Small laptop

[Deirdre784]

Hi, i’m looking to replace my iPad with a small laptop and would welcome some advice please. I have a desktop pc and 15’’ laptop, both of which are some years old but still working (if a bit slowly).

From browsing at Curry’s and then reviewing online i realise that the small laptops tend to have the intel celeron processor, and are described as entry level and for occasional use, so i’d welcome advice as to whether or not this is good enough for my needs (often researching for several hours a day, and every day!). 

I would want to install my Family Historian software and would primarily use the laptop for my research. I would also want several websites (ancestry / find my past / GRO / freeBMD etc) open at the same time, and to be able to use WORD and EXCEL (rather than the app versions). Ideally i would like an SD (or multi) card slot. Hence the change from the iPad.
Is this unrealistic and would i really need to be looking at a bigger screen / more powerful processor.

Thanks for reading 

[Biggles50]

Hi

If you have a specific budget we could be a bit more helpful if it was known.

I would avoid a Celeron or Chrome or any non Windows laptop.

Processors vary but the specification will list the number of cores that it has ie 2 core, 4 core.   Look at the number of cores and for each core a minimum of 2Gb RAM is a good starting point.  So 4 core = 8 Gb RAM but the more RAM the better.

Screen resolution, full HD 1920x1080 as a minimum.

Internal hard drive, an SSD (solid state drive) will vary considerably but a minimum of 500Gb will be enough for programs and storage but 1Tb would be better.

Factor in for a portable USB hard drive of at least 1Tb and ideally 2Tb for backup of the internal drive and for duplicate storage of all your files.

I have had an Asus laptop for well over ten years and it has served my well and at the time it cost £700.  As well as Asus, Acer, Lenovo and HP make pretty good laptops.

To meet my suggestions would mean spending £550+ on a laptop, I have visited the Curry’s website and filtered it to only show laptops with 500Gb+ hard drives.

[Deirdre784]

Thanks Biggles50, price wasn’t my main consideration, but the little laptops only appear to be celeron. Looking to go up from that, i ended up looking at an Acer Aspire 5 A514-54 14’’) with core i7 processor, currently around £600. 1TB SSD. But no card slot. And bigger than i would like (my iPad is less than 10’’).

Will look again on the basis of your specs, thanks for that, but it looks like it will be a bigger laptop than i was hoping for, or a new iPad.

[CorleyMiller]

To address the laptop size issue, better processors than Celeron are on not restricted to larger laptops.
Plenty of 14 & 15 inch ones around with i3, i5 and i7's. I've only bought a larger size when i needed the extended keyboard with it's own numeric pad

I'd widen your research beyond Curry's, I've used Laptop Direct, Scan and CCL in the past. Their websites have a wide variety.

I'd also make sure that it either comes with Windows 11 or is compatible to upgrade as support for Windows 10 will cease at some point.

[Deirdre784]

Thanks, i only started at Currys so i could actually see some options before researching online. The option for Windows 11 seems to be available on most of them but good to bear in mind. Will obviously need a re-think 😀

[Biggles50]

SD card readers that plug into a USB slot are readily available like a Belkin for £5 off Amazon hence it should not cause a problem if the laptop does not have one.

An advantage of a larger laptop like a 15” is that you would have more real estate on the screen and thus enable multiple Windows to be open at the same time.

Multiple windows I find very useful especially when working on my Family Tree as I can switch easily from one to the other and see them both at the same time.

Throwing a curveball, you are well used to your iPad, have you considered a Mac laptop?  A 13” Macbook Air £1250, fast 512Gb SSD storage, downside is you would need other software, we have Reunion and Roots Magic on our iMac and despite it being old it is blistering fast compared to the Windows PC and the graphics resolution of a Macbook is vastly superior to any Windows laptop.

[Deirdre784]

Thanks, another thing to add to my list to look at. In case you haven’t guessed, i’m not very techy, but use a computer all day in work and then at home too 😀

[Calverley Lad]

What about an external CD/DVD drive?
Used for loading software on disc/saving info to disc.
 Brian
CCL computers are local to me and offer a good service.

[Deirdre784]

Thanks Brian, my list is growing 😀