Recommendation for a laptop for browsing and python programming

Question

I have a 6.5 year old Dell Inspiron 1545. The battery has been dead for about 2 years and yesterday it started making whirring noises and the wifi stopped working. So now I have to plug it in for both power and ethernet. I suspect something deeper is wrong so think perhaps a new laptop may be in order.

I am in two minds about what type of laptop to get. I mainly use the laptop for browsing, ripping CDs and programming python. My programming is very much at the amateur level - Project Euler, coding of board games and a bit of web scraping. Recently I have been using Ubuntu because my laptop was getting so tired and cranky with Windows. I have a hankering after something that is capable of playing Football Manager 16 at a decent speed with good graphics performance, but suspect that the extra money I'd have to fork out for that wouldn't be worth it.

I suspect pretty much any laptop you can buy now would be capable of filling my basic needs and would probably have better specs than my current laptop? But I wonder whether people have recommendations for a particular budget laptop. It would be nice to have decent battery life for example. I have no need for masses of storage either.

I'd also like your thoughts on the additional I'd have to spend in order to get something capable of playing FM16 to a decent level and any particular laptop recommendations?

In summary:

Laptop 1

<£300 Use for browsing, python, watching netflix, rippig music, decent battery, no gaming

Laptop 2

<£500 As with Laptop 1 but with ability to play FM16 at a decent speed (but no other gaming)

FM16 requirements

Any thoughts on this? HP 250 G4

Answer 1

So the Ideapad 15" tech specs will be

Processor

• Intel Celeron N2840 processor( 2.16GHz 1333MHz 1MB)

Operating system

• Windows 10 Home 64

Display type

• 15.6" HD AntiGlare 1366x768

System Graphics

• Intel HD Graphics

Total memory

• 4.0GB PC3L-10600 DDR3L SDRAM 1333 MHz

Hard drive device

• 500GB 5400 rpm

Optical device

• DVD Recordable

Network card

• Lenovo BGN Wireless

Bluetooth

• Bluetooth Version 4.0

Warranty

• One year

Pointing device

• ClickPad

Battery

• 3 Cell Li-Cylindrical

Price

• £229.99 - less than £300

And also for the gaming laptop I recommend to use Acer E5-573G because of it specs:

Best 3D performance under $500 for a new laptop with the extra value of 1TB SSHD, 8GB RAM and 802.11ac wifi card.

And the breakdown for the specs:

CPU

• I5-5200U (2.2GHZ-2.7GHZ, 15W)

GPU

• Nvidia Geforce GTX 940M 2GB DDR3, GM108 (Maxwell I), 384 shaders, core@1072MHZ, DDR3@1176MHZ, 64-bit bus Revision A2
• that covers the quality of playing FM16

Motherboard Chipset

• Intel Broadwell-U PCH-LP (Premium), Acer ZORO_BH

RAM

• Hynix 1x8GB DDR3@1600MHZ 2 banks of memory available, totally
• good for all over speed and memory bandwidth test

Storage

• HDD : Seagate ST1000LM014-1EJ164 SSHD, 5400RPM, 32MB cache
• 1TB

Camera

• 1280x720

WiFi / Ethernet

• WiFi: Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Ethernet: RealTek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC

Battery

• 37Wh

So for me these laptops are well for feeding his needs and wants. Also, this will last good for 3 years without upgrade; but so if you want more power then it will cost probably.