Looking for a laptop for college | 300 USD budget

Rhianwen · July 16, 2021

I need a laptop for upcoming college classes next month and while I have pretty good knowledge in PC hardware and how laptops function, my firsthand experience in using the latter is uh, very limited. I don't know how one would behave differently from a desktop. I am gonna be doing programming for circuitry and robotics classes and MS Office will be involved too.

There are some refurbished Lenovo ThinkPads and Dell Latitudes I found with 6th gen i5s within budget, some with 8GB of memory and 128GB SSDs for around $230. However, their processors benchmark considerably less than desktop CPUs from the Sandy Bridge era and I have an Optiplex with an i5-2400 that does not like Windows 10 as it is. Then I found something interesting, that just appeals to me a lot, a Pi-Top! With Pi-TopOS it can run the MS Office suite, it's cute, supposedly great for programming, and easily within my price range. Plus if it breaks, I imagine it won't rob me of too much repair money.

But, is a Pi-Top too good to be true? What would be a better choice in this instance? Also, webcams aren't necessary but are a good nice-to-have.

lionsland · July 16, 2021

Pi-Top's aren't great, they're really meant for kids learning to program and not to be used for any kind of serious work. I would pickup a Thinkpad with a 6th gen i5 and upgrade the ram to 16gb and that should be good enough for what you need. I used a 5th gen i3 laptop for quite a while and while it could slowdown on occasion, it was quite usable for Java programming in classes and Word 365

Rhianwen · July 17, 2021

Ah, I think that's good input, I was hoping for some more perspective on the Pi-top, but I learned later that it was largely assembled specifically for kids that don't have computer accessibility, so it makes sense it wouldn't be for serious work.

Thanks!