$500 Laptop Recommendation?

Hey guys! Figured this subforum would be ideal for this kind of question.

My sister is graduating high school fairly soon, and I want to get her a laptop for college. I'm aware $500 is a little on the low side, but that has to do with the fact that I'm also getting her a cellphone, so gotta trade off a bit. Anyhow, my sister would primarily be using it for basic tasks that you can imagine doing in college, writing papers and browsing the internet, etc. The laptop has to be able to do those well. She's not much of a game, but my sister really likes to edit videos, which I know throws a wrench into things considering the price point. I was hoping the denizens of S&T could help me out by providing a good option all things considered? I'd also appreciate a $700ish dollar option, as I might be able to spare a little if I'm lucky.

Thank you guys <3

While I normally wouldn't recommend this brand, I had to try it due to budget constraints. I just got myself a Dell Inspiron 3000 series with an i5. It's a pretty ok laptop for just school work. It was $529, and I am doing payments on it (here lies the budget benefit that forced my hand)

Don't expect to see anything graphically intense on it, as it only has 128mb of video memory. It does have 8gb of DDR4 ram though!

Good luck!

I was gonna see if Toshiba had anything good (my Satellite laptop is almost 4 years old now and it runs great), but then I see they stopped making consumer laptops and PCs :[

Arsenic said:

While I normally wouldn't recommend this brand, I had to try it due to budget constraints. I just got myself a Dell Inspiron 3000 series with an i5. It's a pretty ok laptop for just school work. It was $529, and I am doing payments on it (here lies the budget benefit that forced my hand)

Don't expect to see anything graphically intense on it, as it only has 128mb of video memory. It does have 8gb of DDR4 ram though!

Good luck!

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Just out of curiosity, how is Dell as a consumer brand? What makes them bad in your sense? Their business products are great and run well and they have a swift warranty option as well for bad PC parts needing replacement.

Surely they can't be worse than HP.

When I worked at an In-store IT, Dell was the #1 brand I saw. Even where I live in the middle of Redneck-yeehaw land their products are known not to be too great, reliable, or have a good power-to-cost ratio. Not to mention their call center is seemingly based out of Delhi.

Not that any brand is perfect of course. My favorite right now is MSI, and they seem to lack a fluent English speaker to proof-read their English writings, advertisements, descriptions, etc.

Why dont u go for asus? Msi u are like paying for the pretty leds too... I know they may have good gaming computers but still...

My recomendations would be for 400$ to get a computer whit the following expecifications:
.Disk: hdd
.CPU(processor): AMD A10, they are almost as good as Intel i5 but abit alot cheaper(i dont think your sister inteads to overclock anyway, so:D)
,RAM:DDR4 4gb(should do the job)
.graphics: radion or nvidea(you would have to search abit, take in notion that this will imply your sister making movies or don't)

Yvtq8K3n said:

Why dont u go for asus? Msi u are like paying for the pretty leds too... I know they may have good gaming computers but still...

My recomendations would be for 400$ to get a computer whit the following expecifications:
.Disk: hdd
.CPU(processor): AMD A10, they are almost as good as Intel i5 but abit alot cheaper(i dont think your sister inteads to overclock anyway, so:D)
,RAM:DDR4 4gb(should do the job)
.graphics: radion or nvidea(you would have to search abit, take in notion that this will imply your sister making movies or don't)

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The thing is here...we're looking for a laptop, and not to build a PC.

Honest said:

Hey guys! Figured this subforum would be ideal for this kind of question.

My sister is graduating high school fairly soon, and I want to get her a laptop for college. I'm aware $500 is a little on the low side, but that has to do with the fact that I'm also getting her a cellphone, so gotta trade off a bit. Anyhow, my sister would primarily be using it for basic tasks that you can imagine doing in college, writing papers and browsing the internet, etc. The laptop has to be able to do those well. She's not much of a game, but my sister really likes to edit videos, which I know throws a wrench into things considering the price point. I was hoping the denizens of S&T could help me out by providing a good option all things considered? I'd also appreciate a $700ish dollar option, as I might be able to spare a little if I'm lucky.

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Get her an used Thinkpad, here's a good one which is better than any new consumer class laptop in $500 price class: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X240-Ultrabook-Refurbished/dp/B078W4JZDW/

Incineroar said:

Do ThinkPads have a dedicated graphics processor though? I know a lot of ThinkPads that I've seen just have integrated graphics, and if she's looking to do videos, integrated graphics simply will not cut it.

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Some of them have dedicated graphics processor, here's one which just fits to the budget: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20EV002JUS-15-6-Inch-Processor/dp/B0178JBPK4

Thinkpads were the laptop of choice last time I was in school for IT. Those jerks playing Witcher 3 during class ugh

Honest said:

Hey guys! Figured this subforum would be ideal for this kind of question.

My sister is graduating high school fairly soon, and I want to get her a laptop for college. I'm aware $500 is a little on the low side, but that has to do with the fact that I'm also getting her a cellphone, so gotta trade off a bit. Anyhow, my sister would primarily be using it for basic tasks that you can imagine doing in college, writing papers and browsing the internet, etc. The laptop has to be able to do those well. She's not much of a game, but my sister really likes to edit videos, which I know throws a wrench into things considering the price point. I was hoping the denizens of S&T could help me out by providing a good option all things considered? I'd also appreciate a $700ish dollar option, as I might be able to spare a little if I'm lucky.

Thank you guys <3

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Yes, it's possible to buy a rather nice laptop according to your specifications and budget, especially if you don't need a gaming one (they're usually expensive).
From my own experience with studying I can recommend you to get a portable one (no more than 14-inch screen) which will be very convinient for using both at home and university (taking with a standard one is really pain!). It shoould have spill-resistant keybord, Intel 5 processor and no less than 8 GB of RAM. A good battery is also necessary, for it at least 6 hours are required. Also touchpad is a very cool addition for note taking, drawing and so on, depends on what she's going to study :) In this case transformer models can be a good choice, they combine laptop and tablet in one gadget.
According to all these specs I can recommend you Dell Inspiron 3000 ($199), Acer Chromebook N7 ($279) and Asus ZenbookUX330UA if you can bump your budget a bit (it costs $699). You can look also for more students laptops here for example https://linkto-blog.com/.
Hope that was helpful! :)