Internet DNA Podcast
It is different times we find ourselves, and different times mean.... new laptops! Well that is where we have found ourselves thrown into homeschooling. In this episode we discuss the right and wrong laptop choices for children; budget, specs, pitfalls, warranty, and mistakes we suggest you don't make as we have made them already!
Transcription
(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of internet DNA with me, Abi this week, we all find ourselves in a very different circumstance and for a lot of us that has led to homeschooling and for us, and I expect for many people as well. That's meant that my daughter needs a laptop. So this week we're going to discuss the types of laptops that may be good for children in the lower budget but what will be okay for them to do their schoolwork and what they'd like to do on it. I guess we should start this conversation by Mac, PC or Chromebook.
I had to get a Chromebook because one of them didn't have a laptop and actually at their school they use Google classroom. So I thought, Oh, that would be brilliant. But it turns out they can't log into their Google classroom on their Chromebook unless they were on the school network. So oddly, I've had to give that one to the child that doesn't have Google classroom.
Explain quickly what a Chromebook is,
so a Chromebook runs a Chrome OS (operating system) not windows or Mac iOS. It costs £150. Do you remember in the old days, they used to be these things called net books and they were very, very lightweight, very small, and they basically ran web enabled apps. So for Google, that's Google docs, Google sheets, Google numbers, I think it's called Google drawing. So much like the Microsoft office suite of tools for which you would use teams or word or Excel or PowerPoint. They have the same tools, but they're based on the web. Now these have a really nice advantage, which is you can't lose your work because they are on the web. So someone turns your computer off, or all the hi-jinks that my boys have been getting up to this week. You can't possibly lose your work,
but my child's school, they use office 365 and they're hanging out on teams and word and things like that. Are you able to download and use office 365 on a Chromebook?
You can run some apps on it but not many. So I'm not sure if word is possible. So a Chromebook, probably not right. And anyway, it wouldn't be the right choice. If you're running a Microsoft suite, you'd be better off on a windows machine.
That's what I thought. Because the Chromebook seemed to me is really lightweight. It's great for surfing and internet and apps. It's a bit like a tablet that you can type on, would you say? Okay. So the price is brilliant. So I nearly went for it and then I got nervous. But it's one up from a tablet.
Yes. For most of what my youngest son is doing, which is writing essays, filling in forms, playing with pencils. It's absolutely fine.
And he’s at primary school. And I did look at Mac books and initially you'd go, well I’m staying away from them because they're really expensive. But actually the refurb ones weren't that expensive. But again, having the Microsoft suite, my daughter’s school said you have to pay extra if you're going to try and use what we use at school on Macs. So that's another thing to think about when buying a laptop for a child is what is the suite of software they use at school.
Probably your daughter's right that you might as well go for a PC. They are cheap. A spec for spec to go for a PC. But my middle son is running on a pretty old Mac book pro and I bought it for I think £180 off eBay and I've just added RAM and an SSD and it's more than functional.
Okay. But most people haven't the ability to add RAM and SSD. Now we did do a podcast some years ago. On what SSD was that people could go back and listen to that. But do you even have to take your computer apart to do that or you just stuff it in
on the MacBook pro? You have to take the back cover off. Then it's literally just like putting RAM into any other machine.
Oh yes just cause we all put RAM in
well, I mean we've all got YouTube these days. I bet there are a thousand videos. How to put RAM or SSD into a particular machine.
So is it okay to get a refurbished computer that doesn't matter?
Grade A or B should be absolutely fine and most Grade As are just returns and they're often business returns or a shop might overhaul.
So a lot of them have never even been used.
All that Grade A means is that the box has been opened. Grade B means that there is some light cosmetic damage so it might have a scratch on it, but I mean for your kids to be honest, it's going to get a scratch on it.
You can get refurb from laptopsdirect.co.uk
Anywhere. most of those warehouse laptop distributors.
Okay, so let's go through some of those. If you're going to start looking for laptops, obviously we've got to buy everything online at the moment cause you can't go to the shop and have a look. Where are the go to places
there’s Scan, eBuyer they will give you good pricing. I use laptopsdirect for laptops just because they have a price guarantee. So if you can find it for the same price somewhere else, they will match it. And also, they have a lot of stock.
Amazon have quite a lot as always, John Lewis are good, 30% more expensive. I think it's not that the laptop is more expensive, it's that they only go for higher spec. And then other one, which I don't like and swore I'd never go to again, but online they're brilliant is PC world / curry’s because on the spec of every computer they say what it's good for. So they say good for internet browsing and social, a good allrounder, a full on work horse type thing and that, not really knowing about the specs I found quite useful. But I have had problems with PC world that every computer I've ever got has had teething problems when it's arrived and has had quite a lot of time spent to sort it out, which often means removing strange malware software. Once I’ve sorted it out it's okay. But,
and that's often the manufacturer. Actually Samsung used to be famous for just piling on a whole load of bloatware, just loads of bits of program that no one ever in their right mind would ever need. And they've kind of stopped it now.
