need advice on new reliable laptop for under $500

[gourandle]

Need some advices on getting a new laptop which is reliable, cheap (under $500). No need for crazy specs and performance as long as it is reliable and decently fast to do basic things. Mostly used for general uses, such as document editing, browsing, reading, and also watching series, movies and what not . Needing around 13-inch to 15-inch big, nothing more or less.

Please advice on the models for which you think is good for this purpose, either you had previous experience before or you read good reviews and such. Please care to explain why you suggest this model is good also.

Thanks for all your help

 

[Avro Arrow]

Well I would recommend the Acer Aspire 5560-8480:
http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215258
I am currently typing on an Acer Aspire 5560-Sb401 which is a similar Canadian model. The A8 is a quad-core Athlon II-type CPU with an on-die graphics processor called the ATi Mobility Radeon HD 6620G. For average everyday tasks like the ones you indicated, it's wickedly fast and it can play modern games like Skyrim while still giving fantastically long battery life. The HD 6620G completely outclasses the Intel HD 3000 GPU that is present in pretty much all laptops under $800 that are Intel-based. This laptop also has an HDMI-out port which allows you to play 1080p material on an HDTV with amazing video quality and perfectly smooth playback. While Intel APUs are faster on the computational side, you'll never really notice a performance difference because the longest that it takes my laptop to load a program is 3 seconds. If it takes the Intel-based laptop 2 seconds (a 33% speed bonus), does it really affect your experience? Of course not. However, if you cannot play a game smoothly AT ALL with the Intel-based laptop but you can with the AMD-based laptop, having the Intel-based laptop will have a significant negative impact on your experience. I read tomshardware's own review of the A8-3500M which was a major factor in my decision to choose the laptop that I have. All I can say is that it's more than everything I had hoped for and even though the CPU side of things definitely favours Intel, the total experience factor definitely favours AMD because of the power of Radeon Graphics vs Intel's horrible graphics system. Here is the tomshardware review that compares the AMD A8-3500M to the Intel i5-2520M:
http/www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,2959.html
I hope that this makes your decision much easier.

 

[WR2]

HP ProBook 4430s 14" notebook $450
Core i3 2330M 2.20GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm HDD, 14" 1366x768 LCD w/ HD 3000 graphics

HP ProBook 4430s notebook review