Advice on Laptop for High School Student

Lnitnat8 on 11/12/2020 - 01:10
Last edited 11/12/2020 - 01:10

Need to get a 13-14 inch laptop for my daughter to get through Year 10 Plus of High school. Mainly used for Microsoft office applications and school stuff. Not for gaming.

I saw a Dell Latitude 7300 on clearance for ~$1200.
Specs - 8th Generation Intel® Core™ I5-8365U Processor. Integrated Intel® UHD 620 Graphics for i5-8365U Processor.
Memory - 16GB, DDR4 Non-ECC harddrive and M.2 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive
With 3 year warranty which I like considering likely rough use.

I have used Latitudes earlier and found then to be reliable and robust. However, feel that 8th Gen processor performance may not be adequate and good enough for the next 3 years.

Any feedback and alternatives laptop options would be appreciated.

Computing Computer Laptop

Comments

  • [Deactivated] on 11/12/2020 - 01:56
    +1

    Why do feel that an 8th gen quad-core i5 processor may not be adequate to run Microsoft Office apps?

    • nitnat8 on 11/12/2020 - 09:19

      Would like to future proof as she may require for Maths/Statistical software applications in future.

  • onetrickpony on 11/12/2020 - 07:36
    +1

    I bought a similar Dell laptop for my daughter for year 10. We bought the Dell three year accidental damage cover as well, which was around 550, which allows for one major repair per year. This year, year 10, a cracked touch screen "mysteriously" appeared on the laptop after school one day. Dell organized an onsite repair and it was completed 2-3 days of the claim being lodged. The accident cover seemed expensive at the time, but was money well spent.

  • YeemaiI on 11/12/2020 - 08:40

    You can probably save some money and not buy a mid-high end laptop like that Latitude.
    If she's only going to be using it for Microsoft Office applications, surfing the web and whatnot, buy a Microsoft Surface laptop. Much cheaper and I think better suits her needs. Just my 2c.

    • nitnat8 on 11/12/2020 - 09:16

      Agree.I find that business grade laptops tend to be built well robust and students take less than ideal care. Any damage and it is usually a write off as repairs are expensive. The 3 year warranty and support is peace of mind.

    • kerfuffle on 11/12/2020 - 10:03

      Surface Laptops are pretty expensive; do you have an example of a cheaper one?

      • YeemaiI on 11/12/2020 - 10:07

        I was thinking along the lines of the Surface Go series of laptops.

  • Seraphin7 on 11/12/2020 - 09:43
    +1

    IMHO the specs you've put there are strong. I recently bought a very similar spec machine for one of my kids.

    It sounds like your kid has got three years of high school to go. Based on spec alone, this will be more than enough to get through that period based on the use cases you have outlined. The probabilities are it will stand up to post-school/university applications as well, keeping in mind most of these are identical to high school use cases.

    In terms of maths/stats applications, I wouldn't worry about it. If this ends up being an issue at university level, it's likely you'll need a specialised machine that would be complete overkill between now and then, or even need to use the university on-site gear.

  • Randxyz123 on 11/12/2020 - 10:10

    That is a good specced laptop for 3 years of high school. 8th Gen is a bit old but easily able to run office and probably will be able to handle matlab etc in the future.

    It might even be able to handle a year or so of Uni after.

    As the SSD is pretty small you should encourage your daughter to save everything to her one drive so it’s backed up. If you aren’t doing O365, cloud storage is well worth the money. $*** happens and it is well worth having stuff backed up.

    As someone else said a onsite repair plan is probably worth the cost. Transporting it to and from school it is bound to get knocked around.

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