Best laptop for work emails and excel

[Eleni123]

Hi I am looking for a laptop to do my emails and use excel and Microsoft and sort invoice files. Can anyone one reccomend one that's not slow and suitable for this I have a budget or up to £250/£300? Thanks in advance

 

[Saga Lout]

Staples has an Acer and a Toshiba around that price range. Both are more than adequate for your purpose. Money saving tip: Libre Office is free and MS OFfice is expnensive. The former is every bit as good as the dearer one and can display and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations you may already made on the MS software..

 

[Eleni123]

Staples has an Acer and a Toshiba around that price range. Both are more than adequate for your purpose. Money saving tip: Libre Office is free and MS OFfice is expnensive. The former is every bit as good as the dearer one and can display and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations you may already made on the MS software..

Thank you so much ! I have been looking at an acer es15 do you know if it's any good and would I need a lot of strorage?

 

[Saga Lout]

In my repair business, all the Acers I've had in during the last ten months have been for Windows related problems or upgrades. My wife runs an Acer laptop and it hasn't had any problems. That's all I can say. As to storage, at 1TB of disk space, it's a little over the top. You cold go for a less expensive model which has, say, 500GB or half the capacity of the ES15. You can buy external storage and indeed should do for regular backups so very few folks need a TB of storage.

 

[Eleni123]

In my repair business, all the Acers I've had in during the last ten months have been for Windows related problems or upgrades. My wife runs an Acer laptop and it hasn't had any problems. That's all I can say. As to storage, at 1TB of disk space, it's a little over the top. You cold go for a less expensive model which has, say, 500GB or half the capacity of the ES15. You can buy external storage and indeed should do for regular backups so very few folks need a TB of storage.

Thank you sorry I'm probably really annoying but would you say the HP Stream 14-Ax002na, the HP 15-Ay082na, Intel® Celeron® N3060 Processor, or the HP Stream 14-ax054sa 14" Laptop may Be better? As you can see I have no idea about laptops just want something speedy and reliable if possible . Tia

 

[Saga Lout]

The HP stream has only 2GB of RAM which is tolerable but on the slow side. It also only has a 32GB storage disk but it is a Solid State Drive which means it doesn't have a spinning disk running at 5,400 rpm all the time the machine is switched. You would definitely need external storage for that one.

The 14 refers to the diagonal measurement of the screen so 14". Most laptops start at 15.6" and netbooks have a 10" screen so you have an idea as to scale..

 

[Dustybin]

If you can stretch your budget a bit I can personally recommend the LENOVO IdeaPad 310, which can be had for £350. I think it's worth the extra for two reasons.

The full HD screen is nicer to work with (most cheap laptops have a lower resolution), it's still quite wishy washy but I do a bit of light dev work on one and appreciate the higher resolution.

Secondly, the memory and hard drive are very easy to upgrade which isn't always the case with low specification machines. The default machine came with 4gb of RAM which I upgraded to 12gb in about 5 minutes flat. My previous computer was an Acer and upgrading memory and HDD involved removing the keyboard to get at the motherboard. It isn't a problem for me but many people wouldn't be happy to do this themselves.

 

[Eleni123]

The HP stream has only 2GB of RAM which is tolerable but on the slow side. It also only has a 32GB storage disk but it is a Solid State Drive which means it doesn't have a spinning disk running at 5,400 rpm all the time the machine is switched. You would definitely need external storage for that one.

The 14 refers to the diagonal measurement of the screen so 14". Most laptops start at 15.6" and netbooks have a 10" screen so you have an idea as to scale..

Okay thank you been very helpful

 

[robert600]

If it is speed you want ... a machine with a SSD rather than a more conventional HDD would work wonders. I'm not sure how that fits your budget but you would be amazed at the difference.

 

[Eleni123]

If it is speed you want ... a machine with a SSD rather than a more conventional HDD would work wonders. I'm not sure how that fits your budget but you would be amazed at the difference.

Really, thank you I will take a look

 

[Saga Lout]

There's very little to be gained to spend a lot more on a machine with a SSD when it's just being used for basic office facilities.

 

[robert600]

There's very little to be gained to spend a lot more on a machine with a SSD when it's just being used for basic office facilities.

I'm sorry but I can not agree with the above statement. Ssds are so much faster at loading programs and and opening files. Each email is essentially a file that needs to be opened … further complicated by often having attachments (pdfs, jpegs, word files, etc. etc.) embedded in the email. These attachments need to be opened by another program (word, paint, etc.) that needs to load and access the attachment file. Who of us hasn’t spent annoyingly long periods of time watching the ‘little circle spin’ while this is done? This is exactly what ssds are sooooo much better at … click on the attachment and ‘bang’ … there it is. This quote from Office Watch (I note that this would apply to any email reading program … not just ‘Outlook):

“Office benefits
Outlook is the main beneficiary of a solid state drive. That’s to be expected since Outlook is really a large database application which runs better if it can get information from the hard drive faster.”