But I had actual malware, I can only assume that they push you to buy a certain antivirus and the antivirus goes look, look, I've found something. I'm brilliant and takes it all off.
So let's say for the reasons I've said, I'm looking for a PC, laptop, there's all sorts of things, isn't there? There's the screen size. How sexy it looks, which is important. I would say it's important for me certainly,
it's not really important for your children. You know?
Then there’s the RAM. So the memory, there's the hard drive size. So whether it's the solid state,
yes, there are three things to really think about when you're buying a laptop; screen size. If it's 13 inches, it's fine. If it's 11 inches is fine, it's 15 or 17 inches, no longer a laptop. It's basically a computer you can carry.
I think it's between 11” and 14” is good because they need to be able to carry it and they're going to be lugging it around in their bags.
Actually, I think when people talk about specs that can get very confused. RAM is really obvious. A minimum spec these days would be eight gigs of RAM, and that's not, say you can't get away with four gigs, but in a year's time.
My research on that though, and I'm going for one that's actually six gig RAM and I run heavy duty software, all the Adobe suite and now my children use it and I've been running a four gig one. It did have 128 meg hard drive, not the 64 that's too, but it ran absolutely fine.
but then I bet you've got a decent processor, which you're not going to get at the low end. You're going to be on a AMD Ryzen 3 series or you're going to be on an Intel Core i3 or you're going to be on Celeron.
Okay, that's interesting. If you're going for the lower end RAM, you need to make sure that you have a good processor.
So the way I described it to my children, RAM is how big your desk is, and your processor is, how fast your brain is. Now if you've got a very slow brain and a very small desk, you're going to do very little because you just haven't got enough to work on at any one time. Now one way of getting around that is getting a very fast brain. The problem is, it’s much more expensive to get a fast brain than it is to just stock RAM. RAM is relatively cheap and the issue with laptops is they tend to step spec them, so the lower end laptops, it will have too little RAM and not fast enough processor. Then you get to the mid range would have a decent amount of RAM and a decent processor and then you get to the higher end where you into the good processes and the good amount of RAM. And so what you don't get is this option to go, I want a little bit of RAM and a really good processor or I want a pretty slow process loads of RAM. I personally would not buy a laptop with less than eight gigs (Gigabyte) of RAM. That's not, so you can't get away with it, but you're just not future-proofing it.
And what's a good processor.
There are two different types of processor on the market now. So everybody should know the Intel spec, well not Pentiums anymore, but they go from Core i3, which is the bottom of the range with a dual-core processor then Core i5 with a quad-core and then Core i7 and Core i9 with both dual and quad and will probably only be in very, very expensive laptops. So we can ignore those. So you're then looking at an i3 or an i5. And really the difference between those is whether they use hyper-threading, how many calls they've got, how fast they are. I've don't know every single Intel processor off the top of my head
but the fact that it's an Intel, is that a good start?
Two years ago it wouldn have been the only start. You would never have gone for an AMD processor unless you were going for a very, very cheap PC. That's totally changed in the last two years. AMD are now producing better priced, better spec’d, better performing processes. So now what you tend to find is in the really cheap PCs they have the AMD Ryzen, their system works in a very similar way. They either start with a 3 or a 5 or 7, and they're very similar so you don't have to worry anymore. Is it Intel or is it AMD?
I found a great one though that I wanted to go for just because of it’s processor and it was called the Lake Apollo or was it the Apollo Lake?
I think that's an Apollo lake yes, almost all Intel processes have a Lake. At the end.
I learned that it was actually in a laptop called Jumper EZ Book. Again, very obscure name.
So if I was buying a laptop for my son, I would be looking at roughly an 8GB. Anything above a 64GB (Gigabyte) SSD (Solid State Drive), no HD (Hard Drive) at all. I wouldn't be looking at a laptop with a hard drive. I would only look at a laptop with an SSD and I've got a feeling almost all modern laptops use SSDs because there's so much softer on the battery because they're not having to spin a disk and then I would be looking at the best processor I could afford within my budget.
What budget are you talking about for this sort of spec?
For a reasonable laptop, if you're buying it new, you're probably looking between £350 and £500 pounds and that's a lot of money for a child's laptop in my opinion.
