I'm looking for a good small-midsize laptop that is portable and affordable (preferably under 500 dollars, but anything up to 1000 is all right, as long as it is worth the price). I have looked at the Mac Book Air, which is rather expensive and would be hard for me because I'm not used to the Apple interface, though it is amazing, the Asus Transformer Book T100, (slightly too small and low on storage), the Acer Aspire Switch 10 (very small storage) and the Toshiba Satellite L50 BST2NXL (which is my favorite so far, but is to big and heavy to be a good option for carrying around school all day, though if anyone knows anything like this that is lighter, I would love it!). I would be using this laptop for school, which will probably include editing videos, but not much more hardcore stuff than that. However, it would be awesome if it could last me into college, so if you have anything that has great specs with an okay price, that would be amazing! I would love to get someone else's opinion on the laptops listed above, and suggestions of anything else
Advice on a good portable and affordable laptop for high school?
To be perfectly honest, if it's just for school you can get away with a $250 chromebook (I have one and can't see where it would fall short as a school laptop). They got pretty good battery life, cheap, and have fast start up and shut down times for transitioning between classes. (mine's an ASUS C200 and I'd certainly recommend it.) Then you can use the rest of that money for something else.
If $1000 isn't out of the question, look at www.system76.com. They tend to be cheaper than Macs (but not necessarily cheap) and have a lot of specs Macs don't (although Macs have their advantages too). The only thing to keep in mind is they ship by default with Ubuntu OS. From a technical stand point it's much faster and more secure than Mac OSX, but if that's a deal breaker for you, you can install windows on it, you'll just need to buy the windows install disk separate. (be sure to calculate the added cost for that)
From my experience Toshiba Satellite laptops are great if you're looking for something reasonable and modest. For the Under $500 price range the most competitive brands are Asus, Toshiba, and Lenovo. Acer, and Hp are just a little too cheap in quality for me, Dell and Sony tend to be expensive, but if you find a good deal they are certainly nice machines, (Sony more than Dell).
If I can make a personal recommendation for you, check out the Lenovo Z50.
-Great wireless card 802.11ac which supports beamforming so you will have a better connection in the school even in classes where Wi-Fi is thin
-4th gen Intel i3 processor. Intels are more energy efficient which will help with battery life (although windows 8 won't) and 4th gen i3 processors are powerful enough for whatever you'll need it for in school. And 4th gen processors do fairly well with casual gaming (just saying!)
-and I've seen these start at or around the $500 price range with an ecoupon
If that size works for you, it's a good mid-level machine for home and school.
Dell inspiron series is great! I've been using mine for 5 years and its still in great condition, be sure to check them out and see if you like it.
You could easily go with the Dell Inspiron i5447-6250sLV 14-Inch Laptop as seen at the link below:
http://www.amazon.com/...00K4PAPG0/
This laptop has a decent processor, excellent 8 GB of RAM plus a 1000 GB Hard drive… It is also only 14 inches and 4.5 pounds which makes it very portable