Thinking about Excel ... (apart from just loading in a flash) ... it would also benifit from a ssd. For sure, it would not give any benefit to simply entering data but as soon as you actually used the data … the benefit would be noticed. For excel to do anything … it has to load the appropriate module to do the task (even something as simple as a graph)… again this is something a ssd speeds up hugely. So this quote from somewhere?:

“Office work usually (depending on what you do and what software you use) needs a moderate to high amount of memory, moderate CPU, and fast sequential and random access reads on your disk (SSDs, even cheap ones, are typically excellent at this). The most important "feature" of office programs is that they are ugly fat pigs which are already heavy on their own, and load a lot of small plugins, addons, templates, and whatnot all the time. Loading can literally take minutes if your disk drive can't cope. Write speed usually does not matter at all. You don't save once every two seconds, and it is usually a very quick process, too.
→ SSD model definitively preferrable.”

And this quote from ‘Office Watch’:
"For Word, Excel and PowerPoint we definitely noticed a vast speed up in Windows Explorer display including Open and Save dialogs in Office. Instead of waiting for files and folders to appear, a file list appears in a flash – just like it’s supposed to . Navigating around folders is much faster and easier. This SSD advantage is worth the extra price in our view.
Of course there are also the general advantages of a Solid State Drive. Windows startup is faster and transition to/from hibernation or sleep modes is a lot faster with SSD.”

 

[Saga Lout]

I agree with you that Microsoft Office programmes slow any system to a crawl. My comment was based on my experience using the markedly faster Libre Office from the Opensource community.

 

[Eleni123]

There's very little to be gained to spend a lot more on a machine with a SSD when it's just being used for basic office facilities.

I'm sorry but I can not agree with the above statement. Ssds are so much faster at loading programs and and opening files. Each email is essentially a file that needs to be opened … further complicated by often having attachments (pdfs, jpegs, word files, etc. etc.) embedded in the email. These attachments need to be opened by another program (word, paint, etc.) that needs to load and access the attachment file. Who of us hasn’t spent annoyingly long periods of time watching the ‘little circle spin’ while this is done? This is exactly what ssds are sooooo much better at … click on the attachment and ‘bang’ … there it is. This quote from Office Watch (I note that this would apply to any email reading program … not just ‘Outlook):

“Office benefits
Outlook is the main beneficiary of a solid state drive. That’s to be expected since Outlook is really a large database application which runs better if it can get information from the hard drive faster.”

Thinking about Excel ... (apart from just loading in a flash) ... it would also benifit from a ssd. For sure, it would not give any benefit to simply entering data but as soon as you actually used the data … the benefit would be noticed. For excel to do anything … it has to load the appropriate module to do the task (even something as simple as a graph)… again this is something a ssd speeds up hugely. So this quote from somewhere?:

“Office work usually (depending on what you do and what software you use) needs a moderate to high amount of memory, moderate CPU, and fast sequential and random access reads on your disk (SSDs, even cheap ones, are typically excellent at this). The most important "feature" of office programs is that they are ugly fat pigs which are already heavy on their own, and load a lot of small plugins, addons, templates, and whatnot all the time. Loading can literally take minutes if your disk drive can't cope. Write speed usually does not matter at all. You don't save once every two seconds, and it is usually a very quick process, too.
→ SSD model definitively preferrable.”

And this quote from ‘Office Watch’:
"For Word, Excel and PowerPoint we definitely noticed a vast speed up in Windows Explorer display including Open and Save dialogs in Office. Instead of waiting for files and folders to appear, a file list appears in a flash – just like it’s supposed to . Navigating around folders is much faster and easier. This SSD advantage is worth the extra price in our view.
Of course there are also the general advantages of a Solid State Drive. Windows startup is faster and transition to/from hibernation or sleep modes is a lot faster with SSD.”

Thanks do you can you reccomend an ssd laptop in my price range?

 

[robert600]

How do you feel about refurbished? This one looks quite good to me ... it's 36 over your budget though:

https/www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-ThinkPad-i5-3320M-Certified-Refurbished/dp/B01C6WNEL6/ref=sr_1_20/258-9358848-8195007?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1495333406&sr=1-20

 

[robert600]

At £140 this seems extremely good. I know it's used but the warranty is 1 year. The ssd is small but could probably handle emails and Excel just fine if you don't install too many other programs.

https/www.amazon.co.uk/Thinkpad-Refurbished-Windows-i3-3110M-Warranty/dp/B06XY2G5SG/ref=sr_1_24?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1495334020&sr=1-24

 

[robert600]

you'd have to act fast for the above ... there is only one left.

 

[robert600]

Here are some more detailed specs on it ... it really does like quite good for the price! Note that it will accept up to 16gb of ram (very easy to upgrade ram if desired), has a dvd burner, has usb 3 (very nice if you want to use an external HDD ... much faster than usb 2).



https/support.lenovo.com/ca/en/solutions/pd024705

 

[Eleni123]

How do you feel about refurbished? This one looks quite good to me ... it's 36 over your budget though:

https/www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-ThinkPad-i5-3320M-Certified-Refurbished/dp/B01C6WNEL6/ref=sr_1_20/258-93588488195007?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1495333406&sr=1-20[/

Thank you but wouldn't want to go with a refurbished one. Is there not just a laptop for that budget which I can use for online email acc and excel that is recommended and pretty good ?

 

[robert600]

Someone else could probably better answer this question. To be perfectly honest, I have never purchased a new laptop.