Sims 4 laptop £500 under
@Frankfurter11 First, the easy answer: Your EA account owns all the Sims 4 content you've purchased, not your computer. So when you sign into that account on the new computer, all your packs will be available to download, no purchase necessary. If that's not the case, you're in the wrong account.
For the new laptop, a few good Black Friday deals make this decision somewhat easier as well. A few laptops with 16 GB RAM have dropped into the under-£500 range, and while that's not the single most-important component—8 GB is enough if you're careful—it's very convenient to have the extra memory and will also help the game run better in the most demanding saves or scenarios.
The most important component is the laptop's graphics card or chip, with dedicated cards being out of your current price range. The fastest available integrated chips come in a few different processors, all of which are themselves more than fast enough for Sims 4, so it becomes a question of finding a system with one of these iGPUs for the right price. I found a few that also have 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage (or more), which is likewise not necessary but very convenient to have.
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/inspiron-15/spd/inspiron-15-3525-laptop/cn32524sc
https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=84T78EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB
https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=53L77EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB
The graphics chips in the third option is a few percentage points slower than the chips in the other three, enough to say that the others are better options all else being equal. But if all else is not equal, if you like the third best for some other reason—screen size, weight, aesthetics, whatever—the slight downgrade is trivial in comparison. All of these should be able to run Sims 4 on medium-high to high graphics settings with all current packs installed.
If you want to bring the price down further, you could go with a system that's otherwise equal but has only 8 GB RAM. The memory in these laptops is usually upgradable, so you could add more later if and when it became necessary. I'd still go with 16 GB now if it's doable; I'm just saying if saving about £100 now and upgrading later is an attractive idea, it's also a viable approach.
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/2994066?clickPR=plp:21:52
https://ao.com/product/x1400eaek2134w-asus-vivobook-14-laptop-black-99122-251.aspx
https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=30A26EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB
https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=6W7H2EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB
The last one is the same laptop in two colors. All have the same processor and graphics chip as the first of the previous group of four, so they should all run Sims 4 the same as long as you're not multitasking and using too much of the laptop's memory.
If you have more questions, please feel free to ask. And there's no need to apologize for being the hundredth person to ask this question. The answer changes so quickly that it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to use previous answers unless they already had a significant amount of knowledge about hardware specs. And those people usually don't need to ask for help in the first place.
