Buying A New Laptop

[countrykid]

With Windows 7 Support ending soon, and our existing laptop very tired, it's time to replace it. It's mostly used for internet/email, photos copied from phone, a bit of Word/Excel usage. Popped in to a Curry's/PC World to see what "Everyday" laptops cost. Looking to spend no more than £350. Was told PCs no longer come with any software so would need to add Microsoft Home/Student package/McAfee/set up etc etc from them for £198. Is this just "upselling". Could I just buy a laptop online (Black Friday?) and Microsoft Word/Excel or use some free software that does similar job. Didn't really want a total spend of circa £550 which Curry's would be

[JimF]

Start here: https://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/c/404/Laptops-Netbooks/ Get the "best" you can afford.

There are plenty of places where you can get, er, cheap copies of Microsoft Word - don't. If you don't want to pay for software, you don't have to. Start here:
https://www.libreoffice.org/

[Jackdaw33]

Open Office is free to download, has all the same features and in many cases is better than Word. I'ts what I and many others use.

[countrykid]

Thanks JimF, I'll take a look at the links tomorrow all being well.

[ToraToraTora]

They are having a turkish, don't touch curry's/PC world et al with a barge pole, for your needs get something like this, I chose I5, 8GB, 500gb £129 all in, more than you'll ever need including software.
https://tinyurl.com/y636bmjz

[ToraToraTora]

MS Office, £6: https://tinyurl.com/y6cswjkx

[Buenchico]

Just a few points:

1. For your fairly basic needs a refurbished laptop (from a 100% reliable source, that I'm happy to recommend) might well meet your needs. Take a look at these:
https://accomputerwarehouse.com/product-category/cheap-refurbished-laptops-uk
(When buying a refurbished laptop though, from any source, it's always worth budgeting for an extra twenty quid or so for a new battery from eBay or similar).

2. You don't need Microsoft Office. Most ABers (including myself) seem to use OpenOffice:
https://www.openoffice.org/
(LibreOffice, as per Jim's link, is also very good,as is WPS Office: https://www.wps.com )

3. You don't need McAfee or any other full security suites. The most popular free anti-virus program among ABers appears to be Avast, which is what I use myself:
https://www.avast.com/en-gb/index#pc

4. Windows 10 doesn't come with a video-player but VLC is far better than Windows Media Player anyway:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.en-GB.html

5. Windows 10 machines rarely come with a PDF viewer provided. Adobe's own viewer is free but (despite the fact that Adobe invented the PDF format) it's nowhere as good as Foxit Reader (which is the most popular alternative)
https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/
or Sumatra PDF (which is what I use):
https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

6. Most people probably access their email via webmail these days. However if you want a dedicated email client (akin to, say, Outlook Express) the Windows 10 Mail app is extremely basic. Thunderbird is a far better alternative:
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/

7. If you need other free software, just ask here. For example everyone should have Irfanview on their machines. It's a far, far better image-viewer than what comes with Windows and has some nifty photo-editing tools built into it as well:
https://www.irfanview.com/
(If you'd prefer to have an image-editor that's as full-featured as Photoshop, give GIMP a try: https://www.gimp.org )

8. Your existing laptop won't suddenly stop working (or get infected with loads of viruses and malware) when support for Windows 7 ends, so you've no need to rush into replacing it. I'm using three Windows 7 machines and, although I've been looking at Windows 10 alternatives (from AC Computer Warehouse, as above), I'm in no great hurry to switch to Windows 10.

[TonyV]

Agree with Chris Open office is good and free.

[countrykid]

Thanks for all replies. Special thanks to burn for such a thorough reply and links. Lots for me to check out. Great info all round. Another reason for replacing the win 7 laptop is that it's become incredibly slow. No idea why, it's got loads of space left on hard drive, but I realise lots of other things slow PC down