New laptop recommendation please

Sarmad

Posts: 38   +1
Hi,

I'm looking for a laptop for my wife to do her college work, online video conferencing (Zoom, Google Meet), Internet browsing, watching You Tube. Kids will also use it for similar things plus online school lessons and also to play their Roblox online game. Can someone please recommend a laptop, specs, and good place to buy from? We're seeing laptops sold at Currys of what could be the correct spaces at around £500 / £550, so may that's what we should be spending. Here are the specs I'm considering but please feel free to amend if you recommend different or if there's anything I haven't thought of:

Windows 10 64-bit Home
Intel i5 processor (not sure which number, frequency, cores, etc, but it's got to handle our requirements, so please advise)
8 GB RAM
Storage: 256 GB SSD
Graphics (not sure which graphics card will handle our requirements, so please advise)
3 x USB ports including USB 3
Camera
Mic
HDMI socket
Full HD screen
Good battery life
headphone socket
WiFi
Bluetooth
Ethernet

Thanks.
 
There are significant shortages of laptop options in that price range at the moment, due to overall supply issues. But here are two that meet almost all of your criteria:



Neither have a LAN/ethernet socket, but that's par course for low-to-mid cost laptops these days. At this price range, no laptop will have a separate graphics chip (graphics cards will only be found in desktop PCs), so it's down to what's inside the CPU.

The Asus uses an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U processor, whereas the Hewlett Packard has an Intel Core i5-1035G1. The former is better at games, whereas the latter is stronger in applications where the performance of a single core is more important. However, since neither are overly powerful, it won't make any significant difference in the usage examples you gave.

Also, neither models aren't packed with lots of USB sockets - again, typical for this price range. The Asus one has four in total: two are USB 3.1 (Type A and Type C) and the other two are USB 2.0. The HP laptop, despite what Currys state on their website, only has three: all of them are USB 3.1, with two being Type A and the other being Type C.

So it really comes down to which is the better laptop overall but there's nothing to really split them, by any large margin. The HP has a slightly better screen, but worse performance in games and fewer USB sockets; the Asus will perform a little better, but can run a bit on the hot side, and that screen isn't amazing.
 
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