Gettin a laptop for high school and college

[CoreCombat]

So basically, I will be attending a high school pretty far away from home, and I need a sub-550 USD machine. A few available option for me is:

-Get a laptop with the Ryzen 5 3500U, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD and use it as it is

-Buy a cheaper model with the Ryzen 3 3200U or 10th gen i3 and swap out the current RAM ( Mostly 4GB ) for 16 GB of RAM, slap in more storage

I'd be using this laptop for at least 5 years, until half way in my university courses so this is a pretty big choice to make lol. Gaming is also one of my priority, but I really don't play any graphics intense game anymore than League of Legends or CSGO.

Also, these are the devices I'm currently looking at. I'd appreciate a lot if anyone who uses them can share their experience about it:

-Asus Vivobook A412DA (Ryzen 5 3500U, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) / (Ryzen 3 3200U, 4GB, 512 GB SSD)

-HP 14s (Ryzen 3 3200U, 4GB RAM, 1TB HDD) / (Ryzen 3 3250U, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD)

-Asus Vivobook D409DA (Ryzen 3 3200U, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD) / (Ryzen 5 3500U, 4GB RAM, 512GB SSD)

-Dell Vostro 3490 (i3 10110U, 4GB RAM, 256 GB SSD)

There might be more, but these are the one that attracts me. ( By the way the ASUS laptops mention above all have 4GB of RAM on board, and to make it 8gb they put in another 4gb stick. Price efficient, but upgrades are hard)

Anyways, thanks for all your help! 

p/s found a laptop with Ryzen 5 and GTX 1050 on sale for $550 but they don't ship to my place because of the pandemic :'l big F

 

[Bombastinator]

The existence of a $500 laptop that will last 5 years is unlikely in this environment. If one can be found with the hardware to do it it likely won’t have the build quality to survive that long.  A $1500 one might.  Of course thats 3 $500 laptops.  Battery is going to be a big concern.  Might be outside possible to buy a $500 laptop and treat it like it’s made of glass (or worse, cheap plastic, which it will be) and then accept that a battery replacement will be needed along the way. So a $500 now, $200 later laptop.  As long as the thing doesn’t get damaged in some other way.

[RaspberryJam44]

4 hours ago, CoreCombat said:

So basically, I will be attending a high school pretty far away from home, and I need a sub-550 USD machine. A few available option for me is:

-Get a laptop with the Ryzen 5 3500U, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD and use it as it is

-Buy a cheaper model with the Ryzen 3 3200U or 10th gen i3 and swap out the current RAM ( Mostly 4GB ) for 16 GB of RAM, slap in more storage

I'd be using this laptop for at least 5 years, until half way in my university courses so this is a pretty big choice to make lol. Gaming is also one of my priority, but I really don't play any graphics intense game anymore than League of Legends or CSGO.

Also, these are the devices I'm currently looking at. I'd appreciate a lot if anyone who uses them can share their experience about it:

-Asus Vivobook A412DA (Ryzen 5 3500U, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) / (Ryzen 3 3200U, 4GB, 512 GB SSD)

-HP 14s (Ryzen 3 3200U, 4GB RAM, 1TB HDD) / (Ryzen 3 3250U, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD)

-Asus Vivobook D409DA (Ryzen 3 3200U, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD) / (Ryzen 5 3500U, 4GB RAM, 512GB SSD)

-Dell Vostro 3490 (i3 10110U, 4GB RAM, 256 GB SSD)

There might be more, but these are the one that attracts me. ( By the way the ASUS laptops mention above all have 4GB of RAM on board, and to make it 8gb they put in another 4gb stick. Price efficient, but upgrades are hard)

Anyways, thanks for all your help! 

p/s found a laptop with Ryzen 5 and GTX 1050 on sale for $550 but they don't ship to my place because of the pandemic :'l big F

 

Cheap windows laptop mostly run slow after updates due to low storage space but for sub 550 you could get a Chromebook if that fits your needs, there's definitely a sub 550 laptop that has sufficient storage, though I'm not sure what that laptop is. Though Linus complains about intel, quite a few good cheap laptops have intel celerons in them, so it might be worth looking at some intel options too

[CoreCombat]

32 minutes ago, RaspberryJam44 said:

Cheap windows laptop mostly run slow after updates due to low storage space but for sub 550 you could get a Chromebook if that fits your needs, there's definitely a sub 550 laptop that has sufficient storage, though I'm not sure what that laptop is. Though Linus complains about intel, quite a few good cheap laptops have intel celerons in them, so it might be worth looking at some intel options too

Thanks for the recommendation! I couldn't find any place that sell Chromebooks here but there are a few cheap Windows laptop that goes around at my local store for much less than 300 with respectable specs. Might consider getting one of them and throw Chrome OS on it