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Affordable laptop recommendations: budget £350-£450

I can't see the full specs on the HP, but it looks to be a vastly better deal than the Dell.

Even ignoring the SSD, Full HD vs. 1366x768? Who in the hell is trying to sell "HD Ready" on a £500 laptop?

Given that Amazon only sells the regular Yogas and not the convertible ones, I think this is your best bet with the voucher. But it really depends on how seriously Angel takes the tablet/drawing functions - It may be better to get a simpler laptop and put aside money for a dedicated drawing device (because this ain't it).
 
I think I'm going to have to reluctantly join this black Friday thing as I need a new laptop like this Dell E5480, but touch screen not necessary and for around £500. Perhaps I want the moon on a stick but I also need it to fit my Dell docking station which I don't think many other brands do.
 
They may not be the best value proposition, but you're not going to go wrong with a Latitude. Always solid machines, not too bad to work on. Get the on-site warranty, because Dell's pretty fantastic at it.
 
Throbbing Angel said:
She wants a Lenovo Yoga book tent flip thingy, so that's sorted that, then.
Click to expand...

My daughter has one of those and loves it. It's not suitable for everything (small amount of memory and hard drive and ordinary graphics card) so it's not a replacement for a laptop really. What it's good for is using on the go (like at college), especially for drawing, and it starts up really quickly and the battery is decent. It'd probably work well for your daughter.
 
scifisam said:
My daughter has one of those and loves it. It's not suitable for everything (small amount of memory and hard drive and ordinary graphics card) so it's not a replacement for a laptop really. What it's good for is using on the go (like at college), especially for drawing, and it starts up really quickly and the battery is decent. It'd probably work well for your daughter.
Click to expand...
There's a wide range of them, from underpowered play-tablets to full-blown development workstations.

In Angel's budget, there's this:
Lenovo Yoga 520 (14") | Stylish 2-in-1 Entertainment Laptop | Lenovo UK
Even the Pentium-powered ones are quite powerful compared to the basic tablets (Pentiums are basically what used to be i3s - dual core, four threads) and come with the pressure sensitive drawing pen. It's not cheap, but it is nice for the money.
(Though I'd spring the extra £70 just to get the Full HD screen, I have feelings about laptops that cost over £350 without them)
 
Chz said:
There's a wide range of them, from underpowered play-tablets to full-blown development workstations.

In Angel's budget, there's this:
Lenovo Yoga 520 (14") | Stylish 2-in-1 Entertainment Laptop | Lenovo UK
Even the Pentium-powered ones are quite powerful compared to the basic tablets (Pentiums are basically what used to be i3s - dual core, four threads) and come with the pressure sensitive drawing pen. It's not cheap, but it is nice for the money.
(Though I'd spring the extra £70 just to get the Full HD screen, I have feelings about laptops that cost over £350 without them)
Click to expand...

But for the same price you can easily get up to i5 and 8 gig of ram plus possibly a better screen and a larger SSD. (I recently did myself). And it's not quite as good for extended typing. Hence me saying it's not really a laptop replacement. However the advantages really are quite noticeable as well, especially if you want to use it a lot for drawing. My daughter's had several non-integral graphics tablets including a £500 Wacom one and this has almost as good sensitivity and responsiveness as that. The hinge concerns me because she's always falling asleep holding it but she hasn't broken it yet, so it must be more robust than it looks.
 
In our case it is the drawing that lil'Angel wants to do the most, along with general web browsing and faffery that the yoot get up to. It'll more than suit her.
 
scifisam said:
But for the same price you can easily get up to i5 and 8 gig of ram plus possibly a better screen and a larger SSD. (I recently did myself). And it's not quite as good for extended typing. Hence me saying it's not really a laptop replacement. However the advantages really are quite noticeable as well, especially if you want to use it a lot for drawing. My daughter's had several non-integral graphics tablets including a £500 Wacom one and this has almost as good sensitivity and responsiveness as that. The hinge concerns me because she's always falling asleep holding it but she hasn't broken it yet, so it must be more robust than it looks.
Click to expand...
I get that it's not the best value in laptops, but the screen is (the Full HD one anyhow) is as good as any at that price and Lenovo's 14" Thinkpads are some of the best keyboards on the market. The trade-off for the hinge and pen gimmick is a slower CPU and smaller HDD. But the hinge and pen is what's wanted and I'm of the opinion that any Core-based CPU is plenty of oomph for anyone not playing high-end 3D games or rendering video.

