Best Cheap Laptop for 2025 – Budget Computers Under $500
At any given moment, there are a large number of $1,000 models on the market, with a large portion of them under $500. As long as you manage your expectations in terms of choice and specifications, you can still get quite a bit of benefits from budget laptop models, including good battery life and a reasonable lightweight laptop body. (If you are replacing an old Windows laptop that is no longer running Windows, consider Turn it into a Chromebook)
price
If Intel and PC manufacturers throw stats at us, you’ll be holding this laptop for at least three years, so if you can expand your affordable budget a little bit to better spec.
Better yet, consider a laptop with a replaceable battery (if you can find it), upgradeable memory (although the memory is usually soldered to the motherboard), graphics card and storage space, or all of the above. If you do this, please trawl users to comment and comment to upgrade the experience of people with a specific model. Sometimes, they require proprietary parts or require access to difficult-to-access locations in the system.
for Cheap gaming laptopyou still have to break the $500 ceiling to support most games. The cheapest budget laptop is suitable for a stable gaming performance experience (gaming experience with a medium-powered discrete graphics processor), and you will bring you close to $700. If you are looking for Best gaming laptops below $1,000. If you want to live on the brink of bleeding, cloud gaming services like Nvidia Geforce and Cloud Gaming from Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will get you the specs of playing games on your laptop for as low as $500.
One highlight is that you don’t have to settle for a traditional flip laptop with a fixed display and keyboard. You can also get a convertible laptop (aka, a two-in-one) whose screen can be flipped to convert the screen to a tablet to position it as comfortable streaming or for demonstration.
You can also try to make your current laptop last longer. If you need something to waste months, dig out where possible to buy a refurbished machine and explore nonprofit or educational discounts if eligible.
Windows, Mac or Chromebook
You can’t find cheap laptop prices for MacBook or any other Apple laptop. At best you can get the current entry-level model of the MacBook Air for $999. In sales, you may be able to get it at a less rate, but it will never reach the real “budget” realm. Even if you buy an optional keyboard, even an iPad, you’ll offer you more than $500 (though it might be less if you look for sales on your tablet or keyboard), which is more than our budget. The basic model iPad with a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad cheap stand might suffice.
Finding cheap Chromebooks is easier than cheap Windows laptops, making it one of the most popular budget laptops on the market, although we also saw Chromebooks from $500 to $1,000 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $500 for $5 More Chromebooks in the range and in the $500 range in Windows laptops. . These Windows systems are often re-fixed Chromebook configurations that really don’t run Windows comfortably.
Google’s Chromeos isn’t as powerful as Windows craves power, so you can get it with a low-end processor, slower storage and less screen resolution or RAM. There are only a few components that make laptops expensive. The other side is Chrome, Google Apps is more of a memory pig than you expected, and the system will still feel slow if you have too low skimp on the processor or on memory.
While Chromebooks can run Chromeos-specific and Android applications, some people need a full Windows operating system to run Heftier applications, such as video editing suites. With that, the need for a faster processor, with more cores, more memory – 8GB of RAM is the minimum, and although it can be taken 16GB, it can be used for more storage space for the applications and the operating system itself.
Chromeos is also a very different experience from Windows. Make sure you need the apps Chrome appAndroid apps or Linux apps before jumping. Since Chromebooks are cloud-first devices, you don’t need a lot of storage built-in.
This also means that if you spend most of your time roaming the web, writing, streaming videos, or playing Android games, they are perfect. If you wish to play Android games, make sure to get a touchscreen Chromebook.
size
Remember to consider a lighter, thinner laptop or touch screen laptop, which will be important to you in the future. The size is mainly determined by the screen, which is a factor in battery size, laptop thickness and weight.
Super software laptops are usually 13 inches or less, under $700. It turns out that making things smaller is not always cheap. Usually, you’ll find budget laptops in 14-inch, 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch sizes. Plus, the 11.6-inch Chromebook is attractive due to its inexpensive price. We do not recommend any size except for the smallest students.
Within the budget price range, you have to be wary of the screen terminology: “HD” screens may not always be true HD screens. HD has a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels, which is called “full HD”, so marketers can refer to lower resolution displays (1,280×720 pixels) as HD. In Chromebooks, HD usually refers to a screen with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. On the plus side, the 14-inch laptop boom has been drifting to this price range, which allows for more FHD options in that size.
The complaints we often see are displays of “elimination”, with a poor perspective. Unfortunately, this is one of the tradeoffs: many of them use TN (Twisted List) screen technology, which is cheap, but Meh. Find IPS (In-Plane Switch) LCD, which is more suitable for viewing, brightness and color.
Processor, memory and storage
Many Windows laptops in this range use AMD Athlon and Lower-Edd A-series or Intel Celeron and Pentium Processors for a lower price. We do not recommend using Athlon instead of Ryzen or Celeron/Pentium instead of core: Windows is too heavy for them, and combined with 4GB of memory, you may find them likely to find them slow. The best.
SSDs can change a lot in the sense of Windows performance compared to spinning hard drives, although thankfully, older hard drives have become much scarce. Not all SSDs are equally fast and cheap laptops usually have slower drives. If you need to use smaller drives – they tend to maximize at 256GB in this price range – you can always add one or two external drives (or five) along some time or use cloud storage for enhanced A small internal drive.
For memory, we strongly recommend 16GB RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data of the currently running app and can be populated quickly (for example, Chrome now takes up 7GB of my memory). After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is a little slower. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which can be used in conjunction with slower disks to make Windows laptops frustrating. Additionally, many laptops now solder memories to the motherboard. Most manufacturers reveal this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, it is soldered and cannot be upgraded. Some PC manufacturers will solder memory on it and leave an empty internal slot to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the full specifications of your laptop online to confirm.
