5 budget laptops for college students: We name the best

So you’re heading back to school and you need a new laptop—but you didn’t manage your finances over the summer. Your bank account is nearly tapped out, and you still need to buy text books and lay in enough ramen noodles to last through the winter.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. Fortunately, Moore’s Law is still in play, so today’s budget notebook is yesterday’s workhorse. Pretty much any modern laptop can handle the gamut of productivity chores—word processing, number crunching, email, and the like—but all of the machines in this roundup can also tackle media editing and encoding sessions, and deliver respectable entertainment experiences.

To strike the best balance between performance and affordability, I gathered the top five notebooks I could find for $650 or less. Benchmark busters they’re not, but they aren’t budget busters, either.

CPU, memory, and storage specs

Model	CPU	Memory	Storage
Asus VivoBook S550CA (Reference)	Intel Core i5-3317U	6GB DDR3/1600	500GB 5400-rpm (+24GB cache)
Acer Aspire E1-572-6870	Intel Core i5-4200U	4GB DDR3/1600	500GB 5400-rpm
Dell Latitude 3330	Intel Core i3-2375m	4GB DDR3/1600	320GB 5400-rpm
HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000	AMD A4-1250	4GB DDR3/1333	500GB 5400-rpm
Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch	Intel Core i5-3230M	6GB DDR3/1600	1TB 7200-rpm
Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253	AMD A6-5200	6GB DDR3/1333	750GB 5400-rpm

I used several criteria to evaluate these laptops, including benchmark performance, storage capacity, weight, battery life, and (of course) price. Three of the laptops use Intel CPUs and two are AMD-based, but no two machines use the same CPU. And though Intel’s Haswell family has been justly lauded for its conservative power consumption, the one entry in this roundup equipped with a fourth-generation Core processor finished third in our battery rundown test.

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Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046844/5-budget-laptops-for-college-students-we-name-the-best.html#tk.rss_laptopcomputers

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