Which leaves that the hard disk is on the small side. Small compromise to make, IMO. Would *I* buy one? No, I don't care about the convertible aspect and the pen. Would I recommend it here? Obviously.
 
Chz said:
I get that it's not the best value in laptops, but the screen is (the Full HD one anyhow) is as good as any at that price and Lenovo's 14" Thinkpads are some of the best keyboards on the market. The trade-off for the hinge and pen gimmick is a slower CPU and smaller HDD. But the hinge and pen is what's wanted and I'm of the opinion that any Core-based CPU is plenty of oomph for anyone not playing high-end 3D games or rendering video.

Which leaves that the hard disk is on the small side. Small compromise to make, IMO. Would *I* buy one? No, I don't care about the convertible aspect and the pen. Would I recommend it here? Obviously.
Click to expand...

Yeah... That's what I also said when pointing out the advantages and saying that it would probably suit TA's daughter. I'm recommending the same item as you.

It's the keyboard that makes the most difference if you're doing a lot of typing, which is often what people want a laptop for. The keyboard on this is tablet style rather than the usual, er, press in keys or whatever proper computer keyboards are known as. But - like I already said - if that's not your priority then the advantages definitely outweigh that issue.
 
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mango5 said:
I think I'm going to have to reluctantly join this black Friday thing as I need a new laptop like this Dell E5480, but touch screen not necessary and for around £500. Perhaps I want the moon on a stick but I also need it to fit my Dell docking station which I don't think many other brands do.
Click to expand...

Chz said:
They may not be the best value proposition, but you're not going to go wrong with a Latitude. Always solid machines, not too bad to work on. Get the on-site warranty, because Dell's pretty fantastic at it.
Click to expand...

My problem is the price. I can't afford a mid-range latitude and I'm looking for similar heavy duty performance for less than £500
 
Chz said:
There's a wide range of them, from underpowered play-tablets to full-blown development workstations.

In Angel's budget, there's this:
Lenovo Yoga 520 (14") | Stylish 2-in-1 Entertainment Laptop | Lenovo UK
Even the Pentium-powered ones are quite powerful compared to the basic tablets (Pentiums are basically what used to be i3s - dual core, four threads) and come with the pressure sensitive drawing pen. It's not cheap, but it is nice for the money.
(Though I'd spring the extra £70 just to get the Full HD screen, I have feelings about laptops that cost over £350 without them)
Click to expand...
I just bought one of these as my new laptop - I think the drawing function will be very useful for work, I've already enjoyed putting it in tablet form and turning it around so I can view a whole page in one go, and I otherwise do a bit of accounts spreadsheets and word documents and a bit of internetting so don't need anything too powerful. The idiots at PC world (I needed to get a laptop in a hurry) not only don't include the pen with the laptop, they don't even sell it, and the staff didn't even know anything about it, despite that being basically the main selling point because otherwise you're basically paying for a hinge. So I've had to order it from Lenovo - only £25 but hassle. The PC World staff were also trying to upsell me to a very solid but boring laptop with non of the functionality I wanted for £100 extra, or the new Microsoft surface - as if I'd be looking at a machine for less than £400 which I know has some limitations if I could afford something top spec for over a grand :facepalm:
 
For what it's worth, Currys has a Yoga 520 for £380:
LENOVO Yoga 520 14" 2 in 1 - Grey

Full HD screen, 128GB SSD. Only 4GB of RAM, but it is replaceable (not soldered on). I bought one to replace Mrs. Chz's 6 year-old IdeaPad. There's even a spare SATA drive slot inside, so you can put the old laptop drive in there and get your stuff. The included SSD is M.2. I think, for the price, it's excellent. It's only £30 over the regular IdeaPad 320, so you're not paying much for the touchscreen and tablet hinge.
(The 320 is also i3 vs. Pentium, but for Kaby Lake CPUs that means they're both 2 cores, 4 threads. Just 200MHz and a bit of cache in it, so it's well worth it unless you're certain you'll never use that capability)

Also, you can upgrade to 3 years' warranty through Lenovo for £62 (£52+VAT). Which is way better than whatever PCWorld are offering.
 
