**Laptop Buying Guide: A Comprehensive Review**

When it comes to buying a laptop, there are numerous factors to consider, and choosing the right one can be overwhelming, especially for students on a budget. In this article, we will explore various laptops that cater to different needs and budgets, providing you with a comprehensive guide to make an informed decision.

**Surface Laptop at $800**

One of the most popular options in the thin and light laptop segment is the Surface Laptop. Although it has been around for a while, it still holds its charm due to its excellent keyboard quality, aspect ratio of the screen, and Windows Hello facial recognition feature. The Surface Laptop is an excellent choice for general school work, word projects, essays, and other everyday tasks. However, there's one major drawback – upgrading is not possible, which may be a concern for those looking to upgrade their laptop in the future.

**Budget Gaming Laptops**

When it comes to gaming laptops, budget options are often limited. However, at around $1000, you start to see a range of excellent choices that can satisfy even the most demanding gamers. One such option is the Dell XPS 13, which has been a favorite among gamers for its impressive performance and sleek design. Another contender in this price bracket is the ThinkPad X390, which promises to deliver solid performance with a powerful processor, ample storage, and high-quality display. Although we haven't had the chance to review it yet, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.

**Gaming Laptops for Serious Gamers**

For serious gamers who want no compromises in their gaming experience, there are two laptops that stand out from the rest: the Asus Zephyrus GA502D and the Razer Blade 15. The Asus Zephyrus GA502D is a solid performer that can handle demanding games with ease, thanks to its third-gen Ryzen 7 3750H processor, GTX 1660 Ti graphics, and 16GB of RAM. While it may not offer the same level of performance as more expensive options, it's an excellent choice for those who want a great gaming laptop without breaking the bank.

**Top-of-the-Line Laptops**

If you're looking to splurge on a top-of-the-line laptop with no compromises in terms of performance or features, then there are only a few options available. The Dell XPS 15 is one such option that has been a favorite among professionals and gamers alike for its massive touchpad, impressive performance, and stunning display. While it may not be as sleek as some other laptops on the market, it's definitely worth considering if you're looking for a laptop that can handle demanding tasks with ease.

**Apple Laptops: A Complicated Choice**

When it comes to Apple laptops, there are some significant drawbacks that need to be considered before making a purchase. The most notable issue is the poor keyboard quality, which can be a major inconvenience, especially if you plan on using your laptop outdoors. Additionally, Apple's GPUs are often underpowered compared to other manufacturers, and there are no touchscreens available for their laptops. However, the MacBook Pro 13-inch is still an excellent choice, thanks to its massive touchpad, impressive performance, and sleek design.

