Looking to get my daughter 14 yrs a laptop for Christmas. Nothing too much cost wise, absolutely no more than £250 but much happier around the £200 area. I would like a reasonable size screen on it and reasonable tech/reliability. Been google but there is a surprisingly vast choice of laptops and chrome books (whatever they are). She has a nexus a few yrs old but I would like something more useful for her now.

So stw’ers what suggestions please?.

What exactly does she need it for as that will help decide what’s best.

I’m typing this on a Chromebook and it’s excellent at what it does, unlikely to suffer from viruses, basic OS so snappier in use, great battery life etc but might not be compatible with everything software wise she needs to use.

I recently bought a few laptops for work. If you need full windows then the HP STREAM 13 is pretty good. It’s like most chromebooks as it’s designed to be very portable and quick despite modest components as it only has flash storage of 32gb but no moving parts in the HDD.

Yes you could get a laptop with 500gb of storage for similar money but it’ll be better to encourage her to store stuff in the cloud (rather than on a HDD that’ll not get backed up and fail eventually losing everything!) so it can be accessed at School without emailing, memory sticks or other ways you might lose data in transit.

This is what I’m typing on: Acer Chromebook 15 which is handy if you want a bigger screen.

The screen isn’t super HD but acceptable, but it starts up and shuts down swiftly enough and doesn’t lag in general use. The battery life claims are realistic in normal use. For Word Processing, etc you can get most things through the free google apps or I can use web-based versions of Microsoft Office through an Office 365 subscription.

One other good thing with a chromebook is that manufacturers don’t seem to fill them with unecessary crappy software like they do with windows.

Got my 15 yr old a Lenovo B50-30 last year, 15 inch screen, decent memory and processor and most importantly for this age group it has an hdmi port. Ebuyer have it for £180, my missus has just bought herself the same model a couple of days ago. I did a bit of shopping around when i bought it and it was easily the best value for money.

Chromebook fan here

Cheap, can’t load games on them and when the Internet fairies go to bed* it becomes a paperweight

* each one has school night access restricted on my router

It will be a multi purpose thing really. Mostly leisure, music etc. However she will do some school work on it. She does use the nexus a bit for school stuff but it’s not ideal.

On another note, I have only had Samsung laptops which is a brand I know. How do the likes of Asus, Acer and Lenovo fair?.

What is it exactly that the chromebooks can’t do as my 8 year old was asking for a laptop for homework which seems to consist at the moment of logging into a school maths site but I can’t log in on my tablet I have to be on the laptop for some reason. Will I have the same problem with a chromebook

depends on how badly the site is written.

Silverlight is not supported on chromebook.

Everything else works fine.

I will have a look thanks

At that price deffo a chrome book. I’ve got an acer 720 and it’s fantastic.