uh summertime and the living's easy you've probably been off dangling from
rope swings enjoying long walks on the beach and playing washer toss when it
hits you holy crap it's almost time for school i
spent all my dough on moomoos ice cream and have almost none left for a new
laptop well don't worry dear viewer there is
still some summer left and we've created this video to make buying a cheap laptop
as simple as possible so sit back relax maybe grab a cold
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if you're on an extremely tight budget and we're talking about 200 then buying
new might not get you a laptop that operates to the level that i'd find
acceptable even for just basic web browsing which is why we've got this
thinkpad yeah so this right here is the thinkpad
t540p it only cost us
225 us dollars and that comes with eight
gigabytes of ram and a 240 gigabyte ssd
you can normally find these on like office auctions and they come without
hard drives which is awesome because then like you're throwing the hard drive
in the trash anyway and a new ssd only costs like 40 bucks
eight gigs of ram it's still around like 40 bucks or so so you
can have a very good little laptop for pretty cheap the only
problem with it though is that it's got a screen that's a little bit under what
i would consider good these days yeah if you go like the
ap if you go much lower than that it's going to come to a point that windows is
going to actually complain to you that it can't show everything on screen it
also has no warranty you don't know what the battery health is and even though it
has an i5 it's an old i5 and it gets absolutely
whooped by a modern one so all that said this is still a very
respectable machine and as a bonus i think these old thing pads look pretty
cool but maybe the used market just isn't for you like there's no warranty
and there's a number of traps to avoid when you're buying a laptop new
for under four hundred dollars yeah and
the first problem is a suspiciously large amount of memory for under four
hundred dollars you'll be very lucky to find anything above four gigabytes so
when you find something that's say says 20 gigabytes
be careful because that is likely just four gigabytes of
real ram and 16 gigabytes of octane memory now optane will improve the
performance of your computer compared to not having it at all but just getting
eight gigabytes of ram will go a lot further and it also is a commonly paired
with a hard drive which brings us to trap number two do not buy a hard drive
it might be tempting after all it probably has a terabyte of storage but
do not be fooled because that storage is molasses slow ssds have become so cheap
that it's basically the only option which brings us to emmc storage
it's slow the run
sugar helps the medicine go down
speaking of unreliable our umbrella just kind of like yeah it
blew that way but it was about as reliable as emmc storage
which is also slow and in many cases you won't be able to upgrade to an ssd if
you buy a laptop equipped with this so just buy a laptop that has an ssd which
brings us to the final tip of buying a cheap laptop
ensure it's upgradable before you buy to do this just google your laptop model
followed by tear down hopefully i fix it as a guide although if not check out
whatever maintenance manuals or youtube videos are available to ensure that
there are sodium memory slots and swappable storage with all of that in
mind my super budget pick is this 309 dollar
acer aspire 5. it has a radeon 3 3200u
dual core which is slightly faster than the i5 and the thinkpad has vega 3
graphics which might be good for some old games but it does have a 1080p ips
display that just absolutely blows the one of the thinkpad out of the water now
it does only have four gigabytes of ram but that's easily upgradable it's 128
gigabyte ssd is small but an entire two and a half inch bay is open for easy
upgrading and the keyboard
actually feels pretty solid for me for the price
it's nice and springy not uh not a short amount of travel
seems fine to me yeah it's not as good as the thinkpad
though so it's true kind of brings us to the surface go when
you move up to like a 500 budget you
might be tempted to get something that's prettier and like
this does have some great things about it this little keyboard it's awesome it's better than what we found on the
acer and it does have a really great touch display that that you can use when
coupled with a pen to write out all of the notes that you might need for a
class but it does have one pretty fatal flaw yeah it's just too freaking slow at
this price point what you should be looking for is an i5
processor eight gigabytes of ram and a 240 gigabyte ssd any specs better than
that or things like a touch display at this price are a bonus with that in mind
here we have that same acer aspire from earlier but this one comes in at 500