**Ring Door Peep Hole: A Peace of Mind Solution**

In conclusion, buying a laptop can be a daunting task, but with this comprehensive guide, you should now have a better understanding of what to expect from various laptops in different price brackets. However, if you're still unsure about where to start, it's always a good idea to check out our sponsor Ring Door Peep Hole, which provides peace of mind for homeowners and students alike. With its 1080p HD resolution, motion sensor, and two-way audio, this device allows you to keep an eye on who's at your doorstep without having to get up or leave the house. Whether you're trying to protect yourself from unwanted delivery persons or just want to know who's knocking on your door, Ring Door Peep Hole is a must-have solution for any homeowner or student.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enuh summertime and the living's easy you've probably been off dangling from rope swings enjoying long walks on the beach and playing washer toss when it hits you holy crap it's almost time for school i spent all my dough on moomoos ice cream and have almost none left for a new laptop well don't worry dear viewer there is still some summer left and we've created this video to make buying a cheap laptop as simple as possible so sit back relax maybe grab a cold drink and take in this refreshing sponsor segue because today's video is brought to you by glasswire glasswire lets you instantly see current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or android device use offer code linus and get 25 off at the link below if you're on an extremely tight budget and we're talking about 200 then buying new might not get you a laptop that operates to the level that i'd find acceptable even for just basic web browsing which is why we've got this thinkpad yeah so this right here is the thinkpad t540p it only cost us 225 us dollars and that comes with eight gigabytes of ram and a 240 gigabyte ssd you can normally find these on like office auctions and they come without hard drives which is awesome because then like you're throwing the hard drive in the trash anyway and a new ssd only costs like 40 bucks eight gigs of ram it's still around like 40 bucks or so so you can have a very good little laptop for pretty cheap the only problem with it though is that it's got a screen that's a little bit under what i would consider good these days yeah if you go like the ap if you go much lower than that it's going to come to a point that windows is going to actually complain to you that it can't show everything on screen it also has no warranty you don't know what the battery health is and even though it has an i5 it's an old i5 and it gets absolutely whooped by a modern one so all that said this is still a very respectable machine and as a bonus i think these old thing pads look pretty cool but maybe the used market just isn't for you like there's no warranty and there's a number of traps to avoid when you're buying a laptop new for under four hundred dollars yeah and the first problem is a suspiciously large amount of memory for under four hundred dollars you'll be very lucky to find anything above four gigabytes so when you find something that's say says 20 gigabytes be careful because that is likely just four gigabytes of real ram and 16 gigabytes of octane memory now optane will improve the performance of your computer compared to not having it at all but just getting eight gigabytes of ram will go a lot further and it also is a commonly paired with a hard drive which brings us to trap number two do not buy a hard drive it might be tempting after all it probably has a terabyte of storage but do not be fooled because that storage is molasses slow ssds have become so cheap that it's basically the only option which brings us to emmc storage it's slow the run sugar helps the medicine go down speaking of unreliable our umbrella just kind of like yeah it blew that way but it was about as reliable as emmc storage which is also slow and in many cases you won't be able to upgrade to an ssd if you buy a laptop equipped with this so just buy a laptop that has an ssd which brings us to the final tip of buying a cheap laptop ensure it's upgradable before you buy to do this just google your laptop model followed by tear down hopefully i fix it as a guide although if not check out whatever maintenance manuals or youtube videos are available to ensure that there are sodium memory slots and swappable storage with all of that in mind my super budget pick is this 309 dollar acer aspire 5. it has a radeon 3 3200u dual core which is slightly faster than the i5 and the thinkpad has vega 3 graphics which might be good for some old games but it does have a 1080p ips display that just absolutely blows the one of the thinkpad out of the water now it does only have four gigabytes of ram but that's easily upgradable it's 128 gigabyte ssd is small but an entire two and a half inch bay is open for easy upgrading and the keyboard actually feels pretty solid for me for the price it's nice and springy not uh not a short amount of travel seems fine to me yeah it's not as good as the thinkpad though so it's true kind of brings us to the surface go when you move up to like a 500 budget you might be tempted to get something that's prettier and like this does have some great things about it this little keyboard it's awesome it's better than what we found on the acer and it does have a really great touch display that that you can use when coupled with a pen to write out all of the notes that you might need for