$500 Laptop

My mom's laptop is garbage and she wants a new one. Her budget is $500, and wants a 14 or 15 inch screen. I barely know anything about hardware or the reliability of OEMs, so I could use some help.

Check newegg, and look for Toshiba, Acer, or Asus.  You might find something.  If she doesn't need it for too much don't worry about the stats.

Even if she isn't editing video and playing Crysis, I still want her to get the most out of her money. Better hardware will be better suited for future software. Plus, from my experience, you want all the power you can get if you're running current versions of Windows.

Newegg has deals everyday, and a lot of them are laptops. Check back consistently.

The issue is I barely know anything about hardware or which OEMs are best, and I know some people here know a lot more about this stuff.

I'm a fan of Acer products, they've all been very reliable and generally well-priced. The Aspire series of notebooks seem to be the "replacement desktop" laptop of the Acer brand. Mine was a monster but I'm noticing smaller ones while searching - also with more RAM then mine had, which is awesome.

I found two within your budget on Newegg. Both 15", both with decent graphics (though on-board is generally a bad idea for gaming, it is just fine for most other applications), dual-core processors and "super multi" DVD drives (I had to look this one up, the name seemed superfluous. Turns out it just means it reads/writes all DVD formats.).

The first link is for an Acer Aspire AS5253, it's $449, has 3gigs of Ram, a 250gig HD and runs an AMD processor.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115979

The second is an Acer Aspire AS5742, it's $479, 4gigs Ram, 500gig HD and runs an Intel processor.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115994

Obvious differences are the processor brand (which doesn't matter all that much and is more about preference) and the size of the RAM and Hard Drive. So - how big a drive does she need and will she be running a lot of programs at once?

Hope this was helpful -

I'm no expert, but 1GHz, 1MB L2 Cache VS 2.13GHz, 3MB L3 Cache doesn't sound like the only difference is the brand.

Turns out I had two tabs open for the same one when I did this - or must've as looking at it now I'm seeing a few more differences then I did when I looked yesterday.

Sorry about that. The Intel based one would be the better one in this case then.

Dual-core pentium is old tech.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157466R
This is impressive for the price, if you don't mind buying open box, it even has a semi-decent graphics card.

Otherwise you'll want to go for something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115985
Which has an anemic Intel HD gfx chipset.

I definitely wouldn't go for anything less than 4gb of ram though.

How much of an improvement are the i3 CPUs? Also, the most intensive graphics stuff the computer will do is play video. Roph said to avoid Intel graphics, but I'm not sure if that's because they have poor game performance (which doesn't matter to the person this is for) or if they have a high failure rate.

Also, the first one you linked to is out of stock.

Roph was advising you because they're bad for game performance.  Your mom could probably get away with a netbook.