Laptop for Nephew

My Brother wants to get his 13 yr old son a lappy for his birthday but max budget is £300 and asked me for some advice.

The best I could find was this but it is a refurb. I'm not much of laptop person so what do you guys think?

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/stor...ory_oid=-27411

He only wants to do surfing, homework, playing films/music and he likes writing stories. I think no to a Netbook as he can't play DVD's or listen to his CD's.

I am bias towards 15" laptops as I think the 16-17" are too big, and you get the most Hardware for your money in this range. He is only small so a 17" laptop will be massive for him to carry around.

2gb would be good as it'll invariably have Vista on it and I don't want it coming to a halt as soon as a Virus scan starts, decent sized HDD as he is not the type for good file management.

Any other suggestions would be welcome, no second hand though as kids like new. Its just a pity he didn't ask earlier as Tesco seem to have been shedding stock and Have had some great deals.

That refurb looks pretty good to me. Other options would include buying this HP (£290) or this emachines (£275) from ebuyer and a spare 1GB so-dimm (£9) to boost the RAM. Both of those options would come in at just below £300 with the extra memory.

Between those two it's a tricky shout. The eMachines, aside from being cheaper, has the edge in graphics (ATi X1250 vs Intel GMA X3100) and a smaller screen size: 14.1", but is in fact larger and heavier overall - 3.5kg is on the top end of portable. The HP also *probably* has the better processor (the Celeron M 500 series are based on Core architecture), claims the better battery life (although they're always worth taking with a pinch of salt), and obviously it's from a much bigger name company. I think I'd probably just about choose the HP - I've certainly not had many problems from my HP Celeron-based laptop I bought 18 months ago...

Perhaps a netbook and a USB-powered external optical drive?.. That should come in under £300. I've found that often I don't need an optical drive, and it's mostly using up space and energy in the machine. Also, the first thing I do with a CD I get is rip it onto my computer and it gathers dust after that.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Perhaps a netbook and a USB-powered external optical drive?.. That should come in under £300.

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Cheapest USB powered external optical drive is ~ £50. It *is* just about possible to get a netbook with HD and a USB optical drive for £300, but then you're sacrificing a lot of power for portability and spending the same amount of money. Only worth it if the laptop is *mainly* for carrying around - and I can't see many fathers letting their 13yo take a netbook to school!

Have a look at Dell outlet and also at their special offers. They often have some really good deals.

For example, stretch the budget and you can get the inspiron 15 here!

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/pr...hs1&l=en&s=dhs

There are some cracking deals at Laptops Direct. No recommendation, but this was just a click away when I went to the site: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/eMach...03/version.asp Get the 2Gb RAM version for an extra tenner.