Best Budget Laptop of 2026 – Cheap Computers Under $500

There are plenty of sub-$1,000 models on the market at any given moment, and a good portion of them are under $500. As long as you manage your expectations in terms of options and specifications, you can still get a little out of a budget laptop model, including good battery life and a reasonably lightweight laptop body. (If you’re replacing an old Windows laptop that can’t run Windows anymore, consider And turn it into a Chromebook.)

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If the statistics given to us by computer and PC manufacturers are correct, you will be keeping this laptop for at least three years, so don’t skimp if you can stretch your budget a little to get better specifications.

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, look into user reviews and comments about people’s experiences upgrading a particular model. Sometimes they require special parts or require access to hard-to-reach locations in the system.

to Cheap gaming laptopHowever, you still have to go over the $500 cap to support most games. Less expensive budget laptops suitable for experiencing solid gaming performance — those with fairly powerful discrete graphics processors — will run you closer to $700. Here are our recommendations if you’re looking for Best gaming laptop under $1000. If you want to live on the bleeding edge, cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now and Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate’s Cloud Gaming will let you play games on laptops with specs for under $500.

The bright spot is that you don’t have to settle for a traditional laptop with a fixed display and keyboard. You can also get a convertible laptop (also known as a two-in-one), which has a screen that can be flipped over to turn the screen into a tablet, or to put it in a comfortable position for streaming or giving a presentation.

You can also try making your current laptop last a little longer. If you need something to tide you over for a few months, research potential places to purchase refurbished machines and explore 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. At best, you can get the current entry-level model of the MacBook Air for $999. On sale, you may be able to get it for less than that but it will never reach true “budget” territory. Even the iPad will cost you more than $500 once you buy the optional keyboard (although it may work out for less if you’re looking for sales on a tablet or keyboard), which is higher than our budget here. A basic model iPad with an inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard and a cheap iPad stand may be sufficient.

Inexpensive Chromebooks are easier to find than cheap Windows laptops, making them one of the most popular budget laptops on the market, though we’re also seeing more Chromebooks in the $500 to $1,000 range and more Windows laptops in the $500 range. These Windows systems are often redirected to Chromebook configurations that cannot run Windows comfortably.

Google’s ChromeOS doesn’t consume as much power as Windows, so you can make do with a lower-end processor, slower storage, and less screen resolution or RAM; Just a few components that make a laptop so expensive. The flip side is that Chrome apps and Google apps hog more memory than you’d expect, and if you underclock your processor or under-resource, your system will still feel sluggish.

While Chromebooks can run Chrome OS-specific and Android apps, some people need the full Windows operating system to run larger apps, like video editing suites. With that comes the need for a faster processor with more cores, more memory — 8GB of RAM is the minimum, although 16GB is best — and more storage space for apps and the operating system itself.

ChromeOS is also a much different experience from Windows; Make sure the applications you need have the file Chrome applicationOr Android app or Linux app before you make that jump. Since Chromebooks are cloud-first devices, they don’t need a lot of built-in storage.

It also means that if you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video, or playing Android games, it’s a perfect fit. If you want to play Android games, make sure you get a Chromebook with a touch screen.

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

Ultraportable laptops, generally 13 inches or smaller, are rare for under $700. It turns out that making things smaller doesn’t always mean they’re cheaper. Generally, you’ll find budget laptops in 14-, 15.6-, and 17.3-inch sizes. Also, given their lower prices, 11.6-inch Chromebooks are attractive. We do not recommend this size for any student except the youngest.

In the budget price range, you have to pay attention to screen terminology when it comes to specifications: an “HD” screen may not always be a truly high-definition screen. HD, which has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, is called “Full HD” so marketers can refer to lower-resolution displays (1,280 x 720 pixels) as HD. On Chromebooks, HD typically refers to a screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. On the upside, the boom in 14-inch laptops is trickling down to this price range, allowing for more FHD options at this size.

A frequent complaint we see is about “dull” displays with poor viewing angles. Unfortunately, that’s one trade-off: a lot of these devices use TN (twisted nematic) screen technology, which is cheap but convenient. Look for LCD screens with IPS (in-plane switching) technology which are better for off-angle viewing, brightness and color.

Processor, memory and storage

A lot of Windows laptops in this range use lower-end AMD Athlon and A-series processors or Intel Celeron and Pentium processors to reach lower prices. We don’t recommend using Athlon instead of Ryzen or Celeron/Pentium instead of Core: Windows is too heavy for them, and in combination with the 4GB memory that many of them have, you may find them very slow at best.

SSDs can make a big difference in how quickly Windows performs compared to a spinning hard drive, although older hard drives are thankfully becoming rarer. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheap laptops usually have slower drives. If you need to use a smaller drive — 256GB usually maxes out in this price range — you can always add an external drive or two (or five, for some of us) at some point down the road or use cloud storage to support a small internal drive.

For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly (for example, Chrome is now taking up 7GB of my memory). After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is a little slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which, combined with a slower disk, can lead to a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. In addition, many laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, it is soldered and cannot be upgraded. Some computer makers solder the memory and leave an internal slot empty to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact your laptop manufacturer or find the full laptop specifications online to confirm.