a class but it does have one pretty fatal flaw yeah it's just too freaking slow at this price point what you should be looking for is an i5 processor eight gigabytes of ram and a 240 gigabyte ssd any specs better than that or things like a touch display at this price are a bonus with that in mind here we have that same acer aspire from earlier but this one comes in at 500 and has exactly our recommended specs and is also the first laptop here that i can wholeheartedly recommend it's got a quad core processor it completed the blender bmw test in 11 minutes and 40 seconds that's massively faster than the 19 minutes and 34 seconds recorded by the ryzen 3 model this laptop right here is pretty great but don't get married to one specific model or brand just try and find something that's worth like 800 and it's on sale for 500. make sure that you get an 8th gen processor those are typically quad core whereas 7th gen or older are only dual core this logic basically holds as your budget increases until around 800 which up until that point the best gpu you can find is an mx250 which it's better than nothing but you're not going to be playing games on it so yeah yeah when we move up to an 800 budget and this is where things get interesting again here we have the acer nitro 5. it's got an i5 with a gtx 1650 it's the first laptop that can really gain out of the all the laptops we have here it's got an overclockable display to 90 hertz uh at least for our model and it's built body i mean it does leave something to be desired but for 800 you're getting your money's worth i think yeah although on occasion at eight hundred dollars you can get one of these guys right here the surface laptop any qualms about build quality like yeah you just don't have them it has probably the best keyboard on the market the aspect ratio of the screen is higher which makes it great for doing things like word projects essays really just general school stuff and it has windows hello facial recognition we're just like oh the best way to unlock something although at this price point you normally can only find the gigabyte model and there's no upgrading it so that's a bit of a downer which brings us to a thousand dollar budget where you're just spoiled for choice for thin and light laptops you've got the surface laptop two here you've got the dell xps 13 which is just freaking awesome and the thinkpad x390 also looks really promising although we don't actually know yet it's coming in a future video i haven't really tested it now for gaming what you're going to want to look for is the asus zephyrus ga502d this thing has a third gen ryzen 7 3750h a gtx 1660 ti 16 gigs of ram 512 gigabyte ssd 120 hertz ips panel although it is a 6 bit panel and it's just an extremely solid performer for the price like it's all that you need for gaming really like that's what i'd get yeah but if you're really looking for no compromises well this does compromise a bit in gaming compared to this but if you're looking for video editing really just doing anything school related the deliax ps15 it's just been the winner for years it came out in like 2015 and although they haven't changed a lot it still just kicks butt it's got a gtx 1650 i7 up to six cores and it costs like sixteen hundred dollars or more like at least two grand if you're looking for a 4k display so yeah i mean that's that's basically the level where you start to get to the no compromises zone but if you want absolutely no compromises in any way shape or form you want the razer blade 15. it's got an i96 core up to an rtx 2080 for graphics and it's got a relatively large 81 hour battery and not only that its display can burn that battery pretty quickly at 240 hertz now it still works pretty well as a daily carry laptop with most gaming laptops not really falling under that category but it just happens to be really really expensive you should expect to pay at least 2 000 although over 3 000 for top specs so yeah maybe instead of getting a razor blade it's better to just get the nitro 5 and put 2 grand onto your student loans and maybe have some left over for some ltt merch like what anthony has on right here this is what i always wear to the beach which speaking of expensive brings us to apple i personally have a lot of trouble recommending them right now because of their poor keyboard quality especially if you use them on the beach like we have it's probably gonna die their gpus they're underpowered for what you're paying for and there's no touch screens available like what the hell mac come on well that's not entirely fair i mean the macbook pro 13-inch is still a relatively good pc it's got a massive touch pad it's got a lot of programs that people especially for school just straight up need to use like logic pro final cut it all that kind of stuff you just cannot run on a pc without going through a hackintosh which i mean if you if you're at school you just don't have time for that kind of thing and the build quality it is great like there's no complaints there yeah so hopefully this has given you a better idea of what to expect given your budget if you're still super confused then go to the ltt forum and get some help there and you can also help us out by checking out our sponsor ring door peep holes are so 1990's ring wants you to know who is at your front door even without getting up the ring kit includes the video doorbell 2 spotlight cam battery and solar security sign it also has a motion sensor 1080p hd resolution with 160 degree vision and two-way audio spotlight camera has a 1080p hd video