• We hope you have a fantastic holiday season to close out 2025! Thank you all so much for being part of the Tom's Guide community!

(New or Used) 11.6" Laptop with an upgradeable HDD and DDR3 Ram

jpsulisz

Honorable
Jun 5, 2013
9
0
10,520
Hi all,

Some unfortunate events occurred to my faithful Acer E3-111-C0WA, the unit still work besides the display. The cost for me to fix it will be ~$60, I was curious if anyone knew of any new or used laptops that can accept a 2.5 SSD and a single stick of DDR3L Ram @ 8 gigs.

I realistically only want to pay <$130 for something I will only be using for a couple months.
I have seen some Thinkpads X131e's that fit the budget, but are running slow AMD chips.

My old Acer:
CPU: Celeron N2840
RAM: 2GB, Upgraded to 8GB
HDD: 240 GB SSD
Screen: 1366x768

TL;DR: Need a small laptop, new or used, that can take a SSD and a single stick of 8GB DDR3L.
 
What will you be doing with this laptop? For this low price I would recommend looking at a chromebook as these are more value for money assuming you are doing normal things.
 
Ended up going to eBay for a HP Elitebook 2570p, It is a little bigger than the 11.6 inch (12.5 inch). However, I can look over this as the battery holds a 3 hour charge, got a charger, everything works, and my parts work fine in it!

Got a solid 3rd gen i5 laptop for $99.01, upgraded it to a now 12 gigs of ram and 240 gig SSD.
 


Did an OS come with this?
 


Ha, funny enough it did! The same seller was selling it with Windows 10 for ~$40 more, but I didn't choose that. I ended up just replacing the hard drive and keeping that as a backup if need be. The copy the seller included said that it was activated and legit, how much truth is in that though? Couldn't tell you!

Currently looking to buy a 6 or 9 cell battery, a optical disk drive to SSD drive, and a WiFi card that will work with El Capitan.