Best laptop for School Sub $500?

I just returned to school again and im in need of something better than my two 7" tablets. Our desktop is monopolized by my wife every evening for her work/classes so it is unavailable. I like the feel and function of a decent desktop, but not being tied to a desk. Currently all of my classes are online, but I will be in face to face courses in the near future. Thoughts from the hive?

Good used / refurbished Dell Latitude or similar enterprise model? With a docking station you can have the best of both worlds.

Honestly, Just get the one with the features you want. They are not that different in the under $500 space. We all use the same ODM and parts suppliers for the budget laptops. Of course I'm going to say buy one of the Dell being a Dell employee for almost a decade now but in reality, Figure out what is important to you (Touch, 2 in 1, Etc) and match the unit to what you figure as the best match.

Assuming you can get wifi everywhere, the chromebooks make a damn good argument for school work. Everything is cloudbased and accessible anywhere.

Hands down...

http://www.costco.com/Dell-Inspiron-11-3000-Series-2-in-1-Touchscreen-Laptop-%7c-Intel-Core-i3-%7c-Windows-10.product.100218129.html

Great power consumption, super portable, great as a tablet/lazy mode, cheap, and decent performance. This is what my wife has been using for her MBA program and it is suiting her needs very well.

If its too small, then +1 to cheap laptop + docking station. I actually want to setup a docking station @ home for my work laptop... just haven't figured out to hook up 2 monitors + keyboard + mouse through a single KVM that doesn't cost a fortune.

If you can live with strictly on-line functionality (or are willing to hack a tiny bit for a Linux install), Chromebooks are great and stupid cheap. I bought a super-thin, lightweight Asus C201 a while back for $150 - with a Crouton Linux install, it does everything I want, and even without it's pretty damn useful. Did I mention 13 hour battery life?

Somebody recommended a used Dell ATG (All Terrain Grade) laptop to me and I bought a pair for our club. I love them and wish I had bought 3. They are rugged as heck and have beautiful displays, even outdoors. They are very solid to work with, unlike the HP $429 unit I bought first. They were under $300 and seem to have plenty of horsepower.

Last time around when I wanted to spend about this much, or a little more, on a laptop I bought a used Macbook Pro and over the course of the following six months I swapped the hard drive for an SSD and added 4gb of ram to the existing 1gb that the machine came with. I know that they've become less serviceable over the years but careful shopping should get you into something for about $500 or a bit more.

I did this because I'm really comfortable with OSX on laptops and Apple seems to get power management handled in ways that Windows + x86 hardware just doesn't do consistently. I also realize that this is probably not the path the OP will take but it's worked for me and I would recommend it to anyone that isn't afraid to open up a computer.

Can i piggyback on this? Looking for similar budget, but "need" a 1080p display.

Swank Force One wrote: Can i piggyback on this? Looking for similar budget, but "need" a 1080p display.

Only if I can piggyback on your piggyback (is it getting a bit aritoscrat-ish in here?):

What features or level of performance would you guys say I "need"?

Edit: I was just throwing budget numbers out there. If $600 gets a waaay better machine it isn't out of the question.

MrJoshua wrote: What features or level of performance would you guys say I "need"?

What are you going to school for?

Most students won't need more than the most basic entry level laptop can provide. Word, Excel, internets, etc. are all going to run fantastic on a i3 with onboard video.

Great Duke. I'm glad that those worked for you. Your use case is exactly what they are made for.

We sell the off lease Dells here: http://dellrefurbished.com/laptops You can get a couple year old unit for pretty cheap. They are more business class units. Newegg also sells a lot of our refurbished off lease systems too.

At one time, our school district decided that it would supply every student in the district with their own (loaned) laptop. They bought IBM Lenovo Thinkpads.

Every grade 6, 7 and 8 kid had a laptop, and then the funding was cut. All the laptops then went on carts that could circulate to the classes that needed them for assignments.

Despite TONS of abuse from ignorant/malicious/apathetic teens, these laptops have been very durable.

If the laptop is for YOU, just get the cheapest one with the features you want. If it's for your kid, you'll want something durable.

Lenovo hardware quality is very, very good. In a different league to most of the others which mostly share the same cheapo components - even Apple.

If you are going to go with a Chromebook and use a portable hot spot, backdoor it through a router or use a wi-fi amplifier. Chromebooks don't play well with straight hot spot connections.

We've had good luck with sub-$500 Toshiba's, so much so that I subscribe to their daily emails. At least once a month they have killer deals on quad-core AMD, sometimes under $400(which usually ends up around $425 shipped+tax). I think you can get the same deals straight off their website, but you'd have to check daily.

I did the GRM route a couple years ago and built up a Dell 6320 from ebay parts for ~250. Looks like you can get a newer version of something pretty similar for the same or less. I spend a bit more on memory and a 1TB drive, but probably not necessary.

Dell Refurbished is cool but they don't tell if you a laptop has got an SSD or not. It's sad when a $90 tablet can outperform a $500 laptop from a few years ago, and I put the blame on the hard drive.

I have a dell studio had it for 5 years it was babyed for the first few years then tossed around for the last. Only used it for 2 years for school work before I built a desktop for myself. I love my little dell. The battery is going flat but would last for a 3 hour class. Tablets are amazing and might have better processors then older laptops but... Have you ever typed out 10,000 words on a tablet. Even if you get a Bluetooth keyboard you still have to remember to charge it and bring it with you. Ram is another factor if you like to have a few web pages open at once then you better have some ram to run it. I have 6 pages of google chrome open right now along with some photos and im using 35% of my ram. 35% of 8 gigs is 2.8 gigs so if the computer you are looking at only has 2-4 gigs then keep looking unless you only do one task at a time. Another thing is don't get to hung up on brands. Most computers are all the same the big thing is Toshiba will have a Toshiba hard drive, dell will have a dell motherboard ASUS will have a ASUS mother board ect ect. So the big thing is look to how you use your PC now and then find something that fits.

I bought one of these just before Christmas last year. It was $249. It's been perfect for me. Refurbs are $189.

I bought my wife the next model up. It has the touch screen and a DVD-RW. It has also been a good machine. It was about $450.

I just bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 15.6 with a 4k screen and 4gb of discrete graphics memory for photo editing for $1100 I think. This will be my third Dell, each had lasted me 6+ years. I'd still be using my Vostro 1500 that this one is replacing if XP was still supported.

If you can manage 'only' a 1920?x1080 screen you can get the basic one for $675 right now. Same basic bits but a lower spec but still nice screen, less ram, and integrated graphics. The feels are great though, they're nice feeling and looking machines. If you go down to the 5000 series they're at Office Max/Depot for $475 right now.

You can tell SSD or not by capacity usually. OEM's only really use 250, 320, 500, and 1TB spinning disk. The SSD's are 128, 180,256, or 512GB usually.