Help me buy a cheap laptop for hackathons

oval99

Prominent
Jul 20, 2017
1
0
510
1. What is your budget?

Below $300

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

At least 10"

3. What screen resolution do you want?

1920 x 1080 should be enough

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

No need for a desktop replacement; just a basic laptop for basic functionality.

5. How much battery life do you need?

At least 5 hours. The hackathon I go to has power strips for chargers, so it shouldn't be much of a problem.

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?

Don't need to play games.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)

MS Office, Text Editing (Sublime Text), Web Design (basically, using an FTP client like Cyberduck), and perhaps Photoshop.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?

Seems like 32GB is typical for this price range. I may potentially need more to accommodate Windows 10 and its constant updates as well as MS Office. But if I could plug in a cheap external HD to run MS Office from, that could bridge the gap.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.

Thinking of buying this HP laptop from amazon: http://tinyurl.com/y8qe2bt5 This laptop checks most of the boxes, except for potentially the hard drive space issue.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?

If I get two years of life out of it at this pricepoint, I'll be happy.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?

Don't need an optical drive.


12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.

I'm not interested in Chromebooks as I understand it's not always possible to install certain software (perhaps Sublime Text) locally. I like the stability of having something like MS Office installed locally (won't have to worry about flaky wifi speeds) and having an operating system I'm familiar with (Windows). Otherwise, I'm open to any Windows-based laptops, regardless of brand.

13. What country do you live in?
US

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.

Is it possible to run programs like MS Office off an external HD? I'm looking at a cheap 100 GB harddrive like this one here: http://tinyurl.com/ybo7ookh Would that work to free up space on the built-in harddrive which will be bloated with Windows 10 and its updates?

 
Solution
That is a low performance laptop that is basically suitable for web browsing and other normal daily tasks.See following Windows performance video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjot2ERWZs8


I recommend you purchase the following refurbished F555LA-AB31 for $234. It has a Core i3-5010u CPU what will run rings around the AMD E2-7110 APU. It has a 1080p screen and a 500GB hard drive. Since it is refurbished, the seller only offers a 90 day warranty.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-F555LA-15-6-i3-5010U-2-1GHz-4GB-1000GB-1080P-Laptop-GREAT-DEAL-/172777607945?epid=219571140&hash=item283a591309:g:B1EAAOSwu1VW3Yxn
That is a low performance laptop that is basically suitable for web browsing and other normal daily tasks.See following Windows performance video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjot2ERWZs8


I recommend you purchase the following refurbished F555LA-AB31 for $234. It has a Core i3-5010u CPU what will run rings around the AMD E2-7110 APU. It has a 1080p screen and a 500GB hard drive. Since it is refurbished, the seller only offers a 90 day warranty.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-F555LA-15-6-i3-5010U-2-1GHz-4GB-1000GB-1080P-Laptop-GREAT-DEAL-/172777607945?epid=219571140&hash=item283a591309:g:B1EAAOSwu1VW3Yxn
 
Solution