Best Laptop for a Church Youth Group

[techman678]

Hello!!

 

I was given the task to find my church's youth group a new laptop. After looking around, every laptop has mixed reviews. I do not want to take a chance and buy a crappy laptop, as our current one is pushing 7 years of use and has become crappy. We have a $500 budget for this laptop. We use EasyWorship to run our songs, videos and power points. We also use Youtube, Amazon music, VLC player, Audacity and Chrome. 

 

Here are some requirements:

• MUST be a laptop (We move around a lot)
• Core i3 or newer (Nothing AMD)
• Disk Drive
• HDMI or VGA out (All of our Visual Equipment is connected via. VGA)
• 3.5mm Out. 
• Microphone in (preferred, not required

[Rolling Potatoe]

Does your old laptop still work? You should try running it with a 256 gb ssd and a new installation of windows, that can do wonders. If you want a new laptop with vga you should probably look for some older lower end laptops or at what lenovo offers.

[manikyath]

could look into low power quadcore laptops, they're stupidly cheap and usually pretty well built as well.

[Pendragon]

just buy a second hand t420 or something.

[Galm]

4 hours ago, manikyath said:

could look into low power quadcore laptops, they're stupidly cheap and usually pretty well built as well.

What is a low power quad core exactly?  Like AMD or something?

[manikyath]

2 hours ago, Galm said:

What is a low power quad core exactly?  Like AMD or something?

intel has been cranking out low power quadcores in every market they can, because believe it or not, the low cost/low power market is something amd was actually quite good at up until a few years back.

 

so instead of having some dualcore with or without hyperthread undervolted and downclocked to be manageable in a laptop with a small battery and cheap VRMs, or you could have a quadcore with lower single core performance, but in total can actually measure themselves against other options.

 

also, battery life on these things is flipping epic

[Galm]

9 hours ago, manikyath said:

intel has been cranking out low power quadcores in every market they can, because believe it or not, the low cost/low power market is something amd was actually quite good at up until a few years back.

 

so instead of having some dualcore with or without hyperthread undervolted and downclocked to be manageable in a laptop with a small battery and cheap VRMs, or you could have a quadcore with lower single core performance, but in total can actually measure themselves against other options.

 

also, battery life on these things is flipping epic

Can you give me a name?  I dont see any in the Laby Lake line up.