Laptop for simple tasks under £200.

I require a laptop for simple tasks such as making notes for my A-Levels, browsing, internet shopping, Skype, storage for a lot of photos and relatively light to carry around.

I'm not looking for anything fancy.

Any recommendations, preferably from people who have actually used the recommended laptop would be greatly appreciated.

TheNamesBond. Check out what I've written on this subject in post #7 in this thread:
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=5920486

From what you've said, something like a Lenovo T450 or T460 off ebay for £150ish would be great for your needs.

I cannot stress highly enough how easy a task it is for the computer hardware to run browsing (including Internet shopping), Skype, photo storage applications. Even 8 year old laptops give instantaneous response for these tasks. A Lenovo T450 is overkill for these tasks.

I have extensive experience of Lenovo T450's as well as a number of other laptops from Lenovo, Dell and HP.

The T450's are midway in weight and portability between a 15" laptop and a Lenovo x1 Carbon. If you hold a T450 with the 9 cell battery and then hold an X1 Carbon (or Dell XPS 13), you will notice that the Carbon is lighter. But the difference isn't so great that it'd be a bid deal for any young fit able bodied person. Especially when you add in the weight of the power supply and rucksack or laptop bag. If you were a 90 year old 7 stone grandmother, I'd suggest an x1 Carbon.

If the laptop comes with a 256 GB SSD hard drive, see how you go for storage space for your photos. If it comes with a mechanical hard drive or a 128 GB hard drive, it'd be a good idea to buy a 480 GB SSD for £50.

Do not buy a Chromebook, as westty has already quite rightly pointed out. They are tragically feeble computing devices.

I'd be willing to spring an extra 150.

What about this.

Lenovo IdeaPad 320 15.6" HD Notebook - (Platinum Grey) (Intel Pentium Gold 2.3GHz (4415U), 4GB RAM, 2TB HDD, Windows 10 Home) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0792TCTFL/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_tavZCbN3EDTS0

I'd be willing to spring an extra 150.

What about this.

Lenovo IdeaPad 320 15.6" HD Notebook - (Platinum Grey) (Intel Pentium Gold 2.3GHz (4415U), 4GB RAM, 2TB HDD, Windows 10 Home) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0792TCTFL/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_tavZCbN3EDTS0

Compared to a Lenovo T450, it has a bigger screen, which is good and bad. Good for having a larger screen to look at. Bad for portability.

The battery only has 40 whr, compared to a T450 with the 9 cell battery option having 95 whr.

Some T450's come with 4GB RAM, many come with 8 GB.
The CPU is a bit slower than what you'd get in a T450.
The hard drive has more capacity but is much slower for booting up and loading large applications than the corporate standard 256 GB SSD in the T450. You could always take the 2TB drive out of the Ideapad 320 and replace it with an SSD for about £40.

Windows 10 Home. I'd take that off straight away and put Windows 10 Pro on. But then I'd instantly rebuild any laptop I bought as I've not come across any sellers so far that do the sort of lean and fast software builds that I like.


With that Ideapad 320 you're paying more money for a worse laptop. It therefore makes no sense whatsoever to me to buy one.

For the sort of spec you get with that Ideapad 320, it would be OK for your very simple and easy (from the computer's point of view) requirements. However, that's the sort of specifcation you could get in a free laptop, give or take a bit.

Right laptop, wrong price and wrong place to buy it.

This, if it sells for the right amount. BTW allow about £30 to upgrade this example to the 9 cell option
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-T450-Laptop-Intel-Core-i5-5300U-2-30GHz-8GB-240-SSD-2Xbattery/254217120364?hash=item3b30856a6c:g:WlMAAOSwhW5cninj&frcectupt=true

Or this, and again allow £30 for a the battery upgrade.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T450-Core-i5-5300U-2-30GHz-8GB-RAM-256GB-SSD-Win-10-Pro/173890065526?hash=item287ca7d476:g4UAAOSwJzpcyXb~

Or this IF it sells for the right price (another one to allow £30 for the battery upgrade)
[url=https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T460-Laptop-New-NO-RESERVE/303141976486?epid=4014104853&hash=item4694ab79a6:g[excludedFace]h[/excludedFace]ssAAOSw83ZcyyDd&frcectupt=true]https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T460-Laptop-New-NO-RESERVE/303141976486?epid=4014104853&hash=item4694ab79a6:gssAAOSw83ZcyyDd&frcectupt=true

Why so cheap? Seems insane that Amazon would sell near 400 when I could get it for less than 100.

Btw what does 'renewed' and 'seller refurbished' mean?

I get the idea of what the latter means but I want to be sure.

Is there an option of a laptop without an OS which you can install Linux on?

It's an ebay auction. I suspect the final selling price will be more than £100. You can use the advanced search feature in ebay to see what any particular make and model of laptop has been selling for.

But yeah, you're right about the Amazon seller at £350 and the ebay buy it now seller at £170. The insane bit is anyone buying off Amazon when they can buy off ebay. As I said, buy used business laptops off ebay. Or possibly, even better, get some contacts in IT departments, supporting large organisations and see what they're prepared to supply you with.

Renewed and seller refurbished are no big deal. They may just mean that the seller has run the built in diagnostics, which the laptop has passed, and that they used a vacuum cleaner on it, wiped the case with some furniture polish and the screen with some screen cleaner. And removed any user applied stickers from it, such as asset barcode stickers. All of which you could do yourself in a few minutes with any laptop that you acquire.

Business laptops are commodity items. They are bought by the hundreds or by the thousands. And disposed of by the hundreds or thousands.

Corporate buyers were paying Lenovo about £500 per T450 laptop with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 9 cell high capacity batteries when they were brand new. Lenovo were very price competitive with this model. It's only fair that this price competitiveness should be reflected in what they sell for used on ebay.

I require a laptop for simple tasks such as making notes for my A-Levels, browsing, internet shopping, Skype, storage for a lot of photos and relatively light to carry around.

I'm not looking for anything fancy.

Any recommendations, preferably from people who have actually used the recommended laptop would be greatly appreciated.

Every PC and laptop that I've ever seen can have Linux installed on it.

I recently bought a used HP 800 G2 business desktop for £140 off ebay. It came with nothing installed on it. I fitted a spare SSD inside it and installed a Server version of Linux on it with a few minutes of my time. If it had come with Windoze on it, it would have made no difference.

Linux is great for techie type users.

Think of any laptop hardware as a great big sandpit, in which you can draw any patterns that you want on it. You can even have giant sandpit sized stamps that put an instant pattern onto it. And if the pattern goes wrong you just rake over it and create a new pattern, or use your stamp to obliterate everything and recreate your original pattern.

The point is that it is cheaper without windows and Linux is free.

I am not asking for myself, it is a suggestion for the OP

There are other highly valid reasons apart from price why someone might want to install Linux, even if their PC comes with Windows 10 bundled in for "free".