Lenovo Thinkpad W500 Battery all-laptopbattery.com |
Posted: May 27, 2018 |
RAM: Not skimping here can save you lots of loading-induced headaches. You should only settle for 2GB with the cheapest, most basic machines, but even on the aforementioned ThinkPad 100s you’ll find yourself carefully managing how many apps you have open at once. 4GB is better — and plenty for a Chromebook — but if you can find a 6GB or, ideally, 8GB machine that isn’t irredeemably awful somewhere else, grab it, and reap the performance boosting rewards. 16GB or higher is usually overkill unless you’re committed to a gaming laptop or other ultra high-end machine.Storage: Maybe the most significant upgrade you can make to any computer is to swap out its hard disk drive, if it has one, for a solid state drive. If you can at all afford a device with an SSD built in, the speed gains are drastic, and usually worth the loss of total storage space. (This is where cloud services like Dropbox come in handy.) If you can get at least 256GB, though, that’s usually enough. Again, with most budget Windows laptops, you’ll probably have to make the switch yourself. If you can’t, at least try to get as much room as you can out of the HDD you’re provided. (The norm is 500GB, so beyond that.) You’ll see some ultra-cheap models that do advertise SSDs, but those use an older form of memory that isn’t particularly quick.GPU: Unless you’re regularly gaming or running higher-level tasks, don’t worry about paying up for a discrete graphics processor. Your notebook’s chipset will have an integrated unit by default, and that’ll be fine for most mainstream processes. If you do have to sort through separate GPUs, have a look at Nvidia’s GeForce family.Ports: Just because every laptop maker is obsessed with making their devices thinner doesn’t mean you have to stock up on pricey accessories. Many of you may not need an SIM card reader or Kensington lock, but having a handful of USB 3.0 and HDMI ports should lessen the possibility of future stress. You should be mindful of USB-C from here on out, too, but as it stands now that standard is far from universal. A good general rule to follow here is to avoid fixating on one particular spec. If you’ve studied and you’re comfortable trading one thing away for another to hit a certain price point, go on ahead, but know that a laptop is the sum of many parts. Overloading on RAM doesn’t guarantee a faster device, just as selling out for a 4K resolution doesn’t guarantee a better display. Especially if you’re on a budget, you want to find the right balance. Remember than many laptop vendors let you customize your device’s components to your liking, too, so experiment a bit. So much of a laptop’s experience is about feel — a keyboard’s travel, a trackpad’s accuracy, how much of a weight the whole thing is on your lap. You can, and should, read as many reviews and forum posts as you can about a given machine, but none of that will fully replicate actual hands-on time with the device itself. Buying a laptop is an investment, and an expensive one at that, so get out to a Best Buy or Apple Store, utilize any return windows, and do whatever you can to make yourself comfortable. Put in the work, and you should walk away satisfied. Disclosure: This post is brought to you by Business Insider's Insider Picks team. We aim to highlight products and services you might find interesting, and if you buy them, we get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners, including Amazon. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions. We frequently receive products free of charge from manufacturers to test. This does not drive our decision as to whether or not a product is featured or recommended. We operate independently from our advertising sales team. We welcome your feedback. Have something you think we should know about? Email us at [email protected] a budget laptop is an exercise in compromise. There’s no one category of tech where the old “You get what you pay for” axiom rings truer — you simply aren’t going to find many affordable notebooks that are close to being "objectively good" buys the way a Macbook Pro or Dell XPS 13 is. On average, their screens are grainy, their builds are flimsy, and their internals aren’t very fast. Mediocrity is the norm.
