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I have a friend who needs a new laptop, budget-conscious, that's got at least 500GB and 6GB of RAM. I'm not really sure where to point them, as I haven't bought a laptop in years and have no idea who is a good manufacturer and where to go to price one out. The most intensive thing it will have to do is run Skype, so it doesn't need to be a monster. It's just a work/study machine.

Acer Extensa 2510?

It may not have the 6GB RAM, but that is remedied easily enough, and aside from no backlight on the keyboard, the review sites praise it as one of the best ones to be had at/near the $500 price point.

This was from about 10min web searching, I assume deep research would turn up at least a few more worthy competitors.

--Patrick

In my experience for Windows laptops, Acer is the way to go.

"needs 6 GB of RAM"
"the most intensive thing it will run is Skype"
Does not compute

That said, Acers tend to be fairly good in the price/quality department. Not the absolute best, but a sensible choice.

I would've recommended a minimum of 4GB, actually. That seems to be the sweet spot these days for most OSes.

--Patrick

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834317600

It meets your specs, but I don't know much about the model.

Lenovo's about on par with Acer. I myself prefer Asus, but I generally buy a heftier machine with a higher price point.

GasBandit said:

Lenovo's about on par with Acer. I myself prefer Asus, but I generally buy a heftier machine with a higher price point.

Click to expand...

...that isn't made by Apple, we know.

HP has more than a few decent models, but most of theirs obviously look and feel like they were designed to be mass-produced as quickly as possible.

--Patrick