the market will be adequate in performance for using "stuff" on Windows, obviously ensure you get enough storage for your needs e.g. if you've got a lot of photos etc, though.

Only other difference is that mine is 8GB RAM and I find 4 to 8 makes a difference in terms of performance in Windows.  Going beyond 8 is largely unnecessary except (again) if you're gaming.  Edit: Mine's also Intel Core i5 rather than AMD, but for what you're doing that will make no difference - CPU performance on anything on the market well exceeds what you need to run Windows, the main constraint these days is the speed of your broadband connection.

Depends what you buy.  If spending £1500 on a new Mac, yes, consider it seriously.  If you're spending £300 on a budget laptop there is little more point than taking out insurance on a kettle or microwave - just self-insure and get a new one if it breaks.  In my experience I get 3-5 years out of low-end Windows laptops, and that's about the kind of timeframe when you'll benefit from an upgrade anyway.

I don't 100% agree. I certainly wouldn't take out a PC World extended warranty - mostly they're criminally expensive. But often other suppliers like John Lewis, Laptop Direct, even Tesco - sometimes have extended warranties as part of the deal or for relatively small amounts, say £25 - £50 for providing 3 years - well worth factoring in. I've claimed under those policies quite a bit!

If that cheap it may well be worth it, yes.  I was thinking more the mass-market warranties which are typically heading towards £100 on a £300 laptop which to me just isn't worth it.

Totally agree.