After last weeks debarcle with my wife’s iPhone (now fixed for £16 thanks for help) I now need laptop help.
My lovely boys decided to do their best Keith Moon impression on the laptop earlier and the HDD has said no more. It was a Lenovo T61 so not a young performer by any means :0)
I need a Windows 10 based laptop ideally for internet use and MS Office use at a very junior level. They’re young and technology moves fast so no need for anything top of the range yet.
Ideally change out of £200 so happy with referb options.
Any pointers?
Cheers
Tim

What’s actually wrong with it, it’s not clear, if it’s just the hdd, then the obvious solution is to sling in an SSD drive?

Yes, just Hard disc failure.
It’s old so sensible time to move along a bit???

With apologies for a possible hijack, I’d be interested in recommendations along similar lines, plus any guidance you can point me to for keeping a 10 year old safe on it.

I am torn between locking it down or supervised freedom!

Well if it’s just a surfing /office machine it’s still fine, and an SSD will make it a lot faster, even though it’s an older core 2 with 2gb ram.

£200 won’t really get you much to be honest.

Assuming the laptop is in reasonably good condition otherwise, I’d just stick this in for £50
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/kingston-120gb-ssdnow-uv400-drive-sata-6gb-s-2.5-7mm-height-solid-state-hard-drive-suv400s37-1-hd-101-ks.html

Lots of choice here for £200 notes

SSD upgrades are the business. Done 4 computers, old and new, and it’s like night and day. Serious speed increase on booting. SSD’s are a fair bit more expensive, but for general use then they make a big difference in speed.

If you want to store loads of files, use cheap USB drives on a laptop.

Ok. That makes sense. Will need to factor in a copy of Windows as well but even I,ve managed that before :0)

Your laptop is about the same age as mine (2007). Added a 250GB SSD drive, switched to Windows 10 from Vista, maxed the RAM (years ago) and a cheeky processor upgrade (1.5-2GHz) that my local computer shop found in their bits bin and it does everything I need it to. MS office 2007/10 and web browsing.

Only thing it struggles with is HD videos of whitewater kayaking where the onboard graphics can’t keep up so it goes a bit pixelly.

Aldi currently have these reduced to £200 in our local:-

https://www.aldi.co.uk/medion-11-6”-2-in-1-laptop-4gb-64gb/p/079509165808600

Comes with Windows 10 and a 1 year subscription to Office 365