Which new laptop under $300 with upgradeable parts should I be looking at?

Hi,

A problem I have been coming up against is that a lot of the newer, budget Windows laptop (which I will immediately replace with my distribution of choice upon receipt) have memory soldered on the motherboard. This is a decision which brings the utmost distate to my mouth; I’m looking for budget laptops around the $300 mark (new) that let me upgrade their parts. Which models should I be looking at?

I am aware that the used market is fairly decent right now but I’d like to take a look at what’s coming up alongside looking at used gear. Thanks.

juergen,

I can recommend minifree.org - this is a shop from Leah Rowe, who is the lead developer of the libreboot project. That is a (more secure) bios alternative, related to coreboot.

I bought my Thinkpad T400 from there, some 6 years ago or something. I am still writing on it and i can highly recommend it. However, today i would buy a smaller form factor. so 12,8° instead of 14°.

So it is kind of heavy compared to a macbook air and not the fastest machine, but you can get your stuff done. And it is really really durable, which is the reason i bought one of the older thinkpads.

Around $300, there would be the libreboot 820: minifree.org/product/libreboot-820/

And with minifree.org you can be sure that the linux/libreboot/coreboot support is really great. Because: since Leah is a developer, she testes everything beforehand and fixes problems when she notices it. So i would recommend to describe what you would want to do. For instance, initially i wanted to use a encrypted harddrive and i had installed the grub variant, but later upgraded to libreoot with seabios. This was much better and fixed the problems with my encrypted harddrive. But i suspect leah would have found out and fixed that already, had i told her that.

Also for instance, seabios has better openBSD support.

alphacyberranger,
@alphacyberranger@lemmy.world avatar

Framework laptops

loopgru,

Framework machines are great, and certainly upgradeable, but $300 they are most certainly not.

alphacyberranger,
@alphacyberranger@lemmy.world avatar

True …My bad, forgot about the 300$ budget part

herescunty,

I got a used business dell a couple of years ago for £300. It still had active service warranty which dell transferred over to me. I upgraded the ram to 32gb and the ssd to 1tb and it was pretty decent for the time - i7 10th gen from memory (without grabbing the thing to check).

MigratingtoLemmy,

Could you tell me the model you got? I’m very interested in older laptops used in the enterprise, especially if they are a viable alternative to the older Thinkpad line

herescunty,

It’s a latitude 7390. I was mistaken, it’s an 8th gen i7, but still pretty new at the time I bought it. Bonus - Dell put all their service manuals online so you can always find instructions on how to tear down and upgrade

MigratingtoLemmy,

Thanks, I’m seriously considering the Latitude line alongside the Thinkpads.

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

The laptop that doesn’t exist… For they money you might find something with an Intel Atom or Pentium inside. Which is about as far as having a mouse on a wheel as your CPU…🤣

anamethatisnt,

Soldered RAM has better performance and reliability while consuming less power than socketed RAM and users of budget machines rarely want to upgrade. If you find one with socketed RAM at that price, colour me impressed!

For an upgradable laptop frame.work comes to mind but even their outlet is $200 above your budget.
frame.work/marketplace?outlet[]=Factory+seconds&o…

HakFoo,

Sometimes the appeal of socketed RAM is to just buy the bottom model and upgrade.

When I bought my Thinkpad E585 (wouldn’t reccomend), it was like $50 cheaper to buy a second 4GB DIMM from Crucial, and like $100 less to take the 500GB spinning rust option and add your own NVMe.

anamethatisnt,

Sometimes the appeal of socketed RAM is to just buy the bottom model and upgrade.

Yeah, I’m all for swappable RAM and disk in my laptops, problem is that those that care about it generally also spend more on their computer.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •