The great second-user laptop swindle

YOU KNOW THE STORY, you're almost certainly the family computer expert. So whenever a friend needs a new computer, guess who gets asked? It's the same here. It came as no surprise a few weeks ago to be plied with a bottle of wine and asked to scout out a cheap laptop for someone. And there the odyssey begins.

Unless you want to be hip to the latest re-marketing attempts and call them notebooks, laptops are just laptops, right? You'd think the choice would be fairly simple, just find out what tasks it needs to perform and go from there. Except that this was for someone who couldn't afford much. It was almost certainly going to have to be a second-hand machine.

The requirements were simple enough: word processing, a good keyboard, decent battery life and reasonable screen. The first thing to do was the obvious one, a quick Google for "cheap laptops uk" seemed in order. Sure enough, not only a good selection of results but plenty of advertisers too. Poking around the stock of a few firms soon gave an idea of where things were headed.