For the average laptop you pay between 500 and 700 dollars, as our analysis of 570 Best laptops showed at the end of last year. If you are tight on cash, there are fortunately enough budget laptops that cost less. For less than five hundred dollars you have to pay attention to what you buy. An affordable notebook of less than 500 dollars is generally not a super deluxe device, so a cat in the bag is quickly bought.
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Inexpensive laptop: for school, study or general use
Are you busy with school or studying, or do you just want a computer that can be taken with you everywhere? There are plenty of reasons to look for a new laptop. Although we like to report on the latest developments in PC components and peripherals at Hardware Info, laptops now represent the vast majority of the PC market.
Laptops come in many shapes and sizes, from ‘normal’ notebooks to convertibles and detachables that can be transformed into a tablet in an instant. The screen size also varies, from tiny 10-inch machines to 17-inch desktop replacements that take up your entire desk. We have chosen for this buying guide to focus on models with a 13 to 15 inch screen. Such devices are large enough to be able to work on them in a practical manner, but compact enough to be convenient to carry.
The best cheap laptop: Acer Swift 1 SF114-32-P5FF
The 14 inch Acer Swift 1 SF114-32-P5FF is a lightweight laptop on the go. With a weight of only 1.3 kilograms, you can easily put this laptop in your backpack and take it with you on the train to work or school. Is it a warm summer day and do you prefer to work outside on your reports or reports? A bright sun does not reflect on the anti-glare screen. That way you always see what you are doing. With the SD card reader you can easily view the photos from your camera. You put your SD card in the reader and you’re done. Do you have little time but still need to quickly adjust something? Windows and programs start up within seconds from the 256 gigabyte SSD.
Rent a laptop for working from home
Due to various circumstances, your employees may suddenly have to work from home. Often there is not enough IT hardware such as laptops or notebooks to facilitate working from home. Renting IT hardware from Flex IT Rent can be the solution to maintain your business continuity. If you need IT hardware immediately, we can deliver it directly from our stock. With Flex IT Rent you can rent a laptop for one day, a month or another desired period. Also you can rent an Ipad to combine 2 screens with a laptop and Ipad.
Advantages of the Acer Swift SF114-32-P5FF
- Lean system performance
- Little RAM, RAM cannot be expanded
- Very long battery life: about 12 hours with light use
- High-quality metal housing, excellent touchpad and (backlit) keyboard, handy fingerprint scanner
- Ips display with good maximum brightness and contrast (but don’t expect too much from the color reproduction)
- Lots of storage (256 GB)
What can you expect? Housing, connections and screen
Mid-range laptops that are sold between 500 and 1000 dollars nowadays often have a housing that is partly made of metal, for example the screen lid and the space around the keyboard. The use of metal makes the device feel a bit more luxurious and it also helps for sturdiness; aluminum is often somewhat more resistant to bending and compression than plastic. For less than 500 dollars, manufacturers have to make further savings in the design. Most laptops you will find for this amount have a plastic exterior. Some manufacturers try to give the impression of metal with a silver-gray paint and a brushed pattern, but that only works from a distance.
Display
For a number of years now, a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (Full HD) has been common for the cheapest laptops, where you often had to put up with a screen resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, which provides little work space on a common 14 or 15 inch laptop screen. You will still find a screen resolution lower than Full HD on devices with a smaller 10 or 11 inch screen, for example cheap tablets or Chromebooks for education. An TN panel with poor viewing angles makes Koen more difficult to recognize. Unfortunately, the fact that Full HD panels are now used in affordable machines does not mean that image quality has made a leap forward in other respects. More than half of the test field still has a cheap twisted nematic (tn) LCD panel. The disadvantage of that panel type is the poor viewing angles. If you tilt the screen too far back, the display deteriorates to such an extent that it is hardly possible to recognize what is in the picture, because the colors, as it were, reverse. It is better to buy a laptop with an IPS panel that offers wider viewing angles. Moreover, the contrast of this panel type is on average higher, where cheap TN panels more often show a distressingly low contrast.
