Recommendation for Budget Laptop for Editing

[BardAnon]

I am a teacher at a middle school, and this year I started working as an advisor for our middle school's Business Professionals of America (BPA) club. One of the things the students do in the club is create short videos, games, and websites and submit them as part of a competition against other schools in the state/country. We are able to get to the High School to use their equipment once a week, but it would be nice to have a laptop specifically for the middle school's use that can handle video editing. Ideally I'd like to spend no more than $500 (before tax, shipping, etc.), but if we need to go a little more expensive I think I can come up with the extra money somehow. Nothing over $1000 for sure.

 

The main program I need the laptop to run is Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. It doesn't need to be cutting edge, since this is just middle school, but I'd like the students to be able to load up and use the video editing software without having to wait 20 minutes for everything to respond.

 

Does anyone have a recommendation of either a specific laptop or a place to look into? Or maybe a specific component or set of components I should be looking for?

[SupaKomputa]

You can get a Ryzen 3500u or 4500u with 4 cores for that price.

Next you will need to upgrade it with another 8gb ddr4 stick so you can have 12gb total (assuming most of these laptops came with 4gb onboard).

[jaslion]

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Business-Integrated-Graphics-82KU003NUS/dp/B097D1B2QB/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=5500u&qid=1638808106&sr=8-5

 

This will do the trick.

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, SupaKomputa said:

You can get a Ryzen 3500u or 4500u with 4 cores for that price.

Next you will need to upgrade it with another 8gb ddr4 stick so you can have 12gb total (assuming most of these laptops came with 4gb onboard).

A 4500u has 6 cores and for 500 8gb of ram is easily achievable. That and it's premiere cs6 which is a lot easier to run. These systems will be like top of the line stuff for it.

[SupaKomputa]

2 minutes ago, jaslion said:

A 4500u has 6 cores and for 500 8gb of ram is easily achievable. That and it's premiere cs6 which is a lot easier to run. These systems will be like top of the line stuff for it.

my bad, i want to say 4cores minimum.

[BiotechBen]

Welcome to the forums!

Lower tier ThinkPads are always a great option for general computing on a budget, especially with middle schoolers, they're built like tanks and are super reliable. I'm assuming that BPA is like Junior FBLA? I knew some less than savory people who did FBLA, but I won't hold that against you :).