who is mature student (mid 40s) who wants a laptop for uni essays and reading, needs to be reliable what should she be looking for?
Target price upto £500 all help appreciated

I recently bought one of THIS for my partner having owned one myself for a year. Seems to to work well and does everything I need it for.

I got a deal on MS Office through work – maybe students can also get a deal?

The price of £349 seemed reasonable too.

Cheers tiggs……..any other recommendations?

google chromebook (samsung series 3 user here)

Dell note book ” vostro ”

I wonder about an iPad and an external keyboard? I think that’d be a good simple setup, and easily doable with that budget. Apple do a student discount too.

hi there – do you want to transport this around everywhere? or is it to stay at home whilst you take pen and paper to lectures. portability?

Are you doing anything which will involve a lot of computer power (spreadsheets, simulations, modelling etc.)

I bought a big (19″) and heavy ACER in 2005 for my Uni work and its still working. If you have your student card you can buy software on the cheap… office etc. so something to think about.

I now lecture and see more and more tablets in the lecture room. All our lectures are in electronic format and its quite a clever idea – but writing essays on a tablet could be painful (storage also???).

Good luck! and read as many reviews as possible.

Ps if you are a mature student can you ask the Uni/college if you can get funding towards a laptop?

It depends, if you are doing a science/maths/economics degree then you will need a windows based laptop so that you can run SPSS, R or STATA.

You might also need to get something which does word documents sensibly, which means a Windows PC (or a Mac, but not for that money). Not a chromebook or a tablet. They will edit them, but not always very well, and not always format things exactly the same.

You can buy MS office for 60 quid on a 4 year subscription as a student (think it is called ‘university 365’.

used macbook pro

As joemarshall says, you want something that does Word properly, especially if you have to collaborate with others. Something like this would be fine plus get office 2013

If you wanted to go tablet you get get an MS Surface which is the only way I can see to reliably do Word docs on a tablet. You would need to get the Type keyboard though

Good luck with the course

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&brandid=7&fid=1489

Really rate the Dell outlet stuff, not much in at the moment to be honest. If you hunt around a bit new stock comes in once a week or so. My last one was a 17″ aluminium bodied XPS, i7 spec, loads of memory, for about £500. I kept it for a year, then sold it on second hand on ebay… for a profit.

A lot of the outlet stuff has never even left the factory, they build up custom PCs, the order is cancelled. Outlet!

thanks she is doing essay based work mainly and the course seems bookbased rather than electronic, as a professional qualified individual she understands word

the dell looks a good call

I would get a small laptop with an external keyboard mouse and monitor. I bought a Lenovo X131e lat year which has an 11.6″ screen and would be ideal for your requirements but it has been discontinued with no direct replacement. It is easy to carry around and has decent battery life which are useful for a student

Just bought an atom powered HP running Windows 8 from John Lewis for £300. It’s 11″ and portable enough to carry with him to school (he’s dyslexic). If I was a student, I’d want something I could carry all the time. A Macbook Air at a PC price 😉

I would hate writing big docs on an 11.6 in screen unless I also had a bigger external screen to use at home

One thing to note is that a lot of the larger laptops have a numeric keypad to the right hand side. If your really going to use that for a ton of number entries etc etc, then fine, but I’ve often found that all it does it put the main keyboard, which you use the most, to the left of the device, making you place your hands off centre. This includes the trackpad. That does my head in after a while, especially if your used to just placing your hands centred, with the trackpad in the middle.

for that reason, I personally would only ever consider a laptop without a numeric keypad.

I’d also be looking at as high a screen resolution as possible. I find the more screen space you have, the easier it is to be more productive. Especially if your source of information wants to be on the screen at the same time as your typing something.