Super Cheap laptop

A

a pet rock

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I need to pick out a laptop for my girlfriend and she's on a very, very tight budget. All she uses the laptop for is schoolwork and netflix streaming. What really matters is battery life, portability, and price. What I need to know is what brands are worthwhile, especially since I'm trying to spend as little as possible. Right now I'm looking at:

Acer Aspire Pentium P6100
Compaq Presario AMD E350
HP 635 AMD E350

Obviously, this is from the cheapest laptops on the egg, but that's the price range. I just really want to get some second opinions on the important stuff like brand and build quality. I don't pay much attention to laptops at all.
 
Never really been a big fan of any three of those brands. Acer would be my choice out of those three.

But seeing is that she is on a tight budget and not really doing anything on it but surf the web and writing essays on it. Why not go with a netbook.

Here is the one I was looking at.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220816

Great brand and hard to go wrong with a duel core atom that will make the battery life long.

Hope this helps some and widen your search a bit with some cheap netbooks.
 
Yeah, I know about netbooks, I just don't think an Atom is worth using. I think we'll head down to a Best Buy just so I can actually get a hand on some of these before thinking about purchasing.

I don't keep up enough with low-end chips to know which Pentium is which. Not even the Intel website will tell me anything about Celerons or Pentiums.

And why no E350? Is it because the added GPU strength won't help out streaming with hardware acceleration?
 
The E-350 is about on par with the N550. It really cannot hold a candle to the Pentiums

For reference:

Pentium PXXXX = Clarkdale (P designates a 25w chip, X's = numbers)
Pentium AXXX = Sandy Bridge (A= Alpha character, X's = numbers)

there are also some dual core celeron SB chips, that follow the same naming convention.
 
I wouldn't get a Toshiba laptop. For some reason the sound goes out on them. This is a problem seen on numerous models. I've had mine for 3 years and the sound has gone out but some have gone out as early as a couple weeks after purchase. And seeing as it's going to be used to watch movies, sound would be important.
 
you can find problems with any brand really......


I have 2 toshibas. 1 from like 1994, and the other from 2007. Both are fully functional. Only thing that happened, is the really old one had a hard drive failure this past year, but that is expected on something that is 17 years old.

Also have 3 HP laptops, 2 acer(gateway), and a dell. All work fine, but you can google their model numbers, and all will come up with some sort of "problem". With pre built computers, i think it is really luck of the draw, some models are good, some are subpar, some years are good, others not so much.
 
reflex99 said:
you can find problems with any brand really......


I have 2 toshibas. 1 from like 1994, and the other from 2007. Both are fully functional. Only thing that happened, is the really old one had a hard drive failure this past year, but that is expected on something that is 17 years old.

Also have 3 HP laptops, 2 acer(gateway), and a dell. All work fine, but you can google their model numbers, and all will come up with some sort of "problem". With pre built computers, i think it is really luck of the draw, some models are good, some are subpar, some years are good, others not so much.
Click to expand...

Yeah to some degree but when you have the exact same problem with nearly all the models? That's not bad luck.
 
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