Need an affordable laptop for school work.

Echronus

Estimable
Jun 7, 2014
3
0
4,510
So my mother told me to find her a laptop that fits a $1000 budget. The laptop needs to be able to do basic things such as surfing the web, watching videos, and school work related things such as word, powerpoint, etc, all very quickly. Anyone have some suggestions, I'm thinking atleast 4gb of ram, Win 8.1, atleast 15inch, atleast 500gb of storage, and most importantly not an HP, because she despises that brand for some reason lol.
 
Solution
Her hardware requirements are not high so what I think would be a good solution would be the MSI CX61 2PC-499US base price $699 with the following customizations;
Change Ram/Memory to: 12GB DDR3 1600MHz [SKU-41814ZP] (Dual Channel Memory (1x4GB + 1x8GB SODIMMS)) ( + 40 )
Change Primary Hard Drive to: 120GB Samsung 840 Evo Solid State Drive (Read 540MB/s - Write 410MB/s (SSD2 - SATA III)) (SKU - SSD007) ( + 109 )
Change Optical Drive Bay to: 1TB 7200RPM (SATA III - 6GB/s) in ODD Bay (SKU - ODD016) ( + 69 ) for a total of $917 (before discounts)
The dual channel ram will be an improvement over the standard single channel, the SSD is one thing that can give a PC a snappy feel (fast response) when used for the OS/boot drive and...
Her hardware requirements are not high so what I think would be a good solution would be the MSI CX61 2PC-499US base price $699 with the following customizations;
Change Ram/Memory to: 12GB DDR3 1600MHz [SKU-41814ZP] (Dual Channel Memory (1x4GB + 1x8GB SODIMMS)) ( + 40 )
Change Primary Hard Drive to: 120GB Samsung 840 Evo Solid State Drive (Read 540MB/s - Write 410MB/s (SSD2 - SATA III)) (SKU - SSD007) ( + 109 )
Change Optical Drive Bay to: 1TB 7200RPM (SATA III - 6GB/s) in ODD Bay (SKU - ODD016) ( + 69 ) for a total of $917 (before discounts)
The dual channel ram will be an improvement over the standard single channel, the SSD is one thing that can give a PC a snappy feel (fast response) when used for the OS/boot drive and the HDD in the optical drive bay provides quite a bit of internal storage. I would expect such a configuration to meet your stated needs for a quite few years
I was looking for some pre-built options (one's that feature an SSD but require no customization) and found only refurbished models in the sub $1000 range (admittedly, I did not look too hard)


 
Solution

Echronus

Estimable
Jun 7, 2014
3
0
4,510
Thanks man I couldn't find anything better with the equivalent specs and price. The i5 @ 3.2ghz should be much more than what she needs, the SSD will deliver speeds she's never seen, 1tb of storage is handy, the gpu is not needed but it'll make any video editing she may have to do much easier, 12gb ram is complete overkill, but it will definitely provide multi-tasking. This should serve her well into the future, thank you.