Now I know GIS until you get to 3d only uses a single core, but uses GPU when doing 3d work but I think modern IGP should work well enough. Lightroom only uses multi core when exporting, but as an example 80 20mb files exported takes 4 minutes in 4 core, 2 minutes in 8 cores. Id unlikely batch convert often so its not a biggy.

Its more for the mrs.

But we need a monitor thats 100% sRGB but not expensive, any ideas.

And the laptop needs to be cheap, im thinking probook 430 g4 or similar, or even a used g3?

The problem with the likes of surface book and xps etc is they weld the ram in, so avoiding them.