

This advice is based on our years of testing and review experience if you want to continue your budget laptop hunt on your own. Not sure what to look for in a good budget laptop? Jump to the buying advice right below our recommendations. If you're searching for a laptop under $500, we've tested and reviewed the best budget laptops you can buy right now. You'll have to hit a good sale or pick up a refurbished one to get a MacBook for less. Also, you won't find any current MacBooks at these prices: a new entry-level MacBook Air is $1,000. Otherwise, you may need to spend closer to $700 to get a laptop that'll last several years. So while it's possible to find a good laptop under $500, you may need to shop around and wait for a discount. With fewer chips available, PC makers made more midrange and premium laptops than lower-end models to handle essential, day-to-day tasks.

The chip shortages of the past couple of years have made finding a good budget-friendly laptop a little trickier. The best budget laptop models can handle all your everyday tasks like checking emails, scrolling through social media, typing up documents and more, and they can be available for less than $500. In addition, you need a SATA to USB drive adapter in order to transfer the data from your present HDD to the new SSD.When picking out the best laptop for your budget, you don't want to spend big money on features you don't need. We recommend you use antistatic tools for installing the SSD wearing an antistatic wrist strap will enhance safety. The preparations and tools required for replacing a MacBook (Pro) drive are identical to those necessary for any other system (see our general upgrading tutorial for notebooks): you need to work on a clean, electrostatic-free surface. Mac users will need to download similar cloning software – we chose the shareware tool SuperDuper! and describe the cloning process in more detail using this tool. The main difference to upgrading a Windows system is that the Samsung 850 PRO SSD (256GB) we chose comes with Windows migration software that guides the user through the cloning process (copying the Windows system plus the data to the new SSD).
