Looking for some ideas on laptops for my 13 year old who will be in year 9 next year. Time for her to move on from her faithful ipad. I'm looking somewhere around the $1000-1200. No big hurry, as she won't need it till next year when school starts. Ideally it will last her 3 years or so. I'd really like it not to be to heavy and have a reasonable battery life, even better if it was reasonably robust, 8 or16 GB of ram, 512 GB storage, something like that. I got my son a 14 inch Dell vostro 2 years ago when he started year 13, and it felt like a good compromise of size and computing, has an aluminum lid. It's been pretty good after some initial issues which seemed to be resolved after I stripped out most of the dell bloatware which was a slightly painful experience. I can't seem to find an equivalent model currently.

I'm not too fussed on the brand but I'd probably like to stick with one of the main players.

Some of the HP Elitebook and probooks, particularly the off lease versions look like they might be a good choice. I'm unclear if this exlease models have new batteries installed? Are there particular retailers to keep an eye on.

I'm not super up to date with what are good CPUs currently and if there are some that should be avoided.

Any advice welcome.

Thanks.