Laptop for school

[Firstlqh]

Hi I'm looking for recommendations to buy laptop for my schoolwork. Probably simply for reading lecture notes and doing very simple stuff as I have a pc at home. Trying to keep the costs as low as possible and so far only found acer aspire 1 from hachitech at 448. Any other suugestions?

 

[yusoffb01]

get acer swift. the cheapest one works fine, full hd ips, 10h battery

 

[Ark Law]

If your budget is really under $500, you are better off buying used business grade laptop instead of brand new craptops with those puny Pentium/Celeron CPUs

 

[andywilliamsw]

Someone showed me that Audio House is selling models like the X230 and T430 for $429 and $469 respectively. Other business notebooks are the HP Elite and Probooks, and Dell Latitudes. Not sure if this might be of interest to you.
All have a 1 year warranty.

 

[Firstlqh]

If your budget is really under $500, you are better off buying used business grade laptop instead of brand new craptops with those puny Pentium/Celeron CPUs

I was thinking of that but is there any real con to that?

 

[Intrinion]

These are about 3-4 years old on average and were laptops which were decommissioned.

Most are “refurbished” - I am saying it in quotes as the standards for refurbished laptops vary. Some can simply be a clean up and simple diagnostics.

Someone showed me that Audio House is selling models like the X230 and T430 for $429 and $469 respectively. Other business notebooks are the HP Elite and Probooks, and Dell Latitudes. Not sure if this might be of interest to you.
All have a 1 year warranty.

 

[Intrinion]

Depends on your usage patterns. Basic web surfing is fine. Not for games

I was thinking of that but is there any real con to that?

 

[Ark Law]

I was thinking of that but is there any real con to that?

As mentioned by Intrinion, the condition of refurbished depends on the reseller. But normally you are able to touch and test run the machine. Some units may come with non-US keyboard so just note when viewing.

Being over 3 years old, normally you can expect the battery to not last longer than an hour. For around another $70-$100, you can get yourself a new one from Unicell.

Specs wise, most of the <$500 range come with 4-8GB RAM, with some sellers using SSD instead of HDD. Ideally go for those with an SSD. Alternatively, you can go for a cheaper one with HDD, buy your own 512GB SSD for $110, clone and swap yourself.

Even the 7 year old X230 with an SSD will run circles against the $700 craptop in daily web browsing and general office use. The only thing the craptop will win is battery life because the CPU uses less power. Though it comes at the significant compromise of multitasking capability.

I can understand your caution about used laptops. I was once in the same position as you. Bought myself a $669 Dell 11" 2-in-1 Inspiron craptop back in 2014 and used it for 3 years at home. It was OK for <5 tabs of Chrome/Firefox. 10 tabs with Word/Excel and it became slower. Once you add playing a background video and a few open PDFs, you'd be waiting for the CPU to catch up most of the time. Bear in mind this was with the HDD already swapped for an SSD. Think that's bad enough? Wait till you get hit with Windows Update running aytomatically in the background and everything slows to a crawl.

That's why I refer to the cheap laptops that appear capable on the skin but powered by the Pentiums & Celerons as craptops.