two-way talk led lights battery or solar-powered and also has a siren the audio is as great as you can get and you can just turn away unwelcome guests my personal favorite is telling the amazon delivery driver to not run away after the second knock at the door get some peace of mind with the ring welcome kit compatible with ios android mac and windows buy it today at the link below so do you want to go skim boarding now ganguh summertime and the living's easy you've probably been off dangling from rope swings enjoying long walks on the beach and playing washer toss when it hits you holy crap it's almost time for school i spent all my dough on moomoos ice cream and have almost none left for a new laptop well don't worry dear viewer there is still some summer left and we've created this video to make buying a cheap laptop as simple as possible so sit back relax maybe grab a cold drink and take in this refreshing sponsor segue because today's video is brought to you by glasswire glasswire lets you instantly see current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or android device use offer code linus and get 25 off at the link below if you're on an extremely tight budget and we're talking about 200 then buying new might not get you a laptop that operates to the level that i'd find acceptable even for just basic web browsing which is why we've got this thinkpad yeah so this right here is the thinkpad t540p it only cost us 225 us dollars and that comes with eight gigabytes of ram and a 240 gigabyte ssd you can normally find these on like office auctions and they come without hard drives which is awesome because then like you're throwing the hard drive in the trash anyway and a new ssd only costs like 40 bucks eight gigs of ram it's still around like 40 bucks or so so you can have a very good little laptop for pretty cheap the only problem with it though is that it's got a screen that's a little bit under what i would consider good these days yeah if you go like the ap if you go much lower than that it's going to come to a point that windows is going to actually complain to you that it can't show everything on screen it also has no warranty you don't know what the battery health is and even though it has an i5 it's an old i5 and it gets absolutely whooped by a modern one so all that said this is still a very respectable machine and as a bonus i think these old thing pads look pretty cool but maybe the used market just isn't for you like there's no warranty and there's a number of traps to avoid when you're buying a laptop new for under four hundred dollars yeah and the first problem is a suspiciously large amount of memory for under four hundred dollars you'll be very lucky to find anything above four gigabytes so when you find something that's say says 20 gigabytes be careful because that is likely just four gigabytes of real ram and 16 gigabytes of octane memory now optane will improve the performance of your computer compared to not having it at all but just getting eight gigabytes of ram will go a lot further and it also is a commonly paired with a hard drive which brings us to trap number two do not buy a hard drive it might be tempting after all it probably has a terabyte of storage but do not be fooled because that storage is molasses slow ssds have become so cheap that it's basically the only option which brings us to emmc storage it's slow the run sugar helps the medicine go down speaking of unreliable our umbrella just kind of like yeah it blew that way but it was about as reliable as emmc storage which is also slow and in many cases you won't be able to upgrade to an ssd if you buy a laptop equipped with this so just buy a laptop that has an ssd which brings us to the final tip of buying a cheap laptop ensure it's upgradable before you buy to do this just google your laptop model followed by tear down hopefully i fix it as a guide although if not check out whatever maintenance manuals or youtube videos are available to ensure that there are sodium memory slots and swappable storage with all of that in mind my super budget pick is this 309 dollar acer aspire 5. it has a radeon 3 3200u dual core which is slightly faster than the i5 and the thinkpad has vega 3 graphics which might be good for some old games but it does have a 1080p ips display that just absolutely blows the one of the thinkpad out of the water now it does only have four gigabytes of ram but that's easily upgradable it's 128 gigabyte ssd is small but an entire two and a half inch bay is open for easy upgrading and the keyboard actually feels pretty solid for me for the price it's nice and springy not uh not a short amount of travel seems fine to me yeah it's not as good as the thinkpad though so it's true kind of brings us to the surface go when you move up to like a 500 budget you might be tempted to get something that's prettier and like this does have some great things about it this little keyboard it's awesome it's better than what we found on the acer and it does have a really great touch display that that you can use when coupled with a pen to write out all of the notes that you might need for a class but it does have one pretty fatal flaw yeah it's just too freaking slow at this price point what you should be looking for is an i5 processor eight gigabytes of ram and a 240 gigabyte ssd any specs better than that or things like a touch display at this price are a bonus with that in mind here we have that same acer aspire from earlier but this one comes in at 500 and has exactly our recommended specs and is also the