Is this laptop strong enough for office use?

[Ricky641]

I am trying to purchase some laptops for my office staff. I found a good deal on a website, the specs of the laptop are

"dual core intel 2ghz or faster covered by our warranty and 4gb ram and 160gb hdd minimum."

The price is $110.00 each laptop. Do you think this laptop would be able to sufficiently work in an office environment? It would be a great deal if so! Thanks for the help guys.

 

[USAFRet]

Will it work? Yes, sort of.
Will it be very slow and lead to frustration for your employees? Yes.


How many of these are you looking to purchase?

 

[MRBANG1]

Well they can do basic office / outlook / excel but they will feel sluggish. Personally doing a lot of excel work mightself, with an outlook always running in the background processing a lot of emails, i'd hate a 4GB only. It will spend a lot of time processing the windows swap file. It is cheap, but you get what you pay for.

 

[captaincharisma]

those laptops will be really slow with how weak the CPU is and the very little ram especially if you going to be using a modern OS like windows 7 or 10

 

[Chugalug_]

$110 per laptop isn't good enough, for even a desktop you'd want at least $300 per PC given you're presumably buying prebuilts, and those would have much more performance.
For work laptops you want at least a 6/7th gen i5 possibly an i7 for higher multitasking workloads, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD.
Look at OEM purchases or buying in bulk from a retailer if doing on a relatively large scale.

 

[bigwoofer]

I would put a Core2 Duo up for office work if A: it has a nice, fast SSD drive, and B: 8GB of matched set ram. If that laptop will handle 8GB ram, it will crush any office application along with an SSD, I would think it would easily handle a complex 200mb excel doc. Stock as it is with a mechanical hard drive, if it has Windows 8 or 10, those are VERY RAM hungry and you'd absolutely have to go to 8GB to keep employees productive AND an SSD.

I work with developers and they kept adding more and more ram when it turns out their hard drive was the limiter of their productivity. Also I support a friend's office and we buy these refurb laptops all the time for around $150 and upgrade them to 8GB ram and SSD, however I would REALLY recommend going to i3 processor minimum for a new/used laptop due to large performance increase from Core Duo.

 

[Ricky641]

Thank you for the input everyone. I was planning to buy 5-10 laptops. My supervisor just will not approve of purchasing 5-10 at the price of $300+. May just have to wait until he changes his mind, or moore's law makes $100 laptops more efficient haha.

 

[USAFRet]

10 systems:
$110/ea = $1,100
$320/ea = $3,200

$2,100 difference. 2 weeks(?) pay for one employee?
Over the course of a year, those $110 systems will cost WAY more than $2100 in user slowness and downtime.

 

[Ricky641]

10 systems:
$110/ea = $1,100
$320/ea = $3,200

$2,100 difference. 2 weeks(?) pay for one employee?
Over the course of a year, those $110 systems will cost WAY more than $2100 in user slowness and downtime.

Sorry for late response, was not in the office since early last week.
Could you suggest a decent $320 laptop?