Given the current situation where would be a good place to purchase a new laptop for those of us of advanced years with little tech savvy?

What will you be using it for and how much are you looking at spending?

Cheers cloud nine…

Mainly internet, family contacting by whatever internet app, basic photography editing.
Mrs would like some better/modern Excel/spreadsheet/statistic/graph/graphics package. Mrs does some stuff for NHS.
Budget? Up to £1k to get something decent. Our old Dell is approaching 20yrs old, needs a main battery, an internal battery, is no longer supported etc but still does what we ask of it poor auld thing.
Being retired I plan to take and fiddle with more photos/images.
MrsT has a couple of groups she is involved with that require reports that include lots of images that include graphs etc
Are these “new” ssd worth looking at v a remote hard drive?

Not many retail places open if you want hands on before you buy, with Currys and John Lewis shops shut. Bigger Tesco usually have a handful of tablets and lower end laptops on display, and Costco are still fully open and have some higher end kit in stock, Dells, HP, Apple usually as well as a handful of others.

Have a look at https://www.tier1online.com/ refurbed business laptops galore, from basically brand new (a grade) to a bit tatty but working fine (c grade).

You can get excellent bang for your buck, and upgrade to SSDs, more ram, etc.

I got a B grade Elitebook a couple of years ago for about 1/4 of retail. Upgraded to SSD + more ram myself.
Runs music recording software and Adobe stuff with no problems.

Bought a t470 Lenovo laptop off eBay from a seller called ts75c. Intel i5 6300, ssd drive, Windows 10pro, 8gb mem. 14″screen. It came extremely quickly and is spotless. £390. I bought another 16gb mem as I run a number of VMs and will probably get an external SSD at some point, but very very pleased with it.
You don’t have to spend much for what you need

Ebuyer also. Id say £500 is all you’d need given your requirements.

I would say given the requirements £350 would do it. It would want to spend £1000 then fine but than isn’t necessary for internet stuff, basic photo editing etc,.

My main requirement was a big screen as had to quickly buy a laptop for working at home full time and my old one was too small. Got a 17″ screen Lenovo 340 for £350 direct from Lenovo with free next day delivery (£50+ cheaper than any online retailer) so worth looking at their site

Having bought one recently for our kids, in order that they could do their home-schooling stuff, I’m really impressed with the Asus Chromebook. £240 and it pretty much does everything we need it to: video calling, basic photo editing, plus has all the Google Suite apps, and a Google Drive for 15GB of cloud storage for everyone.

Really simple to use, and for the money, pretty impressive. You could spend quite a bit more for faster ‘this’, slicker ‘that’ in Chromebook form, but for what we spent, I’m very happy. I use it all the time myself, as it sits in the corner of the kitchen most of the time, so when the kids aren’t using it, I tend to grab it.