Laptop for office work (literally)

[Chernabog]

1. What is your budget?
$400-$600
2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
15"
3. What screen resolution do you want?
Any, though FHD would be nice
4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
Desktop Replacement
5. How much battery life do you need?
Any
6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?
No
7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
Excel, Word, updating websites (office work)
8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
500gb, 1tb preferred
9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
https/www.amazon.co.jp/Acer-i3-7100U-Windows-E5-575-33BM-%E7%B1%B3%E5%9B%BD%E4%B8%A6%E8%A1%8C%E8%BC%B8%E5%85%A5%E5%93%81/dp/B01K1IO3QW/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1510479270&sr=8-5&keywords=Acer+Aspire+E+15

http/www.dell.com/jp-jp/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-5000/spd/inspiron-15-5567-laptop


10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
4-5 years at least, hopefully more

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
DVD Rom
12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.
Dell might be a good option, it's said to have good support in Japan and it's upgradable
13. What country do you live in?
Japan
14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.

It's supposed to be a gift for my wife, who currently only has a desktop in her office, and would like something to do extra work at home (instead of sitting there till late night)

I found these two, the acer one being (so I read) amongst the best low end laptops. It's an i3 though, and has half of the ram of the dell one, which is also an i5.
Not sure if it really matters since she will probably use nothing more than the aforementioned softwares (occasionally Photoshop for making fliers, but it's rare)

 

[13thmonkey]

A few points:

For what you are doing 4GB is ok, not great just OK, and i3 will be fine (my current laptop is an i3-3220 so much much older). UNLESS your excel work is really really heavy, but i'm running quite heavy stuff and am fine.

1TB is a lot of storage, in 90% of situations i'd swap 500GB of that for a bigger screen or more ram to keep a constant cost. Surely for working on work for her employer most resources will be on their servers and you should keep local files to a minimum.

4-5 years is a big ask from a laptop, better to reduce the budget and plan to replace in 3 years than hope for 4-5 years (but my lenovo X1 from 2011 is still going strong with a memory and ram upgrade).

The dell link doesn't work, but anything i3/4-8GB/500GB would be fine, screen size is up to you.

One final point which you may not be able to answer without ruining any kind of surprise, does your wife's employer allow remote working? is it setup for it? I work on a contract basis and so move from company to company, some are great, some not so great (but that's in the UK).

Have you however considered a NUC and a screen, I suspect that space is more limited in Japan than the UK and so having something foldable that you can put away is possibly better? But they would be slightly more maintainable.

 

[Chernabog]

Thanks for the help!
Hm yeah all your points make sense indeed.
She works for the family business and as far as I could understand will simply use google drive for passing data across devices. That said, she is quite forgetful so I thought a laptop would be a better pick, since she can use it in the office and then take it home (while it would be a problem if she forgets something in the other computer and it's not uploaded via cloud)

Strange, the dell link works for me, just lazy loading. Here is the one I was looking at:

https/www.screencast.com/t/JmdxKjSpOSh

 

[13thmonkey]

I don't know if that price is good, but the specs are a lot better than the other. You may well find that it'll work for 4-5 years, but don't bank on it. However you can get really small laptops that you would really use with a screen, would be much easier moving from place to place every day, inspirons are not built to be light, so do you want to lug around every day?

There are many things to consider, so i'm just throwing out things that you should be aware of as alternatives etc.

 

[Chernabog]

Oh, you mean hooking them up to a larger screen? That's another option, cause yes, it would need to be carried around every day (more like from home to the office and back, with the car), so I wonder if it would not be cumbersome to have a large screen/heavy one

 

[13thmonkey]

Oh, you mean hooking them up to a larger screen? That's another option, cause yes, it would need to be carried around every day (more like from home to the office and back, with the car), so I wonder if it would not be cumbersome to have a large screen/heavy one

Precisely, although that sounds less bad than the train journeys I was imagining at rush hour. Get a 13.3 or even a 12inch and use a monitor.

Plus better erognomics

 

[Chernabog]

Okay I will pick something else as surprise, I asked her directly since she will use it, and she said she prefers a slightly larger screen (otherwise we have to get an extra monitor at home), so perhaps a 15.6. The dells seem out of the game, they won't let you buy from the US site unless you have a US cc and address, and the same model on their japanese site is like 700+ bucks instead of 579

 

[13thmonkey]

So really just look at 15.6, i5, 8GB, and whatever storage you can get, but an SSD would be much preferable (200GB min), and use cloud storage otherwise. If you have to sacrifice anything then drop the i5 to an i3.