Any Good Laptops ?

I must admit I don't like laptops. I use a tablet (using it now) when I am idling. But for serious stuff I prefer to sit at a desk with a proper PC, keyboard and monitor. I think it is more conducive to doing serious stuff like school work. You can get really small desk top pcs these days no bigger than a hardback book.

At £100, you're not going to get anything too decent, but you can try eBay auctions for laptops or notebooks (no DVD/BD Disc Reader) with 8GB RAM (and an HDD space of 500GB/1TB or an SSD – This is generally pricier than an HDD) and add a snipe price (e.g.: www.myibidder.com/ I've been using this for years) you're happy paying.

That's how I bought an Asus Vivobook 17 (8GB RAM & 1TB) which on Argos cost £270 (it was upped to £300+, iirc) for £160. It's a budget notebook, but I'm very satisfied with it.

Moreover, the main complains I see people have with it is that they say it's too slow, and I agree, but after I installed my preferred Windows 10 version (Enterprise LTSC) it works smoothly, plus it has extended support until 2029 so I'm never installing Windows 11. The commercial versions (Home/Pro) have a lot of unnecessary junk (bloatware) for example; Edge, Microsoft Store, annoying updates, Cortana, etc.

Now, I hope Windows 12 is better than 11 or I'll go with a Linux distro.

We got my daughter a Amazon tablet 10im and got a keyboard and it's great she can do her homework and play games on it

Got this Acer Laptop for my Mum last week as her tower PC decided to expire.

it has 512GB SSD which makes bootup time amazing.

And the 8GB RAM means it can cope with most things thrown at it (Unsurprisingly Mum isn't a gamer, so graphics card and super fast processor aren't a priority)

At £399 it feels like a very good price.

www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-A315-58-15-6-Laptop/dp/B09RQSGL2Y/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=SYT1WTB964SX&keywords=acer%20aspire%20laptop&psc=1&qid=1679179368&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGY&sprefix=acer%20aspire%20laptop%2Caps%2C79&sr=8-1-spons

A good windows 10/11 debloaters is debloos but it's changed its name by the looks of it.

github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy

This can strip windows of un-necessary features which slow PCs down. I picked up a Lenovo C365 all in one pc from a charity shop for £15 which is only based on a AMD A4 5000 CPU/APU but is running Windows 11 fine and speedy. I replaced the 1TB hard drive with a 128GB SSD which cost about £10 from amazon warehouse and put in a stick of 4GB RAM (CEX £4 plus £1.99 postage) to upgrade to 8GB it's maximum allowed memory. It came with a licensed copy of windows that happily upgraded to windows 11. Being an all in one based on a laptop processor it is very low powered which means only uses about 8-15W for its main CPU/APU so good for environmentalists. As for gaming the absolute maximum game it will play is Fallout 4 with minimum detail levels at 720p at a fluid frame rate around 30fps. Anything more demanding is not possible. So the latest big AAA PC games it can't do but it plays new games happily that are not so demanding which is most of them. The sort of games that Epic give away every week typically have no problems on it as those are games from a few years ago. Also its just about the first GPU with GCN graphic core next architecture so it supports Vulkan for much better optimised graphics which can give the PC a graphic advantage compared to Intel GPU's of a similar era or a few years later plus of course the SSD and 8GB give it a significant boost. You can dedicate 2GB to the graphics chip to maximise its performance because of having 8GB. It boots to the desktop in about 8-12 seconds thanks to the SSD and the lean version of Windows 11.

I'm a big fan of all in one PCs, it's single power lead and you can use a wireless keyboard and mouse if you want. The Lenovo is already fitted with built in wifi and bluetooth like a laptop of course and the built in speakers are fantastic quality for a 20" screen, quite bassy. It's also a very vivid display. It's not a laptop but it's easy to move from room to room so very portable. There is a built in DVDRW drive and card reader. Let's face it to get a 20" laptop screen is big money if possible at all but entry level for an all in one PC.

I guess my point is you don't need a super powerful PC unless doing a lot of video editing or playing the latest games and my PC is still more powerful than the low cost entry level laptop PCs sold today using exceptionally weak chipsets. Some of those cannot be upgraded from 4GB and are only dual core. Much more restricted than my PC. This is my second PC not my main PC.

I recently picked up one of these from ebay;

www.fujitsu.com/tw/Images/ds-py-tx1310-m1-en.pdf

It's got a powerful Xeon processor (for its day) and 24GB of memory and cost me £26 plus £10 postage. It's in perfect condition and running perfectly. I've fitted a £10 SSD again and upgraded to windows 11. It's using ECC memory for extra stability and the Xeon has a huge amount of cache to make the experience very smooth. I've taken the PC out of RAID mode as I'd rather have 2x500GB drives rather than 1x500GB with extra file security but slow writing. It's 24/7 PC so you can pretty much run it all day if you wanted to. Servers like this typically cost multiple thousands in their day so always a good option for a cheap desktop PC. It's surprisingly quiet for a desktop PC despite having 3 fans. Anyway this will be my main PC when sorted.