non-gaming home / work laptop advice

[suicidal_monkey]

Sorry :ph34r: another one of these questions...

I am (...well, my other half is... after a decent windows laptop for general home/home-office browsing, shopping and Office 365 type work (no gaming:rolleyes:). Must be capable of running two external monitors (e.g. hdmi+usbc dongle) and needs a decent selection of usb ports (e.g. ideally two regular usb and two usb c) for keyboard, printer, headset, etc. (though if anyone can recommend a reliabe(!) dock to cover the ports). My checklist ... anything else I should be considering? ...

Reasonably light and well-made, probably thinking 14" but that's flexible.
Ideally no numpad so that the keyboard and mousepad are central.
Should be reasonably snappy, so assuming i5 (any of the ryzen's okay?)
SSD ... no games so 256Gb is probably enough.
Ram is always more the merrier, seemingly 8 is a normal option.
If it can do the whole "2-in-1" thing that might be nice.

I'm struggling a bit to work out which options I should be looking at :g: ...my default is to look at Dell and Lenovo and to avoid Acer. HP are half in the doghouse too (there's another thread about that...) Not sure where to look to find the business versions of the gaming laptops (MSI etc). From those it seems we need to budget around £700 ...which seems a little steep for something this straightforward without a dedicated gpu (an MSI thin 1650 starts around there when on a deal...). Razer would be lovely but the pricetag is likely to be a dealbreaker...:blink:

[suicidal_monkey]

Searching for i5 laptops, this is what I am running into...

ASUS 14" some-weird-model-number ... £600 from scan (also a vivobook similarly priced/specced)
Dell inspiron around £700 (john lewis, dell)
lenovo yoga c640 around £750(argos)
at which price-point I start looking at the MSI 63 thin (ocuk £700 pre-order, scan £750 in stock)
...anything more and we're basically in microsoft surface, dell xps and razer territory

Should I be more flexible on the cpu perhaps? :g: