Best Cheap Laptops of 2025 – Budget Computers Under $500
There are always plenty of models on the market that are under $1,000, and the majority of them are under $500. As long as you manage your expectations with regard to options and specifications, you can get a fair amount from a budget laptop model, such as battery life and a moderately lightweight laptop body. (If you are replacing an old Windows laptop that doesn’t depend on running Windows, consider it I’ll change it to a Chromebook. )
price
If Intel and PC makers are throwing at us, we’ll hold this laptop for at least 3 years, so if you can afford to stretch your budget to a bit better specs, don’t skip it.
Better yet, you can use a laptop with a replaceable battery (if you can find it), upgradeable memory (usually memory is soldered to the motherboard), graphics card and storage, or all of the above Think about it. If you do so, troll user reviews and comments about people’s experiences with upgrading a particular model. Sometimes you need your own parts, or you may need to access difficult-to-access locations within your system.
of a cheap gaming laptopyou will need to break the $500 ceiling to support most games. The cheapest budget laptop suitable for a solid gaming performance experience (someone with moderately powerful discrete graphics processors) runs for nearly $700. If you are looking, here are our recommendations Best gaming laptops for under $1,000. If you want to live in Bleeding Edge, using cloud gaming services such as Nvidia Geforce Now or Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate cloud gaming allows you to play games on your laptop with specifications marked under $500.
A bright place is that you don’t have to settle down on a traditional clamshell laptop with a fixed display and keyboard. You can also get a convertible laptop (aka 2-inch). This laptop has a screen that turns the screen into a tablet that can be placed or presented for comfortable streaming.
You could also make your current laptop a little longer. If you need something to tick you into the tide for several months, delve into possible locations to buy refurbished machines and explore non-commercial or educational discounts if you are eligible.
Windows, Mac, or Chromebook
I can’t find cheap laptop prices for MacBooks and other Apple laptops. At best, you can get the current entry-level model of your MacBook Air for $999. You might be able to get it for less money on sale, but it never really reaches the “budget” realm. Even iPads run over $500 when you buy an optional keyboard (though looking for sales on tablets and keyboards will work if you’re less). A base model iPad with a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad’s cheap stand is enough.
It’s easier to find a cheaper Chromebook than a cheaper Windows laptop. It has become one of the most popular budget laptops on the market, but it’s looking at more Chromebooks in the $500 to $1,000 range and increasing Windows laptops in the $500 range. . These Windows systems are Chromebook configurations that often don’t really run Windows comfortably.
Google’s Chromeos is not as power-hungry as Windows, so it can use low-end processors, slower storage, and reduced screen resolution and RAM. A small portion of the components that make your laptop expensive. The flipside is chrome, and Google apps are more memory hog than you would expect, and if you use processors on memory and Skym too low, the system is still slower.
Chromebooks can run Chromeos-specific Android apps, but some people need a full Windows OS to run heavier applications, such as the video editing suite. This requires faster processors with more cores and more memory. 8GB RAM is minimal, but 16GB is desirable – more storage for the application and the operating system itself.
Also, Chromeos is a very different experience than Windows. Make sure you have the required applications Chrome appbefore jumping, Android or Linux apps. As a Chromebook is a cloud-first device, it doesn’t need to have a lot of built-in storage.
It also makes them perfect if you spend most of your time roaming the web, writing, streaming videos, or playing Android games. If you want to play Android games, get a touchscreen Chromebook.
size
Don’t forget whether you have a lighter, thinner laptop or have a touchscreen laptop with good battery life. It’s important in the future. The size is primarily determined by the screen, and the screen is the size of the battery, the thickness of the laptop, and the weight.
Ultra-aportable laptops, generally below 13 inches, are rare, under $700. After all, making things smaller doesn’t always get cheaper. Generally, there are budget laptops in sizes of 14, 15.6, and 17.3 inches. Also, due to its low price, the 11.6-inch Chromebook is attractive. No one recommends that size except for the youngest students.
In budget price ranges, screen terminology should be taken when it comes to specifications. The “HD” screen may not necessarily be a really high resolution screen. HD with a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels is called “Full HD,” so marketers call lower resolution displays (1,280×720 pixels) HD. In Chromebooks, HD usually refers to a screen with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. The advantage is that the 14-inch laptop boom drips into this price range, allowing for more FHD options at that size.
A frequent complaint we see is about “washed” displays with poor viewing angles. Unfortunately, that’s one of the trade-offs. Many of these use TN (Twisted Nematic) Screen Technology, which is cheap, but look for an IPS (In-Plane Switching) LCD that is suitable for Angle viewing, brightness and color.
Processor, memory, storage
Many Windows laptops in this range have reached low prices using AMD Athlon and LowerEnd series or Intel Celeron and Pentium processors. I don’t recommend going with an athlon instead of a core, instead of a ryzen or acelon/pentium. Windows is too heavy. The best.
SSDS can make a huge difference in how fast Windows performance feels to be faster compared to spinning hard disks, but thankfully older hard disks have become very rare. Not all SSDs are equally quick and cheap laptops usually slow down drives. If you need to use smaller drives – they tend to be at 256GB in this price range – you can add one or two external drives (5 for some of us) at any time Cloud storage to enhance small internal drives, either at some point on the road or at or at a time.
I highly recommend 16GB of RAM (an absolute minimum of 8GB) for memory. RAM is where the operating system stores all the data in applications currently running, and can fill up at high speed (for example, Chrome is taking up 7GB of memory). After that, you will start replacing the RAM and SSD. This is a bit late. Many $500 sub-laptops come in 4GB or 8GB, which, when combined with slow disks, makes for an annoyingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, it is soldered and cannot be upgraded. Some PC manufacturers leave empty internal slots for soldering the memory and adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact your laptop manufacturer or check the full specifications of your laptop online.