But they’re cheap. It’s perfectly understandable why legions of plastic $400 notebooks are swiped off of Best Buy and Walmart’s shelves each fall: Even if it’s the safer purchase in the long run, dropping $1,000 on a better-made machine is a schedule-changing investment. And it’s not as if every laptop buyer needs higher-end materials in their stuff.That said, if you’re going to buy cheap, you might as well get the most from your dollar. So instead of writing off the category and demanding you save your money for a better notebook, we dove headfirst into the sea of budget laptops to find the ones that are worth buying.Not surprisingly, the returns were thin. We settled on a rough guideline of laptops under $550, but since this side of the market is filled with such a diverse range of devices, we included our favorites from a selection of full-on notebooks, 2-in-1 convertibles, Chromebooks, and ultra-affordable Windows machines, like the HP Stream.Per usual, we settled on the following laptops after scouring the web for reviews and performing our own hands-on testing. We assigned them a BI Rating, which you can read more about here. And as always, we plan to update this guide over time to reflect the many new notebooks that'll arrive in the coming weeks. There really aren't many quality options in this price range, so what you’re looking for here are small victories. It's too much to expect a solid state drive, 1080p display, and fast performance in one of these things, but if you can get a few qualities along those lines in a package that isn’t substantially lacking elsewhere, it’s worth considering. You need to to put aside "good," and embrace "good enough." Here are a few notebooks that fit that idea.Update (1/26/16): We've completed our first major refresh of this guide. Our Asus Zenbook UX305 and Toshiba Chromebook 2 entries are now fully updated to reflect their newest models. The HP Pavilion x360 11t Touch Select has been removed. The Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG makes way for the Aspire E5-573G-52G3 as a midrange desktop replacement pick. The Lenovo Ideapad 100s replaces the Asus Eeebook X205TA as our favorite ultra-budget Windows notebook. We'll continue to keep an eye out for promising Actually, let’s hold off a second. Just to hammer home how starved for quality this segment is, we’re quickly breaking the guidelines we set above. If there’s any way you can add a little more to your laptop buying budget, do it, and pick up the Asus Zenbook UX305CA. Value for dollar, it’s nearly unmatched. The difference between it and almost every other general purpose laptop available for slightly cheaper is easily vast enough to justify the higher premium.This is a $900-1000 Ultrabook masquerading at a lower price. It’s less than a half-inch thick, it weighs a hair over 2.5 pounds, and it’s sturdily built from a handsome coat of aluminum. It comes with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid state drive, both of which are superb for this price point. Its battery lasts a good 9-10 hours, and its matte 1080p IPS display is sharp, glare-free, and fitted with great viewing angles. The Zenbook packs a ton of high-end components, but costs had to be cut somewhere to meet its mid-range price. Its keyboard, for instance, is generally serviceable, but doesn’t have any backlighting. Its Bang & Olufsen-aided speakers are surprisingly thin and under-powered. Its webcam is rough. And that 13-inch screen, while very nice for the money, has some issues accurately reproducing colors when held up to other Ultrabooks. But for $700, all of that can be hand-waved easily enough. The bigger point of contention is its Core M processor. It’s a new, sixth-gen (or, Skylake) chip, but as we’ve noted in our laptop buying guide, it’s weaker than a more standard Core i5 or Core i3. It’s still far from an entry-level option, so most everyday tasks run just fine, but it’s best to avoid gaming or going all out. On the plus side, having a less intense processor allows the Zenbook to be fanless, making it wonderfully quiet in practice.Still, if you need more power, it’s worth noting that there’s a UX305LA model that packs a (fifth-gen, but still stronger) Core i5 chip for $50 more. It’s a tad thicker and louder as a result, but it’s still very much a great value among Ultrabooks. It’s also gold.If you absolutely can’t shell out that kind of dough, though, this configuration of the Acer Aspire E5-573G is the most respectable buy we could find around $550. It’s nowhere near as thin, light, or aesthetically pleasing as the Zenbook, but for a 15.6-inch desktop replacement, it’s not as unwieldy as it could be, and its black textile plastic is fine.
More importantly, it gets most of the specs right. It runs on a fifth-gen Core i5 chip, along with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. Although that’s not the newest processor around, the power and speed here is admirable. It isn’t a headache to multitask and get things done. Support for (1x1) 802.11ac WiFi and a collection of necessary ports help with that as well. Surprisingly, there’s a discrete Nvidia GeForce 940M graphics card on board too. Again, that’s not the latest GPU, but it’s enough to play many newer games on moderate settings should the desire arise. You don’t get that option in the first place with most notebooks in this range.Likewise, the Aspire E5-573G sports a 1080p (non-touch) display, another rarity among sub-$600 Windows machines. It’s a TN panel, so it doesn’t have the wide viewing angles or general vividity of an IPS alternative, but it’s still sharp, and its contrast is decent for what it is. Since it’s matte, it also does well to avoid glare. All told, it’s a noticeable step up from any 1366x768 option. But again, there are trade-offs. The main issue is bloatware: Asus has fitted this thing with dozens of pre-installed apps, most of which are needless, all of which chew up storage space and slow down performance. It’s worth going out of your way to get a clean install of Windows 10 on here.Besides that, battery life isn’t anything special at about 4-5 hours (or 1-2 if you’re gaming), and the trackpad feels closer to budget-level than we’d like. (A cheap external mouse seems like a good investment.) The keyboard, meanwhile, is pleasant and spacious enough, but lacks any sort of backlighting. There’s no disc drive either, though that’s less of an issue in an age of streaming services. Perhaps the biggest reason to hold off, however, is the fact that a newer model just launched. The Aspire E5-574G-52QU throws a sixth-gen Core i5 and a flashier half-white finish onto what appears to be the same package as the E5-573G, so it should be a little bit stronger, a little bit longer-lasting, and a little more futureproof.
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