Looking to buy a laptop - suggestions?

[jameswilliam]

I'm looking to buy a laptop for school (further education - AS and A levels specifically). I need something which is relatively small, portable and lightweight. I'll probably do doing a little bit of programming on it and maybe some *light* photo editing (nothing too intensive) as well as the usual emails and Office work.

I was looking at the 11.6" ASUS VivoBook S200E however I think it may be a tiny bit small. I've now got my eye on a Sony Vaio Fit E 14" in white for £380 or so, which seems good to me. Spec is along the lines of a Pentium Dual-Core, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB or 750GB HDD.

I require the following:
- 13.3" or 14" ideally
- Small, lightweight, compact (not fussed about optical drive)
- It'd be good to have Windows 8 pre-installed
- Around the £400 mark (or less!)

I've found a lot of good 15.6" laptops which are in my price range and well-specced, but I think 15.6" is a bit big to be carrying around all the time. I used to own a 4:3 15" laptop and it was huge.

 

[jameswilliam]

I'm looking to buy a laptop for school (further education - AS and A levels specifically). I need something which is relatively small, portable and lightweight. I'll probably do doing a little bit of programming on it and maybe some *light* photo editing (nothing too intensive) as well as the usual emails and Office work.

I was looking at the 11.6" ASUS VivoBook S200E however I think it may be a tiny bit small. I've now got my eye on a Sony Vaio Fit E 14" in white for £380 or so, which seems good to me. Spec is along the lines of a Pentium Dual-Core, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB or 750GB HDD.

I require the following:
- 13.3" or 14" ideally
- Small, lightweight, compact (not fussed about optical drive)
- It'd be good to have Windows 8 pre-installed
- Around the £400 mark (or less!)

I've found a lot of good 15.6" laptops which are in my price range and well-specced i'm currenlt looking for this https://engineeringlaptops.com/, but I think 15.6" is a bit big to be carrying around all the time. I used to own a 4:3 15" laptop and it was huge.

Does anybody have any other suggestions? thanks in advance for any help

 

[dogDAbone]

Windows 8 & Pentium are instant no go's if you intend to connect to the internet (who doesn't ?) and do anything that needs any sort of productivity tasks, light photo editing...

If you are buying new, then I would suggest an HP Elitebook or Dell XPS, but you won't get one of those for $400....either of which could easily last you thru 4 yrs of school.

Used OTOH, would probably be doable in that price range, just look for an i5-11xxx cpu with at least 16GB of ram and a 500GB or larger nvme/m.2 drive + WiFi-6.....

You may wanna look around the school websites/newsboards for people who are graduating soon & will be upgrading to newer machines, or your local for sale ads....just stay about 10,000 KM away from Fakebook or any of the other social media ads, as they are prime breeding grounds for massive numbers of scammers

Good luck on your purchase !