Best laptop I can get for around $250? ***Please help, I am buying it within 3 days!***

[SnakeGTX]

Last week, I decided I was going to get a laptop for school, and personal use. I bought the Asus X551MAV-RCLN06 new at BestBuy for $229.99 (plus $15 tax). After a day of using it, I got disappointed with the speed of the computer. It was very slow (still is). I made the horrible mistake of just looking at the specs and not the performance. Its processor is the N2830, or a tablet SoC: it only got 1,018 points on cpubenchmark. It annoys me so badly that I made the mistake what I am always telling people to not do.

A few days ago, I decided I would return it and get my money back, to buy something better. The next step up, would be something like the Asus X551CA with a Celeron 1007u, or the Dell i15rv with a Celeron 2955u. Both processors only scoring about 1,500, I figured they would be fine for the price. But, these are just new laptops. It seems that these two are still going to be somewhat slow. so I also found a refurbished Lenovo G505 on their website for $226 (no tax). It has a A4-5000 1.5GHz Quad Core; and scored 1,900

I'd like the laptop to last me for about 4 years. But at least 2.5 years.

What do you think a good choice would be, will this refurbished laptop last long enough, and are there any laptops better than these, for around $250?

Thank you very much (in advance).

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Have you considered a Chromebook?

 

[Jacob McIntosh]

Chromebook all the way for $250. Unless you need to run any .exe or java programs.

 

[Because0789]

What usage are you looking at? Some of the Chromebook perform pretty well but will be limited in what you can do unless you want to install Linux on it. I have the Acer C720 with the Intel Celeron 2955U which does quite well.

 

[SnakeGTX]

I have considered chromebooks, but I have always used windows. I really don't want a differen't OS.

 

[Because0789]

ChromeOS works like Chrome, it is just limited. What kind of programs do you use?

 

[Jacob McIntosh]

I have considered chromebooks, but I have always used windows. I really don't want a differen't OS.

If you're worried about the hassle of learning a new OS, there isn't one on the Chromebook. I found all the tricks within an hour of using one. And "all the tricks" is an exaggeration, you can swipe left and right with 3 fingers to change tabs, and up and down with 2 fingers to move the webpage up and down. And Alt+search to turn on and off Caps Lock. And that's everything.

 

[velo3100]

I don't know if they still sell this netbook but its a samsung one which has an atom processor and it lasted me a long time. I forgot the model number unfortunately. They may be a good start if you want a laptop that works for a long time. I was able to get a lot of performance with it even though I was running win 7 at the time I had it. And by a lot of performance I mean playing low end games like shayia which is quite intensive for a netbook. Apart from that I can't really think of a better deal.