UKH

Hello, I'll start by apologising for starting yet another of these threads that come up frequently! I thought I could just dig up some recommendations from old threads, but apparently I am such a fuddy duddy that I got lost very quickly! I realised that the last computer I bought for myself was a 2011 Macbook Pro, and in fact I have never ever specified/bought a Windows laptop!

My mother needs a replacement laptop, her own one is bascially knackered and it's not worth doing a "Trigger's Broom" bodge on it. 
She is 76 years old and really just needs basic stuff - email, Internet browsing, Skype, a little bit of photo management, and very basic MS Office (really just Word and very occasionally Excel). 

As per a recommendation on another thread, I went to "PCSPECIALIST.co.uk" and looked at "configure your own laptop"
Looking for example at 15.6" Ultranote VI S, and slightly upgrading some of their defaults (8Gb RAM and adding a 256Gb SSD). 
With Microsoft Office Home & Student 2019 (permanent licence), this comes out as £546. That is within budget. 

Is it overkill? Am I missing anything?

Regarding Office - my parents are old and a bit stuck in their ways. They are unlikely to be at ease with an Office 365 suite on a subscription model, and I will not persuade them that for her needs, freeware like Open Office will be adequate. 
Tangentially to my parents' conservatism on such things.....I am curious as to the branding as well. Does PC specialist build its own laptops entirely from core components so it's essentially their own brand? That might be a stopper, I think they'd like to see something like Hewlett Packard or Dell branded on it! 

I recently bought a refurbished Dell laptop from eBay for £250. It's high spec - i7 processor, touch screen, 512SSD and is working well. It's a little bit scruffy, but less-scuffed versions were available for a bit more money.

I'd suggest going down the refurb route and saving a lot of cash. A modern laptop with bigger screen than I went for can be had easily for £250 and will do everything your parents need, and more.

Go with either a refurb, or a 'Chinese' brand. Though they won't have heard of them, you can pick up great laptop's for so much cheaper (Teclast are well known, among others)

Thanks, are there any particularly well known, well-reputed refurb resellers? Again wrt my folks being a bit conservative and thinking that shop-bought means greater protection etc....I know there’s not much really to worry about with buyer protection etc (my own MacBook pro was a refurb and I was happy with the purchase) but persuading parents is a different matter! Especially as my Dad is buying as a Christmas present for my Mum. 

Mine came from agmworld on eBay and they were good. After a couple of weeks the one I purchased developed a screen fault (it was a grade C or D, so at the scruffy end of their range), and when I contacted them about it they arranged a collection of the faulty one and delivered a new one (which was a grade B, so much tidier), all of which happened within a couple of days.

The most important thing is to make sure it's exactly the same as the previous one. The reason for this is that otherwise there will be significant fear, uncertainty and doubt which you will then have to deal with, and everyone will be unhappy. So resist the urge to get better software and improve things, where possible, as you are already suggesting in your post. Absolutely right with the Office decision you mention, could be worth checking to see if they have an install set for the version they are currently using which will work on the new machine.

I usually use Dell or PC World, but there are probably cheaper options and your budget seems more than adequate. PC World will do you a transfer of the old PC to the new, which saves you the hassle, and also may connect them with PC World support so they can go there instead of ringing you, etc.

Finally, remove the old machine and take it home with you, which will remove the temptation to keep using the old one and thus get them into all sorts of trouble because they forgot what was on which machine, etc.

Good luck.

Edit: I would advise against the refurb - good for you but might decrease their confidence and pride in shiny new PC etc.

Chrome book? Windows is the devils work

Ha ha, sounds like you have met my parents 😃

To be fair to them, especially my Mum, they are managing better with their smartphones than I ever expected.

And chromeOS is even worse. If they're familiar with Windows, stick with it. 

Quite limiting in my experience, especially if they want Office. If it's a second laptop just for email and browsing the internet, they're fine (as long as you're ok with giving Google absolutely all of your data), but are very limited in their ability to run anything else.

That's a shame; LibreOffice seems a perfectly good Office substitute.

I bought a little MSI netbook last year, with a Win7 Ultimate and Office licence, and 80GB SSD, for £17. I don't think I could have bought the licence key for that...

Does she need a laptop? My Mum’s crap with tech but loves her iPad, links up well with her phone pretty easy to navigate and you’re already Mac savvy so can help her out with any issues.

I would second the suggestion above of trying to move the current version of office to the new laptop.  If she still has the install media, that's great.  If not, it might still be possible to extract the key from the existing laptop and set it up on the new one.  IMO the new features in newer versions of office are unlikely to be useful to her based on your description, and the changes in interface will be disruptive, so keeping the same version will be better.  The only caveat is 2010 and earlier are out of support, so may be a slight security risk.

I have bought about 10 PC’s and Laptops from microdream.co.uk and can’t fault them. I recently needed a W7 laptop and only found one at valucomputers.co.uk and bought it on a punt, and I can’t fault it (high spec but with a nasty looking dent on the lid and scratches, which I can live with).

For the first couple of days every time I looked there were new updates to install (probably about 100 in total) and even my other laptops often inform me there is an update to install, which I find strange as support for W7 ended months ago.

What really concerned me was transferring my Firefox bookmarks. I had tried exporting in different formats but never got the icon’s and folders to transfer correctly. This time I found out where Firefox stores the profile and copied it across (after backing up the original contents). Wow, it worked. All bookmarks exactly as expected. What wasn’t expected was that ALL my login data transferred as well. I would have thought that the encryption was tied to the hardware. Anyone able to copy my profile folder gets full access to my accounts, which I find scary.

Windows update process is incremental. It does a bunch of updates, and then thinks for a bit (may take a few reset cycles), decides more updates are required. Rinse and repeat until it finally settles down. It doesn't appear able to figure out all the updates it needs, and then apply them in one go. Probably because some updates are required to perform later updates (e.g. theres an update to the updater...).

My Win7 machines continued to do some security updates after the supposed end of support in February  and now only do updates to Malicious Software Removal tool, Defender definitions and Office programs.

Another vote for a Chromebook. A year ago I bought my 81-year-old father an Asus. He'd been struggling with Windows machines for about 10 years, but has been as pleased as punch with the Chromebook because it turns on straight away when he wants it, doesn't need nursing through updates, is light enough that he can carry it about with him, and is user-friendly. That doesn't mean that he doesn't still have problems with it occasionally, but nowadays they're all of the 'turn it off and back on again' variety, rather than 'you need to update driver X'.

You don’t need to buy office now a days for most home users. Microsoft give you free access to the office suite online and libre office is also easy to use and good enough for offline use.

I think £600 is the minimum it’s worth spending on a new laptop with windows installed and no office, under that you tend to get a worse screen and hardware that’s really not going to be that good in 5 years time. It’s really not a great time to buy just now, demand has gone up with everyone working from home and supply is lower because of Covid, you can expect to pay about 30 percent more at the moment than a good deal a year ago, hp pro books are nice.

id aim for 500 gb ssd (although 256 may just be ok), no hdd, no dvd drive and a quad core as the base spec, those i5 10210U processors will stand the test of time in a laptop.

Thanks for all the answers, even though many of them conflict with each other it's a lot of useful information, it will take me some time to absorb it all - lots of food for thought!