Laptops have become part and parcel of student’s life that you can’t imagine their lives without these gadgets.
From taking notes during lectures, to working on their project and even budgeting, laptops have usually come in handy.
But students usually work on tight budgets more so if the do not have side jobs or businesses and have to depend solely on pocket money.
The students have therefore to choose a machine that will fit their budget and at the same time can serve its purpose without a hitch.
Students usually look at the processor speed, memory, weight, design and of course the price while making laptop purchases.
There are many best laptops for college students that fall in the sub-$500 price range, and as you weigh your options, here are four budget and good machines for you:
The Asus Transformer Book T100
This one starts at $349. It is a two-in-one device that completely detaches from its 10.1-inch touchscreen. It has a full-size keyboard and can serve both as a laptop and a tablet.
The Asus Transformer Book T100 weighs only 2.4 pounds and has a battery life of more than 11 hours. This is where it beats most laptops.
The Acer Aspire
The Acer Aspire starts at $448. It is a good companion to students even though it doesn’t have a touchscreen so it can’t take full advantage of Windows 8. It boasts a 15.6 –inch screen, wide enough for you to carry all you activities comfortably and you can even use it to watch movies.
The Acer Aspire comes with 8GB of flash memory quite suitable for multitasking. Its battery life is more than 6 hours.
The Asus K200MA
The Asus K200MA starts at $294. It improves on the concept of notebooks. The laptop weighs 3 pounds and has an 11.6-inch display.
It is compact hence highly portable. The Asus K200MA is fully loaded with Windows 8, is a touchscreen and offers HD resolution.
It is great for moving from one lecture hall to another as well as for travel.
The Toshiba CB35-A3120
This one starts at $278. It runs Google Chrome OS and is one of the most popular laptops. Chromebooks are not like conventional PC software; they rely on web apps and have limited offline functionality. But this should be much of a problem for students who spend all their time on campus Wi-Fi.
The Toshiba CB35-A3120 is favored by experts due to its portable design and its reasonably sized screen of 13.3-inch display. It is also sleek and light-weight.
Some devices have SSD for faster and fluid performance but this costs manufacturers more than the standard hard drives which have capacities of up to 500GB. On these budget laptops one should therefore not expect much storage.
But for students, the storage is more than enough unless you want to load it with so many movies which are not even part of the academic work.
The Asus Transformer Book T100 has 64GB built in storage while the Toshiba Chromebook has a 16GB SSD. On top of that they both offer cloud storage of up to 100GB.
