whats the best laptop I can get for under £300

for word processing and the internet

cheers

Chromebook.

Had one of these for a couple of years, indestructible. use the spare cash to order a new battery.

Chromebook.

at least I wasnt the first to say it this time! 😉

+1

Any laptop since the dawn of time will do that- pull one out of a bin

I’ve recently got a chromebook – it’s largely stoner’s fault though I did a fair bit of research of my own.

Mine’s an HP Chromebook 14 – £250 and as my wife says, it looks a lot like an Apple though I’m sure the polonecks will point out why it doesn’t 🙂

For the money and for what we (and I expect most people) use it for, it seems very good – certainly browsing is very smooth and start up/shut down takes 5 seconds or less.

Word processing needs you to slightly get your head around it if you’re used to MS products but it all seems to work and Mrs Clubber is merrily using it without me having got round to explaining it yet.

http://www.tesco.com/direct/hp-chromebook-14-4-16-ssd/315-8303.prd

Again chromebook (stoner has converted us…)

Got my Acer for £180 super fast and no hard drive so shouldnt get any slower.

How does Chromebook to MS compatibility work out? Nothing worse than using a format that either doesn’t work or looks rubbish on everyone else’s machine

You create your files in Google Docs own format and then you can download the file as Word/PDF/Whatever – so you’re always going to be compatible.
Google Docs is very impressive and I’ll be buying a Chromebook when/if I ever have some spare cash – would do everything I need from a laptop (web, gmail, Docs, Spotify and remote desktop to desktop for anything else I need).

How do chromebooks get on with iTunes? If using to sync ipods/phones would you be better off with a windows laptop? Or dioes it make no odds?

No iTunes for chrome book. Not expecting it either. Google music is pretty good and you can transfer you iTunes library to it as well

No iTunes on a Chromebook but there is Spotify which I reckon is great – not sure if the offline playlist feature works on a chromebook though.

I was getting interested for a minute there. However, now that I’ve remembered that these are cloud based with a 16Gb hard drive, I’m oot.

SSD drive not hard drive 😉

Can always have an external HDD if you need it.

So instead of taking a small laptop with me I get to take a small laptop + an external hard drive? Still not winning me over here

They’re expandable via SD cards (well, mine is) and come with 100gb of cloud storage. If you need more than that you probably need something other than a chromebook in the first place.

Besides which there is one with a 300gb hdd.

There is? Didn’t notice it on the Chromebook site.

I need a laptop that is capable of handling a bucket load of photos with either a poor or non-existent internet connection. In that situation Cloud based is obviously useless

I think you have stumbled into the wrong thread then as your requirements in no way match those of the the OP.