I agree, you don't need to spend £700 for what you need, as others have said, sony is very reliable, around £500 for what you need. Not really sure if you can get windows laptops with office (full versions) already installed, doesn't take much installing good luck.

I run this program every night before logging off.

rlhttps://www.piriform.com/CCLEANERrl

It will delete any passwords your computer has remembered for you, and cookies, so you have to log on to everything everytime you revisit a site. But I think it's worth it.

Oh dear. Yes ccleaner is good but it's a cleaning program, it will only delete saved passwords if you tell it to; not by default.

If you're getting rid of a computer with it's hard drive you should ideally use dban on the disk or simply keep the hard drive and ditch the rest.

What are your intentions for the old laptop? If you are throwing it away, the safest and easiest method is to smash it up! I opend my old pc and submerged the harddrives in a bucket of water as well as smashing the loving heck out of them!

If you are selling it, I may be interested (In the laptop, not your passwords) unless it's a ruin now?

I need a laptop for basically running Champ Manager on when TOWIE, Big Brother or Emmerdale is on my T.V!

Both my daughter and myself have used Acer laptops which have been fine. They have hdmi connections and we have Skygo so can plug them into the tv so can watch Sky upstairs if anyone is the downstairs tvs.

I'll bet you use that HDMI link to display far more than Emmerdale don't you Rogues?

Someone with enough desire could still get the data from that as you didn't actually destroy the data on the disks.

A big magnet would also work well.

Philth it's not worth sh*t and is also a piece of sh*t, had it for 3 years.

It's a Dell inspiron 1520 core 2 Duo with Vista, the battery no longer charges, the computer overheats.

It's slow and old, things don't run on it and it needs to retire, i nickname it Wellens.

I download RL games on to it so need a bit of space, i want a webcam(have friends and family abroad), and excel(for work), pref as standard save me f'ing about. £700 is my top end budget so if it's under great.

Go into PC world with those requiremenst and they will bite your hand off! TBH you would probably be talking about £300 for a GOOD spec laptop with webcam etc. MS Office can be bought for £40 student licence or for an older versions (depends on what your work uses...we still have 2003 on some of ours) of MS Office for about £50. If you need to do work at home, ask your employer about installing a copy of theirs on your laptop. Some version of MS Office come with a limited USER license not limited machine. As long as the user is only on one machine at a time then it will work and is legal to do (we confirmed directly from MS!)

As for deleting data, if you are trading in, then as long as you go to high street store you would normally be OK. If selling privately you can get a "drive wiper" for free which doesnt delete your data, it overwrites it with blank data.

Sony or Toshiba are the market leaders. Majority of their laptops will come with a webcam built in now. Look for dual or quad core and 4gb ram. Majority of laptops come with Office 2010 installed, it is a full version but is tiam limited as a trial. You have the opportunity within the trial program to purchase the full licence for about £120 but when you order the laptop they will generally sell you the licence as part of the deal.

With regards to the data on your laptop the only tru way to make sure no one can get at your data is by putting a drill through it or taking the plates out of the drive and scratching them with a drill bit etc.

Dropping the laptop in water etc is not 100% as it is possible to take the disks out of the drive, dry them out and read the data off it. 99% of the population wouldn't know how to do it though.

Take the hard drive out which is located on the Left hand edge, it is held in by 2 philips screws. Pull the drive out and smash it to bits with a hammer. Put the rest of the unit on ebay as spairs or repairs. Screen is worth about £35, The charging board which also has 2 USB ports on, VGA out and the ethernet port sell for £25, Memory is worth a tenner, Hinges are worth about £15 (Common fault on this model) Motherboard is worth £75. You will only get these prices if you strip the machine down and sell it seperatley. Worth more as individual parts than it is as a complete unit.

DO NOT BUY FROM PC WORLD UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO LET THEM BEND YOU OVER AND BUM YOU LEAVING YOU TO PAY FOR THE PLEASURE.

They are nothing more than box shifters! All of the manafacturers sell direct from their websites that way your warranty is direct with the manafacturer. In my experience they also wont sell you a load of bollox that you dont need unlike PC World.

Pc world will push you to take a Copy of Norton Antivirus why, because they make a fortune selling that brand of internet security. They know that it is bloated and will slow your machine down. It will cost you around £40 Trend Micro titanium is regarded as the best currently and will set you back around £20 if you shop around.

rlhttps://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/364747/trend-micro-titanium-internet-security-2011rl

Also with Laptops don't rule out the Lenovo which is IBM rebranded. The IBM thinkpad was the business market leader for years.

IBM trying to shake off the Nazi association then?

btw cheers G, sounds like very good advice.

Whilst we're on about laptops, does anybody now where I can get a machine thats decent enough to surf the net and play a couple of games on. Hard drive space not really essential as I have an external. So just decent speed and memory, but nothing too special.

Reckon I'll get models from 2 years ago for £200?

Yed - appreciate the honesty, though a mytech 3-4 year old picture laptop is still better than that essex program!!

Something like this would be perfect

rlhttps://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WHITE-DELL-Inspiron-1525-CoreDuo-1-73GHz-2GB-160GB-Win7-/180701130145?pt