Help My Girlfriend Buy A Laptop!

I know these topics aren't the best, but could you help a duder out?

My girlfriend is going to university soon, and her laptop has all but died recently, and she wants to get a new one. She said she likes the look of the HP Pavilion 15, but I want some opinions of the duders here, you've helped me in the past!

She wants something portable to take to and from university, I think just having a fast computer overall so it boots quickly, etc. She doesn't do much either, just office - which she already has with Office 365 - and watching movies, on netflix, etc. The Pavilion 15 was £350 with an i3 and a normal hdd. I was just thinking she could get a better processor, maybe with an SSD with a comparable price.

Can anyone help? I'm terrible at searching for these things.

I usually just blindly point people at The Wirecutter for stuff like this; your mileage may vary with their recommendations, but it's at least a good jumping off point for research on a lot of common items.

I second @thebrainninja on looking at The Wirecutter. I've gone on their recommendation for multiple items and haven't been disappointed yet.

Also could you elaborate what she will be using it for?If she has a special purpose like programming, music production, etc it could make a difference. A price limit also could help.

I had terrible luck with HP laptops and I'd never buy another one; 3 in 5 years before I switch to Lenovo, that Lenovo has been going strong for almost 4 years now.

@baillie: Have you considered spending less and getting a Chromebook? If what you listed really is all she does, it seems like that would be sufficient. Even if she really needs Windows, the Asus Eeebook costs less than half that and would more than likely be sufficient.

As general advice, I wouldn't recommend that you spend between £250 and £500 on a laptop. In that bracket, the quality of the components goes up, but the build quality doesn't, as manufacturers look to protect their margins. So you might have a faster processor, but it's not going to last very long, and when it does break, you're significantly out of pocket. Get a quality laptop that's built to last, or a cheap and cheerful one that you don't expect much of, but does the job.

@baillie: if we're sticking at the £350 mark, on Amazon the only one I can find that isn't 2nd hand or a refurb model is this Toshiba Satellite as far as i5s go. Everything else seems to be i3 or worse, but honestly for watching Netflix and using Office that's fine. For a similar price you can get one of these Lenovo 14 inch things with a SSHD, which is basically a mechanical drive with a SSD cache to make it quicker. Or you can pretty much any make 15.6 inch i3 1tb drive for the same price.

I'd say spend a bit more (which seems like quite a bit more, actually...) and get an i3 Surface Pro 3.

Being able to use that stylus comes in super handy for school stuff. Especially when you need to take notes that are diagrams. I liked taking recordings of speeches in One Note - it time stamps your notations, so if you go back into your notes and select a note you took, it'll scrub the audio back to when you started taking that note.

Also, holy crap. VAT is like 20%!

Just a quick edit here - I used an i3 Surface Pro 3 for a year as a daily driver. If you're not gaming, it works great. Played videos just fine and had enough hard drive space for Office, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat Pro with about 20-30 gigs free. Pair it with a 64 gig SDXC card and you should be fine. The only big qualm I had was DropBox only wanting to use non-removable storage. I recently upgraded to the i5 since my girlfriend was looking for a laptop and she enjoys the Surface as well. She used to print out documents for work, mark them up and scan them. Now she can do all that right on her Surface.

And as a student, at least here in the US, you get a 10% education discount.

Got the wife a Yoga 3 pro last month for her birthday...she loves it.

But might not be in the price range you're looking for :/

Dunno how much you're willing to spend over that budget, but as someone who went through college with a Surface Pro 1, I can't recommend the lineup enough. The Surface line was practically made for university students. OneNote with the pen is great for note taking in any subject.

Surface Pro 3 makes the most sense for college. You could also go a little cheaper and get the regular Surface 3 (which I just bought as a tablet) but it probably won't last through college.

I got a macbook when I started school. Thing has been with me going on 7 years. I'm a Windows guy but I will never buy a Windows laptop cause 99% of them are total butt.

I should add it was bottom range macbook at 900usd and I used a student loan to pay for it.