first laptop here that i can wholeheartedly recommend it's got a quad core processor it completed the blender bmw test in 11 minutes and 40 seconds that's massively faster than the 19 minutes and 34 seconds recorded by the ryzen 3 model this laptop right here is pretty great but don't get married to one specific model or brand just try and find something that's worth like 800 and it's on sale for 500. make sure that you get an 8th gen processor those are typically quad core whereas 7th gen or older are only dual core this logic basically holds as your budget increases until around 800 which up until that point the best gpu you can find is an mx250 which it's better than nothing but you're not going to be playing games on it so yeah yeah when we move up to an 800 budget and this is where things get interesting again here we have the acer nitro 5. it's got an i5 with a gtx 1650 it's the first laptop that can really gain out of the all the laptops we have here it's got an overclockable display to 90 hertz uh at least for our model and it's built body i mean it does leave something to be desired but for 800 you're getting your money's worth i think yeah although on occasion at eight hundred dollars you can get one of these guys right here the surface laptop any qualms about build quality like yeah you just don't have them it has probably the best keyboard on the market the aspect ratio of the screen is higher which makes it great for doing things like word projects essays really just general school stuff and it has windows hello facial recognition we're just like oh the best way to unlock something although at this price point you normally can only find the gigabyte model and there's no upgrading it so that's a bit of a downer which brings us to a thousand dollar budget where you're just spoiled for choice for thin and light laptops you've got the surface laptop two here you've got the dell xps 13 which is just freaking awesome and the thinkpad x390 also looks really promising although we don't actually know yet it's coming in a future video i haven't really tested it now for gaming what you're going to want to look for is the asus zephyrus ga502d this thing has a third gen ryzen 7 3750h a gtx 1660 ti 16 gigs of ram 512 gigabyte ssd 120 hertz ips panel although it is a 6 bit panel and it's just an extremely solid performer for the price like it's all that you need for gaming really like that's what i'd get yeah but if you're really looking for no compromises well this does compromise a bit in gaming compared to this but if you're looking for video editing really just doing anything school related the deliax ps15 it's just been the winner for years it came out in like 2015 and although they haven't changed a lot it still just kicks butt it's got a gtx 1650 i7 up to six cores and it costs like sixteen hundred dollars or more like at least two grand if you're looking for a 4k display so yeah i mean that's that's basically the level where you start to get to the no compromises zone but if you want absolutely no compromises in any way shape or form you want the razer blade 15. it's got an i96 core up to an rtx 2080 for graphics and it's got a relatively large 81 hour battery and not only that its display can burn that battery pretty quickly at 240 hertz now it still works pretty well as a daily carry laptop with most gaming laptops not really falling under that category but it just happens to be really really expensive you should expect to pay at least 2 000 although over 3 000 for top specs so yeah maybe instead of getting a razor blade it's better to just get the nitro 5 and put 2 grand onto your student loans and maybe have some left over for some ltt merch like what anthony has on right here this is what i always wear to the beach which speaking of expensive brings us to apple i personally have a lot of trouble recommending them right now because of their poor keyboard quality especially if you use them on the beach like we have it's probably gonna die their gpus they're underpowered for what you're paying for and there's no touch screens available like what the hell mac come on well that's not entirely fair i mean the macbook pro 13-inch is still a relatively good pc it's got a massive touch pad it's got a lot of programs that people especially for school just straight up need to use like logic pro final cut it all that kind of stuff you just cannot run on a pc without going through a hackintosh which i mean if you if you're at school you just don't have time for that kind of thing and the build quality it is great like there's no complaints there yeah so hopefully this has given you a better idea of what to expect given your budget if you're still super confused then go to the ltt forum and get some help there and you can also help us out by checking out our sponsor ring door peep holes are so 1990's ring wants you to know who is at your front door even without getting up the ring kit includes the video doorbell 2 spotlight cam battery and solar security sign it also has a motion sensor 1080p hd resolution with 160 degree vision and two-way audio spotlight camera has a 1080p hd video two-way talk led lights battery or solar-powered and also has a siren the audio is as great as you can get and you can just turn away unwelcome guests my personal favorite is telling the amazon delivery driver to not run away after the second knock at the door get some peace of mind with the ring welcome kit compatible with ios android mac and windows buy it today at the link below so do you want to go skim boarding now gang\n"