There are a ton of models under $1,000 on the market at any given time, and a large portion of those are under $500. As long as you manage your expectations regarding options and specs, you can still get quite a bit from a budget laptop model, including good battery life and a reasonably light laptop body. (If you’re replacing an old Windows laptop that no longer runs Windows, consider it’s made into a Chromebook.)

Price

If the statistics dropped by Intel and PC manufacturers are correct, you will hold this laptop for at least three years so don’t hesitate if you can afford to stretch your budget for better specs.

Better yet, consider a laptop with a replaceable battery (if you can find one), upgradeable memory (although memory is usually soldered to the motherboard), graphics card and storage, or all of the above. If you do, trawl through user reviews and comments for people’s experiences upgrading to a particular model. Sometimes they require proprietary features or require access to hard-to-reach locations on the system.

For one cheap gaming laptopyou still have to break the $500 ceiling to support most games. The least expensive budget laptops suitable for a solid gaming performance experience — those with moderately powerful discrete graphics processors — will run you close to $700. Here are our recommendations if you are looking for best gaming laptop under $1,000. If you want to live with bleeding-edge content, cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate’s Cloud Gaming let you play on laptops with specs that hit under the $500 mark.

One bright spot is that you don’t have to settle for a traditional clamshell laptop with a fixed display and keyboard. You can also get a convertible laptop (aka, a two-in-one), with a screen that turns around to turn the screen into a tablet, to set it up for comfortable streaming or making a presentation.

You might as well try to make your laptop last a little longer now. If you need something to tide you over for a few months, look for possible places to buy refurbished machines and check for nonprofit or educational discounts if you qualify.

Windows, Mac or Chromebook

You won’t find cheap laptop prices for a MacBook or any other Apple laptop. You can best get the current entry-level MacBook Air model for $999. On sale, you can get it for less than that but it won’t reach true “budget” territory. Even an iPad will run you more than $500 once you buy the optional keyboard (though it can be less if you shop around for tablet or keyboard deals), which is way beyond our budget here. A base-model iPad with an inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard and an inexpensive stand for the iPad may be sufficient.

It’s easier to find cheap Chromebooks than cheap Windows laptops, making them one of the most popular budget laptops on the market, although we also see more Chromebooks in the $500-to-$1,000 range and more Windows laptops in the $500 range. Those Windows systems often use Chromebook configurations that aren’t really comfortable running Windows.

Google’s ChromeOS isn’t nearly as power-hungry as Windows, so you can get by with a lower processor, slower storage and less screen resolution or RAM; just some of the components that make a laptop expensive. The flip side is that Chrome and Google apps are more of a memory hog than you might expect, and if you’re running low on processor or memory, the system will feel sluggish.

While Chromebooks can run ChromeOS-specific and Android apps, some people need the full Windows OS to run larger applications, such as video-editing suites. With that comes a need for a faster processor with more cores, more memory — 8GB RAM is the minimum, though 16GB is better — and more storage for applications and the operating system itself.

ChromeOS is also a different experience than Windows; make sure the applications you need have a Chrome appAndroid app or Linux app before making the jump. Since Chromebooks are cloud-first devices, you don’t need a lot of storage built-in.

That also means that if you spend most of your time roaming the web, writing, streaming video or playing Android games, it’s worth it. If you’re hoping to play Android games, make sure you get a touchscreen Chromebook.

Area

Remember to consider whether having a light, thin laptop or a touchscreen laptop with good battery life will be important to you in the future. The size is mainly determined by the screen, which in turn causes the size of the battery, thickness of the laptop and weight.

Ultraportable laptops, usually 13 inches or smaller, are surprisingly under $700. It turns out, making things smaller doesn’t always equal cheaper. Usually, you can find budget laptops in 14-, 15.6- and 17.3-inch sizes. Also, because of their low price, 11.6-inch Chromebooks are attractive. We do not recommend that size for anyone but the youngest students.

In the budget price range, you should be aware of screen terminology when it comes to specs: An “HD” screen may not always be a true high-definition screen. HD, with a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels, is called “Full HD” so that marketers can refer to lower resolution displays (1,280×720 pixels) as HD. In Chromebooks, HD usually refers to a screen with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. On the upside, the boom in 14-inch laptops trickled down to this price range, allowing more FHD options in that size.

A frequent complaint we see is about “washed out” displays with poor viewing angles. Unfortunately, that’s one of the trade-offs: Many of them use TN (twisted nematic) screen technology, which is cheap but close. Look for IPS (in-plane switching) LCDs that are better for off-angle viewing, brightness and color.

Processor, memory and storage

Many Windows laptops in this range use AMD Athlon and lower-end A series or Intel Celeron and Pentium processors to hit lower prices. We do not recommend going with an Athlon instead of a Ryzen or a Celeron / Pentium instead of a Core: Windows is too heavy for them, and combined with the 4GB memory that many of them have, you may find that it is very slow.

SSDs can make a huge difference in how fast Windows performance feels compared to a spinning hard disk, although thankfully older hard disks are becoming more rare. Not all SSDs are equally fast and cheaper laptops usually have slower drives. If you need to go with a smaller drive – it tends to max out at 256GB in this price range – you can always add an external drive or two (or five, for some of us) at some point along the way or use cloud storage to bolster the smaller internal drive.

For memory, we recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is the place where the operating system stores all the data for the currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly (for example, now Chrome takes 7GB of my memory). After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is quite slow. Many sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which combined with a slow disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops today have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, it is sold and cannot be upgraded. Some PC manufacturers solder memory and also leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or look up the full laptop specs online to confirm.