With six gig (Gigabyte) RAM, so just under 11 inch and actually this is a touchscreen, flips around to a tablet one which my daughter was really into 128 SSD so slightly below your spec. That was just over £300 and that was my maximum budget. So they are there if you look hard, but you have to go for the slightly obscure Chinese make. Again, that's something I'd like to talk about. Should you be going for Lenovo or Asus or a Dell or is it okay to take a punt on a Chinese unknown if the spec is slightly better?
Well, it depends where you're buying it from. So if you're buying it from a manufacturer that's going to offer you a warranty and that you've researched it’s a warranty that will actually happen because if the warranty is ‘you send it back to us, you never see it again!’ The reason why people go for big is because their known entities, if I send my laptop back Lenovo, I get my laptop fixed. That's the way it works. My only worry, and it's not to say you shouldn't, but my only worry would be look at the manufacturer and see if you can find anything about their return policy, how their warranties work. Because when things do break and they don’t often, because computers are fairly robust these days that you have some recourse back. What you don't want to do is spend 300 pounds on a laptop. It works for three months and then it's broken and there's no way of getting it back. You need to buy it from a decent place or make sure it's a company that you are buying has a record of fulfilling that warranty.
That's really good advice that I haven't taken. It was between that and a Lenovo. I might cancel and go for the Lenovo.
Yes, and a refurbished Grade A or B from a reputable company would fit in your budget and may be a better bet.
Well, that's about it in a nutshell isn't it? Those are all the things you're looking at and it is a scary thing to outlay right now when we don't want to be outlaying anything but with homeschooling they do need one
There is the next level up which is if you're buying a laptop for more than just homeschooling, I have three boys as I keep saying and they like to badger me for a gaming laptop. The thing about gaming laptops is they come in two very distinct flavors. You either get a normal laptop that someone's written gaming on and charge you an extra 200 quid and they're not really gaming computers; and gaming laptops, which are immensely expensive. And my suggestion and what I've done with my boys is actually make them build their own gaming computer because I don't think gaming laptops are good value for money whatsoever.
Well, there's a great engineering project for next term isn't it? Build your own gaming computer.
We buy the components and they put them together and it's like Lego and like you said, Oh people can’t just put RAM in. Once you've done it once and you realize it's electrical Lego, it demystifies computers or stops them from being scary and unknown.
It is so important to start to be able to get under the bonnet, like in a car and to know what's working. So when it does break,
they're not that complicated. I mean they are really complicated. We're not building the motherboards. Obviously we buy them, but it's very difficult to put things in the wrong place. If you can build an FX model, you can pretty much build a computer.
I just want to go back to last week, 3-D printing and how un-useful you said it was to have one in the home and this week when we went on lockdown and in total isolation, I think the home 3-D printer has just gone up in usefulness. Apparently there is a national shortage of egg cups. Easter is coming and we're not allowed out. So I told you 3-D printing was a future and the future seems to be now,
Yes, I'm sure, yes, I have no need for 3- D printing in isolation or try to imagine what I'd be printing. In fact, it worries me to think, well, I'd be printing, I've decided to get into model making with my boys.
Well then you'll definitely need to 3-D print all the little bits that your dog eats. If you had a dog. Is there anything else that we should know or do I need to scurry away and check the warranty of the laptop I've just bought?
There are some really good deals out there. At the moment. Refurbish is definitely worth looking at. A or B grades are fine. I think laptops for kids, you're basically looking for what can you get away with rather than the best laptop possible because they will break them within X amount of time and that's not in a malicious way. I've never ever damaged a USB or charging cable in my life. My sons go through them every two months. I think our generation always thought that electrics were quite delicate. You have to be careful with them. Their generation. Just see them as bits of stuff that lie around the house. So they yanked them much like we would do with a Hoover cord.
Okay. So when we get these laptops, we need to tell the children, take care of the peripherals.
Especially what I find is that as the hinges go,
I had mine that I flip and the whole screen smashed. The manufacturer said that was my fault, that I was overly strong at five foot one!
Overly strong!! So I would be very reticent about going for anything that swiveled or turned or moved in a different ways than literally just had a latch on it.
On that note, I know I have bought the completely wrong laptop, but at least everyone else won't be falling into the traps that I have.
That's good. I brought the wrong laptop as well. I brought a Chromebook thinking it would be perfect and then learnt...
don't get a Chromebook, don't get a flippy flappy thing and check the warranty and that you can send it back to the company if you need to to get it mended and refurb is probably the way
and don't spend too much money and let's get through this.
Well, look forward to speaking next week when we are going to discuss technology in the current situation of ours, speak to you then. I'll speak then. Okay. Bye.
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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.