Just a reminder: if you're after a machine for non advanced computing : i.e. Word, accounts, email, browsing, watching videos etc, a Chromebook will deliver VASTLY improved performance for your money.
 
I was really tempted to get her one, but she does sometimes do real work on it and needs the full vpn config, rdp, (these things exist in ChromeOS but cost extra) and most importantly the drivers for the damned Barclays card reader. Otherwise I'd have saved a good hundred quid.
 
Throbbing Angel said:
In our case it is the drawing that lil'Angel wants to do the most, along with general web browsing and faffery that the yoot get up to. It'll more than suit her.
Click to expand...

FYI lil'Angel loves her Yoga Book
We got hers when it was reduced by a ton and also had an Amazon vchr to use so paid well under the current price for the Win 10 model. It's still under £450 and the Android version is even cheaper

Lenovo Yoga Book 10.1" Black Touch Laptop (Quad Core Atom X5-Z8550, 4GB RAM... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M2YOST2/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_uGquAbHQQKJSE
 
editor said:
Just a reminder: if you're after a machine for non advanced computing : i.e. Word, accounts, email, browsing, watching videos etc, a Chromebook will deliver VASTLY improved performance for your money.
Click to expand...

I'm still amazed by how such a low spec cheap machine performs. Not sure if I'd want it as my only PC, but I kept putting of buying a new laptop as I couldn't justify spending as much as I knew I needed to for a decent windows laptop.

I do think the inbuilt video player is a bit shit and even VLC is rather basic, hopefully that will improve. I'd also rather like an alternative file browser and I've still not managed to map any network drives, but for many these simply aren't issues.
 
Chz said:
I was really tempted to get her one, but she does sometimes do real work on it and needs the full vpn config, rdp, (these things exist in ChromeOS but cost extra) and most importantly the drivers for the damned Barclays card reader. Otherwise I'd have saved a good hundred quid.
Click to expand...

Barclaycard needs drivers? That's pretty shit!
 
editor said:
Just a reminder: if you're after a machine for non advanced computing : i.e. Word, accounts, email, browsing, watching videos etc, a Chromebook will deliver VASTLY improved performance for your money.
Click to expand...
I need something that you can access internet explorer on for a work portal that only functions well with IE. I understand that you can't use IE with chrome do you know if that is the case?? It's annoying having to buy a new laptop just for this contract but as it could be ongoing work for a while I'm going to have to!!
 
A general question, which I can probably ask here rather than starting a new thread. Are CD/DVD drives in laptops a thing of the past already? Neither Currys nor Argos seem to include them in their cheap laptops anymore. Surely people still want to rip CDs and watch movies on their lappie?
 
Slo-mo said:
A general question, which I can probably ask here rather than starting a new thread. Are CD/DVD drives in laptops a thing of the past already? Neither Currys nor Argos seem to include them in their cheap laptops anymore. Surely people still want to rip CDs and watch movies on their lappie?
Click to expand...
If you really need one, buy an external drive. You can get one for about £15.
 
Slo-mo said:
A general question, which I can probably ask here rather than starting a new thread. Are CD/DVD drives in laptops a thing of the past already? Neither Currys nor Argos seem to include them in their cheap laptops anymore. Surely people still want to rip CDs and watch movies on their lappie?
Click to expand...

I don't think most people rip CDs or even use DVDs tbh. I've not used an optical drive in years.
 
Slo-mo said:
If they are only 15 squid, that shifts the numbers a bit. That said, if they are that cheap, why don't manufacturers still include them?
Click to expand...
Space. People want smaller, thinner laptops. (and cost - even £5 in parts matters)

The six year-old laptop I replaced with the Yoga above didn't even have a DVD drive. Because it was a 13" laptop and we wanted something smaller/lighter. It's just that that desire has moved up the range. I believe most 17" laptops still come with one.
 
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