Would be cool if you linked it but you don’t hve to!
additional info: won’t be used for gaming and i’m putting xcfe linux on it. i need it for school for basic stuff
Best has a lot of sub requirements, and cheap goes against that notion. Need to be specific about use cases. No one has the best everything because there are always cuts on design.
If you want the most generic answer, an arbitrary lenovo thinkpad
Do you want something to surf the Internet, play games, software development, or something else? Do you want a small screen or large? Do you require a 10 key? There are a bunch of factors to consider when talking about the best laptop.
surf internet, software dev. screen size irrelevent. doesnt need to be 10 key.
You can buy a Lenovo X1 carbon from a couple of generations back that still kicks ass for well under $500. I grabbed a Gen 6 with an I5 in it for under $200, slapped a m.2 SSD in it, and now I have an amazing daily driver that I don’t have to worry about.
With the preface of “cheap”, do not ever buy a laptop under $500. They are simply underspecced by the time they get that low, and will give a bad experience.
I would also recommend something like a Lenovo ThinkPad, they are pretty damn tough. Maybe a ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 Intel. Spec it out to 16gb of memory and even the i3 processor will get your job done fine in Linux, while landing in under $650. Plus they have removable M.2 SSD’s that can be changed out for a higher capacity very easily, and much much cheaper than the $300 they charge to kit it with a 1tb drive…
This is a lot less true than it was five years ago. Web browsing and basic word editing has not become harder to do in the past ten years, but hardware has made some major leaps. (thanks amd) So as long as it has an ssd and a semi modern (within five years) processor, it will do a great job of handling homework and 4k video. With windows replaced with linux, it’ll do all those things and feel snappy while it does it.
Avoid sub 100$ laptops, and keep a skeptical eye on anything between that and 400$, but it can absolutely be done.
I’m biased, but the dell inspiron laptops that businesses offload are perfect for this sort of task. They have connectivity out the wazoo (useful for that outdated projector in the seldom used classroom) and their batteries are easily replaced.
Basic word editing and especially web browsing absolutely has gotten harder to do in the past ten years. Word processors used to fit on a floppy disk, now they wouldn’t fit on a Blu-Ray, and web pages are heavier than they have ever been, even basic text is some fucking java applet.
I’m sorry, but, no, you’re not even close with the size comparison. Office 2021 is 4gb, libreoffice and office 365 are smaller than that. The cheapest bluray will hold 25gb.
Obviously office programs have not become easier to run (with libreoffice maybe being an exception), but processing power has vastly outpaced whatever new requirements they’ve gained.
Shit like teams needs a supercomputer to run well, and will be slow on everything else. There is no point in buying a top of the line laptop just to keep teams or a badly made website from lagging.
People haven’t seriously used floppy disks for twenty years now.
To add to this, if $500 is actually your budget:
Get a good second hand laptop. I picked up a 2020 model X1 Carbon a few months ago for 🇦🇺$200 and paid another $90 for a new battery for it. Came to about $300 for a great little laptop.
This was for the kid to take to school, so I didn’t want to be buying a $1,000 thing that he’d destroy.
Holy shit, that is a great deal regardless of where in the world you are. How’d you get it so cheap?
It had a dead battery. Didn’t hold charge at all when you unplugged it. On the second hand market, that makes this laptop ‘faulty’.
My suggestion is to get a device that can do the stuff kids want, but just barely do the things they want.
I probably spent more time tinkering around the family computer than anything else as a kid just to get games way over-spec to run on it. Throughout that process I learned programming, hex editing, and some Linux system administration, which eventually led me to my current career.
These days, it’s probably a lot easier to get started with a raspberry pi. But without something to motivate people to learn tech, why would they do it in the first place?
Any second-hand business class laptop, i.e. HP Elitebook/Probook/Zbook, Dell Inspiron/Latitude/XPS, or Lenovo Thinkpad.
Businesses tend to get rid of them after 4 years, even if they’re still in good condition. Great bang for your buck and easily repairable if something does end up breaking.
Where’s a good place/website (in the US) to buy used business laptops that are being disposed due to tech refreshes?
Don’t really know about the US, sorry. eBay might be a good place though.
Piggyback question from OP but can someone give me a QRD on what’s so great about ThinkPads? I’ve seen them in a lot of recommendation threads but they don’t seem like anything special to me. What am I missing?
They have great Linux support, generally are pretty repairable (they will have repair manuals and extra parts for you to order), and they are usually lease laptops, which means if you don’t mind getting a used laptop you can get top of line laptops from a few years ago for a fraction of what they are worth. I’ve gotten thinkpads for years, generally only spending up around $200 on a laptop I use for a few years quite comfortably.
The repairability can’t be overstated. I helped a buddy upgrade a ten year old HP laptop, and it took something like 20 screws, 8 ribbon cables, a keyboard lift and a mobo removal to upgrade the nvme drive, ram and battery. Overall time start to finish, including troubleshooting was 4 hrs, and that’s after I found a guide for it.
I upgraded my thinkpad by removing 6 screws from the bottom cover. The ram,nvme and battery were all exposed and accessible. My upgrade took 10 min.
Yeah, it’s huge. I recently replaced the screen of a friend’s ThinkPad as a favour. I was a tad anxious because I’ve not done a repair on this scale before, but I said yes because of how famously repairable ThinkPads are.
The screen repair was way more involved than the upgrade you describe, but it didn’t take me more than half an hour, and that was me being extra cautious. The great thing about a laptop that’s known for repairability is the abundance of documentation you can find online, it becomes a self reinforcing cycle after a certain point
They’ve been around for ages and are nearly synonymous with “enterprise” computing for a lot of people. I’ve had several through work. Although one, which is still my “carry around” laptop, was never great and still isn’t, they’ve largely been solid. Even this one is going on 6-7 years.
Tough as hell, good to great keyboards, Trackpoints are the bomb if you do work in an enterprise environment (more text than graphics)
