Another "which laptop" question.

[HLaB]

I'm sure there's lots of suppliers but the twice I have bought a laptop My main requirements have been a decent size screen and a separate number pad and then I look at spec to cost and reliability/reviews. That has led me to Acer. My current laptop is an Aspire 5.

 

[vickster]

Sorry ??

Those who give a one star rating and have a right old whinge or rant when the majority are positive

 

[Cycleops]

From your description of your needs I'd think the last thing you need a Windows laptop.
Okay so that leaves Chromebooks Mac's and tablets.
In our house we have just about everything, a Windows HP, iPad, Chromebook and a MacBook.
I'm nearly your age and I get most pleasure out of the iPad which is just a joy to use, great interface, fabulous screen, but you might be rule it out on price. Likewise with MacBook, you don't need all that power. Please try an iPad if you can, you might like it's ease of use. 12.9" is the biggest screen size.
Chromebook is great for all the basic tasks and ours has a touch screen. Good to use and they do come with a bigger screen if you want. Lenovo do some great budget models. Great battery life. Current Chromebooks are supported for up to 12 years now. You'll need a constant Internet connection to operate it. Apple do support their machines for a long time but not as long as this.
The only category I've left out is a Android tablet. These can be bought cheaply but typically don't have long term support plus Android is a phone OS and not optimised for tablets so you should discount it unless you're on a very low budget.

 

[Cycleops]

Thank you.

Incidentally do they still copy CDs ?

As others have said you won't get a built in optical drive but if you download iTunes to your laptop or Apple device this allows you to add your CDs to the library from a add on drive. You don't need to buy anything from iTunes if you don't want.

 

[Time Waster]

I've owned only two laptops a HP Envy with decent specs. Nothing but trouble from about end of warranty. WIFI adaptor had issues so I often had to restart the adaptor from within the control panel. Then the battery stopped working at all. No charge could be held by it so the laptop became a plugged in one only.

My second was a Lenovo ideapad 330 which was an i5 laptop but it now cannot hold a battery charge when turned off. I have turned off the option to allow hibernating which doesn't actually turn things off so I know that when I close it or close the laptop lid it turns off completely but despite that it wil be flat by the time I come back to it.

So I think HP and Lenovo are two brands I am cautious about.

 

[Dadam]

My current work supply high end Dell XPS as standard, much prefer them to the Lenovo from previous employer. However I went Macbook for personal laptop a few years back and my employer now offers that option, so when my XPS is ready for refresh I think that's what I'll be doing.
I want a bigger screen than the 13.6". Really nice for portability, not so good for trying to view documents and make notes all on the same screen as a Teams call!

 

[derrick]

Chromebooks are ok for real basic stuff, quite a few programes do not work with them. Nice to use though.

 

[Cycleops]

I wonder what @Dave7 bought in the end? He never told us. Be interested to know.

 

[Profpointy]

Out current laptop is an Acer. Seems well built and has been trouble free for a good few years. Seemed fairly priced for the spec. At work I have had various Lenovos, Dells, and HPs. From general feel of the the thing the Acer feels more solid.

Spec wise I've always gone a few notches down from the top end, to avoid diminishing returns / major premium for high end processors or whatever, but still getting lots of memory, and somewhat powerful chips -worth reading the current vibe on Intel vs AMD as leadership and value swaps regularly. Worth getting a fairly good screen ("4k" was the keyword when I got ours), though not so big that it's a pig to carry. I'd not bother with a DVD drive as a USB accessory drive is cheap enough and makes the PC so much smaller for the times you're not using it. I would recommend SSD "hard" drive as they are so much quicker, particularly booting up. Depending on your overall storage needs, both at home and on the road, you may then also need one or more of a proper mechanical hard drive in the PC, a cloud storage subscription (my last employer, a small business used this), USB hard drive(s) or home server (RAID box or whatever)

 

[Electric_Andy]

I've had HPs and Lenovos before, some at £350ish price point and my current work one was £789 3 years ago. I can't tell any difference in performance between any of them. My current one which is Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, still struggles with large spreadsheets and often freezes when you tab between different windows. It's also very small and has no numberpad. The speakers proudly state Bang & Olufsen on them, but are pretty poor. IME only, they all seem fairly similar unless you're paying top dollar for a gaming or CAD spec PC

 

[Dadam]

Trouble is "core i5" etc doesn't mean that much because Intel have had the i3, i5, i7, i9 designations for many chip generations. They just use them to differentiate the levels within each generation. A gen 7 Core i5-7200U (with 4 cores from 2017) is going to be a lot slower than a 14th gen Core i5-14500T from 2024 with 14 cores!

 

[markemark]

Also now worth making sure whatever bought, if 2nd hand, is Windows 11 compatible as Oct 2025 is end of life for w10 meaning no more security updates. There may be the option to pay for on-going updates but that's by no means certain. One of the main failings for a w11 upgrade is the processor.

 

[icowden]

Thank you.

I want "new" (cos I'm an old fart)
IYO will, say, £400 get me something decent ?
Incidentally do they still copy CDs ?

You'll be hard pressed to find a laptop that still has an optical drive.

 

[icowden]

You haven't really said what you use the laptop for.

A chromebook will be cheap and is ideal for websurfing, watching TV on demand and light use of things like Office 365.
If you intend to do things like video editing, creating music, doing high end art etc you'll need something better.
If you have apps that are really niche you will probably need a Windows laptop.
If you don't take well to change, a MacBook may not be ideal. Apple insist on American keyboard layouts and other weird things that are different to Windows, so there will be a period of learning.

Within the windows laptop realm I really liked the Lenovo Yoga that I bought but it died about a month after the warranty ended so that really put me off the brand. My Asus was really good until one of my children dropped it. Now it's less good. It has kept going though.

The kids both had Dell Inspirons until recently. They have proved pretty robust although the battery had to be replaced on one of them last year (they are about 5 years old though). Older daughter now has a Microsoft Surface which she loves but they are expensive.

 

[Dadam]

Thank you.

I want "new" (cos I'm an old fart)
IYO will, say, £400 get me something decent ?
Incidentally do they still copy CDs ?

By copy CDs do you mean burn data to new blank CDs, or rip audio CDs into audio files?

Either way, almost no new laptops will do that out of the box, you don't get optical drives these days. But you can buy external ones that plug in to USB2 or USB-c ports.