Buying laptop for new college student

smuggler.ie

tombrown wrote: »

Ordered the laptop, its on its way.

I guess he'll probably need a copy of MS Office now. Do UK Universities normally provide Student versions of this or will I need to purchase it for him?

All/most educational institutions have free MS Office and/or G Suite and should/will provide student with account for course term. You should be able to contact institution and find out.

FishOnABike

smuggler.ie wrote: »

All/most educational institutions have free MS Office and/or G Suite and should/will provide student with account for course term. You should be able to contact institution and find out.

Unless he needs the real time collaboration features of MS office he should consider a freely available alternative like LibreOffice.

Water John

Any opinions on Processors? Are i3 and i5 a bit dated?
Iv'e settled on the 8GB and 256SSD. The Asus recommended here earlier looks good.

Aodhan5000

New versions of each processor line (e.g i3, i5, etc) come out each year. An i5 is usually a good all round processor

Water John

Much appreciated Aodhan

niallb

My son's in Queens since last year and he uses a 14" Acer Chromebook.
All the material is online and works perfectly with it.
The laptop you got should be absolutely fine.
He also had no need to buy an Office package.

The big factor with choosing the chromebook was battery life for carrying around.
It's also really light and slim enough to slip into any bag.
10 hours battery with a 14" screen for about €300 lets him leave the charger at home.
He's not even looking to change or upgrade it for this year.

It's no gaming machine, but he has a decent PC at home he's built over the last few years,
and connects to it with a Nvidia Shield from Belfast for that!

Best of luck to your son in Queens - hope Brexit doesn't cause too much of a mess for them!

tombrown

Thanks

Got my lad's laptop - a Lenovo IdeaPad (I have a ThinkPad myself, so I do like Lenovo). I put LibreOffice on it for now and he can sort what he needs when he gets to Belfast.

My only slight concenr is the relatively small SSD (128GB), but I know there is loads of online storage at Queens, and, if the worst coems to the worst we can always an external SSD or upgrade the internal one

Homelander

Water John wrote: »

Any opinions on Processors? Are i3 and i5 a bit dated?
Iv'e settled on the 8GB and 256SSD. The Asus recommended here earlier looks good.

i5 8th gen are all quad core and great processors, Ryzen 5 are also good processors. i3 is OK for normal use but unless it's a lot cheaper than either the above, worth getting an i5 8th gen or R5. Avoid older i5 7th gen, almost all dual core but still widely available. An i3 8th gen would be pretty much identical.

smuggler.ie

tombrown wrote: »

Thanks

Got my lad's laptop - a Lenovo IdeaPad (I have a ThinkPad myself, so I do like Lenovo). I put LibreOffice on it for now and he can sort what he needs when he gets to Belfast.

My only slight concenr is the relatively small SSD (128GB), but I know there is loads of online storage at Queens, and, if the worst coems to the worst we can always an external SSD or upgrade the internal one

Once he gets O365 and/or G-Suite account from university, he will avail for online storage up to 1 TB
https://www.educationstore.ie/shop/microsoft-office-365-pro-plus-for-students/

https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en (see: How much storage do users get with G Suite for Education?)