$500 budget for a laptop for college.

[Xl House lX]

So my buddy in Indiana is wanting to get a laptop for college (he is majoring in computer electronics/software or something, said he would be working with adobe programs and such) and his budget is $500 tops. He wants more of a low to mid $400 machine, what is the best thing he could possibly get right now?

I don't think he has any real requirements for it other than it last him through school.

Thanks in advance, I have been looking all over and I can't find anything decent, I know you computer forum goers are good at spotting deals.

Love,

House

[Dedweight]

Thanks in advance, I have been looking all over and I can't find anything decent, I know you computer forum goers are good at spotting deals.

For a Laptop you aren't likely going to find anything overly amazing for 500$, most anything you will find will likely have some budget i3 or AMD equivalent, 4GB of ram, and a 5400RPM HDD. I'd say just about anything from a major manufacturer such as Dell or HP with a decent warranty should work but really don't expect much in regards to performance considering his budget.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Make sure it has VGA and HDMI out for class presentations. That is probably the most important thing. A lot of places still use VGA projectors, and your laptop is useless if you cannot use it for presentations.

[inux94]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834230683

Was the best one I could find for sub-$500, VGA & HDMI out with an i5-3210M, sadly no dedicated GPU.

[Xl House lX]

For a Laptop you aren't likely going to find anything overly amazing for 500$, most anything you will find will likely have some budget i3 or AMD equivalent, 4GB of ram, and a 5400RPM HDD. I'd say just about anything from a major manufacturer such as Dell or HP with a decent warranty should work but really don't expect much in regards to performance considering his budget.

Yeah he said he wants it to render videos, which there are some that can do that but overall I think with his budget he is going to be disappointed. The only thing I could manage to find was http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834312468 and even it isn't ALL that great, though for it's price it is a pretty good machine.

[inux94]

That one doesn't have VGA, I'd suggest looking at others

[chazus]

I recently picked up one of these (I had a coupon that knocked it down to 300 after tax/shipping) and did a review of it here.

Notably, it has both VGA and HDMI, and has enough video power to even play some games.

[Elian]

i currently own http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834215663, it has both VGA and HDMI output, but i'm not sure if it can render videos
it sure can play most mainstream games on medium settings. i can play BF3 on low-medium with average of 24-32fps on bf3 only on 32 player maps.

[Deleted]

you can get good laptop to work with for $500 no worries

www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Satellite-C855-S5343-PSCBLU-025003-15-6-Inch/dp/B00APEGA8W/

[Deleted]

If this is a laptop he will carry around 5 days a week I'd strongly suggest a slimmer model. I've been logging a 15.6" 2.2kg laptop around and while it is manageable on its own, adding books, paper and other accessories to it makes it a bit of a pain. I'd recommend something slimmer personally; something easy to haul around and that doesn't take much space or effort. Of course, you will most likely sacrifice some performance for this.

My dad has something similar to this and he travels a lot:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834200702

Bit cheaper yet, albeit a bit bigger:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834310636

Also:

[yurano]

I recently picked up one of these (I had a coupon that knocked it down to 300 after tax/shipping) and did a review of it here.

An A6 APU does not fly for what seems to be computationally heavy work (CPU).

[chazus]

An A6 APU does not fly for what seems to be computationally heavy work (CPU).

Nor does anything else under $500, honestly. The buyer has high expectations for a relatively light wallet.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

An A6 APU does not fly for what seems to be computationally heavy work (CPU).

You won't see a "heavy compute" laptop for under a grand anyway...

[yurano]

Nor does anything else under $500, honestly. The buyer has high expectations for a relatively light wallet.

You won't see a "heavy compute" laptop for under a grand anyway...

That doesn't mean you should recommend an APU for a non-gamer who has a CPU based workload. Its not like there isn't a better alternative, Intel, for the task.