Best laptop deals for student around £500

Current Lenovos still have buttons and a nubbin. 16″ models have the full numpad, refurb or previous gen should come into your budget.

https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadl/thinkpad-l16-16-inch-intel/len101t0097

So what? Under what scenario do you suppose that all-day power is going to be a necessity? It’s not a phone.

I already gave my scenario but the TL:DR is lectures, tutorials and general work. If at school read that as classes and study periods. One charger per desk as you describe will not cut it. Besides, that’s always assuming the charger isn’t buggered. Anyway, I don’t know if that IS a consideration but only that it is a possible one. Try not to be so dismissive of something that doesn’t fit your own requirements. I can live with charging but it would make my life much easier if I didn’t have to.

It’s nothing to do with my requirements. Rather, it’s not the OP’s requirements either, someone made it up along the way in the middle of the previous page.

One charger per desk as you describe will not cut it.

Why not?

The attraction of Mac’s is for recording with an audio interface.

unlike a windows pc, there’s zero latency when recording music.

to swing me into purchasing a Mac, it would need a touchscreen.

Steve,

Separate mouse buttons have disappeared from top end laptops and now only seem to be a thing on cheap laptops or business focused models like the Lenovo Thinkpad series.

Having a separate number pad means that a laptop would be a 15.6″ or larger device. This means more weight to carry and a bigger bag is required – she would have to really want the numpad for that trade off to make sense.

I would suggest you offer to get a small, stylish mouse if she does not like the idea of a touchpad. The Logitech Pop Mouse is a quality option for this – works off Bluetooth, powered by an AA battery that will last for over a year and comes in a variety of colours.

Numpads are practically essential if you’re doing lots of work with numbers, I’d hate to be without one that’s for sure.

I do second a mouse but again, this is a personal preference

Why not?

This might be a misunderstanding, did you mean one per individual or one per table cluster?

No.1 She is pretty adamant she wants mouse buttons on the touchpad rather than as completely flat pad that most have these days. This seems to rule out 95% of options

No.2 she has only just spotted that 14″ laptops don’t have a separate numpad so she is umming ahhing about that.

Theres a couple of possible cosiderations there..

1a. You’re going to want a seperate mouse regardless, even if it’s one of those mini laptop/travel ones – they are just so much better.

1b. As above, 99% of the time the left/right click buttons are integrated into the touch pad, just seem to be they way thigs are these days.

2.a There are a few options here, you can buy a seperate USB number pad gor not much – good if you are doing a lot of numbers, accounting or spreadsheets etc, but it is an extra thing to carry around, something like this maybe (not a reccomendation, just an example) https://www.onbuy.com/gb/p/bluetooth-wireless-numeric-keypad~p59317966/?exta=gshp&extac=gshpfa

2.b Another option is to get a laptop like mine which has a touch sensitive numpad built into the trackpad that you can turn on and off, its quite nifty. You can also flip it round to use as a tablet as it has a touch screen:

This might be a misunderstanding, did you mean one per individual or one per table cluster?

University lecture theatres don’t have table clusters, or at least the ones I visited didn’t. They have rows of seats like a cinema with some form of flat surface in front, each seat with its own individual power provisioning.

I went round my old high school on an open day a few weeks ago. They call themselves a “technology college” these days but it’s still a high school. They had fully-fitted IT suites with dozens of desktop PCs. What provision or even requirement they had for laptops in regular classrooms I couldn’t say.

You seem very keen to challenge me at the moment for some reason, but I’m afraid you’re operating from out-of-date knowledge. It’s not the 1990s anymore, someone has actually thought about this. You don’t need a separate charger for your phone even (which is what I thought you might be getting at), you can charge directly from the laptop and USB-C <-> USB-C power delivery is likely as fast as any wall charger.