Without Really knowing much about your laptop, if it has replaceable parts, hard drive, Ram, sometimes just sticking in a new SSD or newer/better Ram does the trick without breaking the bank.

In my honest opinion, I wouldn't mind getting my hands little dirty fixing up the hardware, if I had a backup laptop sitting around or just simply didn't care about the broken laptop anymore enough if I didn't mind if it stopped working altogether one day. Sometimes you can save more money just replacing some parts from China, but sometimes the biggest pain in the butt is just simply taking the laptop apart....

On Fri, May 11, 2018, 11:44 PM Eric Oyen <eric.oyen@icloud.com> wrote:

well,
Dell has some machines in that price range. HP does as well. both sites have a "build your own" feature that will cull down all the features you want to have and spit out a model.

Mine is a Dell Latitude laptop 2012 vintage core i5 with 4 cores on board. 4 GB of ram and a 250 GB hdd. When I acquired it, the price tag was around $700. It's still serviceable and still boots up pretty fast (for an actual spindle HDD, that's pretty fast).

btw, if you want an SSD on your machine, expect to pay through the nose as those are not cheap.

Here is one on amazon for under $500: https://www.amazon.com/hp-laptop-under-500/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ahp%20laptop%20under%20500

you could also look at a couple of local retailers (like Best Buy, Walmart or Fry's electronics). there is always a deal to be had. just be aware, the cheaper the system is, the less powerful it is less likely to be.

-eric

On May 11, 2018, at 11:05 PM, trent shipley wrote:

> I'm thinking about getting a new laptop. Mine is several years old, and while it's quite serviceable, it boots really slowly, and it doesn't like to run a guest Ubuntu OS under Oracle VirtualBox. Also, I foresee more compiling in my future, even though of late I've been rather truant about working on my own through my Haskell book. I will say no more about the R book. I don't game, because it is addicting, and therefore bad for me.
>
> I tend to try to get as much life as possible out of a computer, because I am poor. I have heard good things about ASUS. I see more Linux in my future, but I have to have Windows and since Windows tends to come preinstalled, I expect it would be my native, host OS.
>
> I'd like to spend $500, but could (and probably will) stretch to $700.
>
> What could I expect to get for that, and what would you suggest.
>
> Trent.
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