My wife (teacher) has to replace her laptop every 2-3 years due to it slowing down more and more, battery life etc, she normally buys asus,hp,acer etc from Argos/tescos etc, and normally goes for the biggest hard drive and highest processor number.
It’s used mainly for creating word documents and sending/receiving emails, would she be better off buying one of the newer ssd types or a conventional 1tb or whatever?
Right click on her disk and select properties and see what the used/free space is, that will give you the answer!
Depends on the environment.
We use Google Drive / Docs etc extensively and all have Mac Book Pros. I'm not sure if that would work in an environment where collaborative work is less common.
It also works well as the children use Macs and iPads.
Use windirstat to see what's taking up storage space and have a think about if an external drive or cloud storage could be beneficial as opposed to a hard drive.
If she has easily accessible wifi then think about a Chromebook. Get whatever's in your budget at Comet if you want a Windows machine.
Do consider if a fresh install or clean up of the old machine could sort any issues. Processors usually don't slow down and hardware requirements are slowing down in their demands. She probably doesn't [i]need]/i] a new laptop.
A Dell should be spot on.
why does she need 1Tb for "word documents and sending/receiving emails"
It might be worth considering using some online cloud backup such as MS.
Personally I would go with a Dell XPS or Latitude. Maybe an inspiron to save some money. Also I would stick with no more than an i5. My XPS in an i5 and my latitude is an i7. The i7 chucks out a lot more heat and doesnt seem any faster as it's probably being throttled due to heat/battery most of the time.
the most important features for what you describe her use as are screen, keyboard and track pad quality and this is what I normally find Dell excel at. Especially the XPS.
SSD drive definitely, makes general performance much better than a traditional hard drive.
Size probably irrelevant as long as it's 120gb or more unless she wants lots of music and videos on there.
8gb ram.
Processor will be largely irrelevant but I'd get an i3 or better.
Microsoft laptops also very nice but ££££
As above, sort out the current laptop. Her school probably pays for IT support; get them to fix it?
SSD drive, easy swap and the machine will fly.
In my last post, I asked for a Surface, was great. I could hook up to the projector (had to be a HD one apparently) walk around the class, add labels to images, add extra bits to slides. Was really versatile in terms of teaching and being able to detach keyboard and use the stylus to do all those extra bits.
The drawback was the size of the hard drive though, so just synced everything with the schools OneDrive account, which worked. Just had to keep updating and organising the folders.
It all depends on how she uses it for teaching, if nothing fancy and just doing a few powerpoints etc. the Dells are pretty good as others have already said.
Do consider if a fresh install or clean up of the old machine could sort any issues. Processors usually don't slow down and hardware requirements are slowing down in their demands. She probably doesn't [i]need]/i] a new laptop.
This...
SSD drive definitely, makes general performance much better than a traditional hard drive.
Size probably irrelevant as long as it's 120gb or more unless she wants lots of music and videos on there.
8gb ram.
Processor will be largely irrelevant but I'd get an i3 or better.
... and this.
I'd suggest Lenovo if it's gonna get kicked about, otherwise a refurb from Dell Outlet. Either that or get the cheapest you can and accept that it's a consumable. Any laptop built in the last five years should be more than capable of the exhausting demands of sending an email.
I want one that auto deletes any email that starts
As you will know
Or auto responds with
No, no I didnt know because you didnt ****ing tell me
I want one that auto deletes any email that startsAs you will know
You can set up email rules for that 🙂
2-3 years is fairly short lived for a laptop, unless your not spending quite enough on them.
Our current ‘go to’ spec for Office suite and browsing users is a 7th Gen i3 with 8GB of RAM, Dell Vostro on Insperon depending how flash they’re feeling.
They fly at the things most users notice, start up and program loading.
1tb is a **** tonne of data for word and stuff.
When Madame starts moaning about her work laptop it usually takes a few hours cleaning the thing up to get it back up to speed. I'm surprised battery life is an issue as classrooms have a plug. If battery life really is an issue then a small screen is the biggest energy saver.