I sold my custom gaming desktop to a buddy of mine a few months ago, and am looking to just get the best cheap laptop I can find. My budget is terrible, so I've been looking everywhere. I can only afford $300 as the most I can spend. I'm only needing it just to surf the web, and it has to be able to handle online college courses. At first I looked at chromebooks, but now that I know what they really are, that's definitely not what I want. This is the best one I've come across so far: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProBook-6455b-AMD-Phenom-II-N620-2-8GHz-4GB-320GB-DVDRW-Win-7-Gaming-Laptop-/271251111278?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item3f27d37d6e The RAM can be upgraded to 8GB if I need to, will have to find someone to do that kind of work, though. Are Refurbished computers ok? I don't know if I really need a brand new laptop. Has anyone bought a refurb, and do they tend to fail more?
Believe it or not buying refurbished electronics is a completely viable option and heres the reasoning; When a product, say an ipod, gets sent back to a company because it is internally flawed/glitched, you can bet your ass that company DOES NOT EVER want to see the same model of product again. A) because it makes the company look bad as a whole, and B] it costs money to fix those problems. So refurbished products are often times held to the same or higher quality as the ones you find on store shelves. @ your question about installing ram; Unfortunately, the majority of windows based laptops are not user friendly when it comes to replacing such parts. This is due to the fact that most of them require you to unscrew a ton of screws on the bottom of the machine, aswell as a ton of screws that can be found UNDER the keyboard, which requires you to take the keyboard off, and dig around through the cable wires underneath it. Example (same model laptop) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRbRStoXCxY If you feel comfortable doing that, then you will be able to do it by yourself. If not, then you will need to pay someone to do it. Why do you feel chromebooks wouldnt be able to do what you need them to? To my understanding chrome books are essentially BUILT for web surfing. Anyways, this laptop looks like it would function fine for college coursework.
To my understanding, you can't run programs on a chromebook, just web applications. I'm not real sure about this, but don't online courses need you to run some sort of program that they make? Also, I forgot to say that I want to use it for playing mp3s, as well. With the web app, would I have to re-buy all my music that I already have? Maybe, I'm being dumb, I just really like windows. Yeah, I'm definitely not confident enough to fuck around with the innards of a laptop, so I would definitely be paying a professional to install the extra RAM. Thanks for the info about the refurb, definitely put my mind at ease.
most ram is accessible on the bottom now where the hard drive is...I got an asus a55a for 450 and just put a ssd in it..love it for general use and its fast as shit dont dread restarting windows now...boots and shuts down in about 10 secs
Good decision on the Chrome Notbook. You can easily change your memory out. Just insure you release those little catches on each side of the memory stick. It will pop up a bit. You put it in at the same angle it was removed, then push it down to catch the little side catches. Usually 2-3 screws hold down the memory cover on the bottom of the laptop.