Help choosing between 2 laptops for less than £350 (or other suggestions?)

[deshg]

Hey everyone,

My girlfriend needs a new laptop and has a max budget of £350 (we're in the UK). She will never do any gaming on it and will mainly use it for normal work usage, maybe occasional video watching and skype but nothing intensive like video encoding etc.

As a result i was looking at either:
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-netbooks/laptops/laptops/acer-aspire-e5-571-15-6-laptop-iron-10071657-pdt.html
or
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-netbooks/laptops/laptops/asus-x550ca-15-6-laptop-21836943-pdt.html

I am erring towards the Acer i3 as I have had quite a few Acers which i like and that's lots of RAM and the CPU comparison isn't massively better for the i5: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3337U-vs-Intel-Core-i3-4005U.

I wanted to see what everyone thought as given she's not doing video encoding/image processing etc then i'm wondering if she'll ever use the RAM and whether the processor increase would actually help her more? Additionally i've never had an ASUS so don't know what they're like as a brand?

Would love to hear your thoughts as to which would be better or else if there's another good one under £350 you would suggest.

Thanks everyone,

Dave

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

They both will be perfectly suitable for a work PC, I would go for the asus, purely because it's thinner and looks nicer but it's completely up to you.

 

[deshg]

They both will be perfectly suitable for a work PC, I would go for the asus, purely because it's thinner and looks nicer but it's completely up to you.

Thanks Pizza the hutt. So you don't think there will be much variation in performance between an i3 with 12GB ram vs i5 with 4GB of ram given the proposed usage?

Also I have never used Asus (but have had lots of Acers in the past), are they are similar build quality or is one or the other generally seen as better?

Thanks so much,

Dave