and has exactly our recommended specs and is also the first laptop here that i
can wholeheartedly recommend it's got a quad core processor it completed the
blender bmw test in 11 minutes and 40 seconds
that's massively faster than the 19 minutes and 34 seconds recorded by the
ryzen 3 model this laptop right here is pretty great
but don't get married to one specific model or brand just try and find
something that's worth like 800 and it's on sale for 500. make sure that you get
an 8th gen processor those are typically quad core whereas 7th gen or older are
only dual core this logic basically holds as your budget increases until
around 800 which up until that point the best gpu you can
find is an mx250 which it's better than nothing but
you're not going to be playing games on it so
yeah yeah
when we move up to an 800 budget and this is where things get interesting
again here we have the acer nitro 5. it's got an i5
with a gtx 1650 it's the first laptop
that can really gain out of the all the laptops we have here it's got an
overclockable display to 90 hertz uh at least for our model and it's built
body i mean it does leave something to be desired but for 800
you're getting your money's worth i think yeah although
on occasion at eight hundred dollars you can get one of these guys right here the
surface laptop any qualms about build quality like yeah
you just don't have them it has probably the best keyboard on the market the
aspect ratio of the screen is higher which makes it great for doing things
like word projects essays really just general school stuff and it has windows
hello facial recognition we're just like oh the best way to unlock something
although at this price point you normally can only find the
gigabyte model and there's no upgrading it so that's a bit of a downer which
brings us to a thousand dollar budget where
you're just spoiled for choice for thin and light laptops you've got the surface
laptop two here you've got the dell xps 13 which is just
freaking awesome and the thinkpad x390
also looks really promising although we don't actually know yet
it's coming in a future video i haven't really tested it
now for gaming what you're going to want to look for is the asus zephyrus ga502d
this thing has a third gen ryzen 7 3750h
a gtx 1660 ti 16 gigs of ram 512
gigabyte ssd 120 hertz ips panel
although it is a 6 bit panel and it's
just an extremely solid performer for the price
like it's all that you need for gaming really
like that's what i'd get yeah but if you're
really looking for no compromises well this does compromise a bit in gaming
compared to this but if you're looking for video editing
really just doing anything school related the
deliax ps15 it's just been the winner for years it
came out in like 2015 and although they haven't changed a lot it still just
kicks butt it's got a gtx 1650 i7
up to six cores and it costs like sixteen hundred dollars or more
like at least two grand if you're looking for a 4k display so
yeah i mean that's that's basically the level where you start to get to the no
compromises zone but
if you want absolutely no compromises in
any way shape or form you want the razer
blade 15. it's got an i96 core up to an
rtx 2080 for graphics and it's got a relatively large 81 hour battery and
not only that its display can burn that battery pretty quickly at 240 hertz
now it still works pretty well as a daily carry laptop with most gaming
laptops not really falling under that category
but it just happens to be really really
expensive you should expect to pay at least 2 000 although over 3 000 for top
specs so yeah maybe instead of getting a
razor blade it's better to just get the nitro 5 and put 2 grand onto your
student loans and maybe have some left over for some ltt
merch like what anthony has on right here this is what i always wear to the
beach which speaking of expensive brings us to apple
i personally have a lot of trouble recommending them
right now because of their poor keyboard quality
especially if you use them on the beach like we have it's probably gonna die
their gpus they're underpowered for what you're paying for
and there's no touch screens available like what the hell mac come
on well
that's not entirely fair i mean the macbook pro 13-inch is still a
relatively good pc it's got a massive touch pad it's got
a lot of programs that people especially for school just straight up need to use
like logic pro final cut it all that kind of stuff you just cannot
run on a pc without going through a hackintosh which i mean
if you if you're at school you just don't have time for that kind of thing
and the build quality it is great like
there's no complaints there yeah so hopefully this has given you a better
idea of what to expect given your budget if you're still super confused then go
to the ltt forum and get some help there
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