Need computer advice

Hiya, so currently I am using roll20 on my laptop which is a 2011 macbook pro - it can't seem to handle roll20 anytime we use dynamic lighting. My group have ended up having to screenshare with me so I can see what is going on in the game.  I was hoping somebody might have some advice - I was planning on getting a new laptop soon anyway but now I want to find one that will be fine with roll20 - what specs do I need to look for when looking? My budget is around £300-500 as I can't afford anything more than this.

Anything modern should handle it. I can run it on a new Chromebook. I can also run it on an M1 Mac Mini.

I run on a old (at least 7-8 yrs?) windows laptop with just 8GB RAM and lowly integrated graphics just fine, though I'm still using LDL (AFoW off) until UDL gets sorted.

Last year I bought a mini pc primarily to run Roll20 on, it cost about £300 from Amazon. While the specific one isn't available any more, this is what the headline for it said, which willhopefully give you some idea of just what its power level was like. ACEPC AK2 Mini PC Windows 10 Pro, 8GB RAM/ 120GB mSATA SSD, Intel Celeron J3455 Processor 4K HD Micro Computer with Gigabit Ethernet, Dual Band Wi-Fi, (that wasn't meant to be a link to anything, i just copied the name from my Amazon order) While it does run Roll20 fine it can be a bit laggy at times, then again i have a habit of making large maps 75 x 75 squares being common, with dynamic lightling running, turning off explorer mode and the vision on some of the mobs can help a lot, but as long as I'm a bit patient with it it works.  Trying to run Discord chat through it at the same time did seem to be too much for it so I now use my phone for Discord and the PC for Roll20. If noting else that might give you a starting point for what you want, you can probably find a much better one for the same money if you shop around and understand a bit more about computers than I do. I would say now is a good time to start looking, while I'm not particularly a fan of Black Friday, if there is something you need and are willing to hunt around a bit, even if it isn't an actual Black Friday sale, you can pick up some very good deals in the weeks around it.  Last year I splashed out on a new monitor to go with that little pc and picked up a 27" monitor for the price of the 24" equivelent, not a massive saving, but well worth it for something i wanted anyway.

With a £300 budget this is a tough time to buy something new. If you already have a monitor consider buying a second hand ex-business dell small form factor PC (in Netherlands these go for less than 100 euro) with at least a 4th generation i5, 8GB memory and a SSD. Not brilliant, but it's cheap, cheerful, comes with a free windows license (in the BIOS) and will keep you playing for the next two or three years.

I’m able to do game preparation on a ChromeBook, but I run games on my 2014 Mac mini. I think Martijn’s advice is excellent.