[Tech] Best Chromebook on a budget?

Guvnor

The Guvnor
Staff member
One of my grand sons needs a laptop for college work and interwebs.

No gaming required.

What's the current best Chromebook for the lad on a budget?
 
I tend to look at Laptops Direct as a first guage of price and spec. We've had Lenovo laptops for our cheap gear for a while, they seem to be perfectly serviceable. The latest ones actually came from PC World, the deal they were doing for the specific spec level was the best I could find.

Avoid the Windows netbook things. Despite what Intel and Microsoft might think, Chromebook spec is not enough to run Windows 10. The ones we had couldn't actually do a Windows update. Run better on a lightweight Linux, mind you.

Speaking of lightweight Linux distributions, if the grandson is of the computer geek persuasion, then he might be as excited as I am about a cheap ARM Linux laptop: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
 
Thanks very much chaps I think I need to have a chat with him face-to-face before I go any further.
he's apple on his portable devices and has an Xbox I don't think he has any particular affection for Windows. Not sure I can justify a MacBook.
Edit: looks like they're not to dear actually..

@MartinP I want that Pinebook.. I assume that isn't an internal hard drive slot, rather one uses a large SD card to supplement the main memory. ?
 
FWIW Nathan (13) is using a Chromebook from HP that cost £170 As a refurb and is solid.

Make sure you get 4GB RAM and at least the full HD screen as the smaller screens are annoying.
 
I want that Pinebook.. I assume that isn't an internal hard drive slot, rather one uses a large SD card to supplement the main memory. ?
It's an eMMC, so effectively a soldered SD card (same as a lot of the Chromebook/netbook models). It has a PCIe x4 slot that can take an M2 NVMe drive with an appropriate adaptor, for faster/larger storage.
 
Sadly the only review I can of it was of one was of an example that the factory in China made a dog's dinner of during lockdown. However it was so clearly a machine that shouldn't have left the factory I am not drawing too many conclusions.

More importantly there was a suggestion that the ARM64 compilations of Linux haven't been optimised enough yet.

Still.. not like the community won't fix that soon enough, the days of ARM64 are definitely upon us.
 
One of my grand sons needs a laptop for college work and interwebs.

No gaming required.

What's the current best Chromebook for the lad on a budget?
Maybe I'm a bit late to this party, but there is a large secondhand market in ex-lease Thinkpads, which are fantastic value for money if you're after a laptop on a budget. Lenovo is the dominant player in the corporate leasing market, so ex-lease Thinkpads come up through the secondary market by the truckload, and quite cheaply due to the sheer volumes - typically about 20-30% of the price of a new machine.

X and T series machines are the mainstay of this market, and they are good quality kit - magnesium and fibreglass chassis, good capacitors, parts with guaranteed supply so they're a stable platform, and so forth. I'm typing this on a secondhand T430 that I bought a few years ago for £250.

There's good support available off the interwebs - videos, forums and other resources on how to take them apart and do various repairs and upgrades, plus parts are readily identified and purchased by part number, again through the secondary market. If you don't want to do the repairs or upgrades yourself the repair guy at your FLCS can look up exactly the same videos and do if for you. As they're cheap secondhand, repairs costs max out at the cost of a replacement machine. In practice, they're pretty rugged anyway. Chances are you won't need to do anything to them, and with a bit of TLC you might get 5 or 10 years from one.

My advice to anyone wanting a PC on a budget is pretty much always to at least consider this option. If you're not too proud to buy secondhand, these machines are far better quality than the rubbish you'll get from a high-street shop like PC World. Take a look at an X230-X250 or a T430-T450 on Ebay.
 
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I bought him a Chromebook after he and I oscillated between that and a refurb Lenovo X250.
 
Get one with a Full HD screen and at least 4GB RAM / 32GB storage. If it’s got a HDMI out you can split screen like a PC. If it’s got a micro-SD card slot then it’s easy to add some extra storage (my gaming PDFs are held in that slot).

Touchscreen convertible units are often better quality screens (usually IPS with a glass front so brighter).

I can dig out a link to a site with specs but I’ve successfully run Roll20 and Discord on a Lenovo N23 which about a third the speed of my current unit (speed mark 10000 rather than 32000).
 
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