Hi guys, my niece is at college and she wants a new laptop for xmas... her requirements in this order: stylish small and light touch screen any suggestions? No real price limits, but all she's doing is office and internets so no need at all to go crazy thanks!
Surface 2, Dell Venue Pro 11, Surface Pro 1 or 2. Notes: Surface Pro 1 -> Has low battery life. There will be next year a battery add-on keyboard, which will help. I am suggesting it as it's good price. Office not included. Dell Venue Pro 11 pen might be busted. The Pen of the Venue 8 is busted, it randomly clicks everywhere non stop. It's out of control. No fix yet. The Venue 11 shares the same digitizer, so I would assume it suffers from the same effect. But touch screen works perfectly fine. It uses Synaptic first try at digitize pen. Surface 2, as you probably know, runs on a ARM processor and is therefor lock to Windows 8 App store. Office with Outlook is included. No digitize pen support. So if she just runs Office and Web surf, this is a good option. Flash plug-in is included, with IE11. Of course, I don't know her age, and where she is in her education. The Dell Venue Pro 8, is also a great option, but has an Atom CPU, so not great on the performance side for do many things. All are Windows based systems.
There's quite a lot more to choose from now. You can pick up an Acer or Asus 11.6" Laptop with a touchscreen for under £300. HP and Lenovo a little bit more towards £350-£450 then you can go straight into the Ultrabook versions which start about £700. But everything else GoodBytes said is bang on.
Read this today, and think it looks quite nice, http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/laptops/385912/lenovo-ideapad-flex-15
There is the Asus X102BA for £300 or the Asus Transformer T100 for around £370. They are budget options, both with 10.1" screens I think. http://www.amazon.co.uk/X102BA-10-1-inch-Touchscreen-Notebook-Black/dp/B00FC55SVO http://www.amazon.co.uk/T100TA-DK00...UTF8&qid=1386679090&sr=1-1&keywords=t100+asus The X102BA comes with Office which is a bonus.
This, if your budget stretches to it. The build quality is superb. EDIT: Additionally, I would avoid a) tablets and b)ARM. Students need USB ports/external VGA/ethernet on a regular basis, and it would be a nightmare having a device without those things. There's also usually a ton of specific software that needs x86 architecture, some subjects more than others of course but there's always something. No point having a fancy ARM tablet to work on if you have to go to the library to find a PC to run something in the middle of the night.
Also it's worth considering Google Docs as a free alternative to Office, it's absolutely fantastic now and is all I use. However, it is cheap for the student version so maybe this isn't too big a deal if you require it.
No, Google Docs is total crap. I am sick an tired of any group work, where you have THAT student, with his Chromebook, pushing Google Doc on everyone, and when we have a paper to give him for him to do his part, or something, we get it back in worst state than if it was all typed up in Notepad in 1 line. At least with Notepad, the file isn't corrupted beyond repair. Every, single, time. Use OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or (less features than the 2 previous, but nicer GUI and better Office support): Kingsoft Office Suit. Or better yet, use Office in SkyDrive. you have OneNote, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it's free. You can also get Office 365 University, for 4 years, for 2 PC's, for only 79$ Canadian/U.S (I don't know the U.K price). Comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote and Outlook. Now that's a good deal. If a new Office comes out, you get upgraded.
So in an education environment where not everyone is using Google Docs then yes, it is an issue, but it certainly isn't crap, especially if you are all working on Google Docs to do it. It's free so I don't know why people wouldn't want to use it, especially for it's collaborative work style and revision history. I do conceed it should play nicer with the accepted industry standards (which Open Office, MS Office and Libre Office all do), but it certainly isn't crap, it just needs everyone involved to use it from the get go. I work at the Guardian newspaper in the UK and apart from our CMS for getting content on to the site, all we use (for document generation) is Google Docs.
SkyDrive has these features, and can integrate with Office, including being able to edit the online file within the offline version of Office. As you saves it uploads the changes directly, and it keeps track of who edited what. It also easier to use. Tell that to the professor. And tell all your friends to be forced to make a Google account, and start being spammed with Google Plus. When a company is too cheap to offer the proper tools for it's employees, it's just sad. Well it sure beats LaTeX, I'll give you that.
I've been waiting for one of these to come out with an up to date processor. Stick a Haswell CPU in here and 8GB and it would be awesome.
