~$800 laptop advice

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Joel

Joel

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So I'm going to be doing my 3rd year of university in France next year and I won't be bringing my desktop with me. I have a Thinkpad which still works OK, but it's far too slow to be my everyday PC and really is only suitable for MS Office and light internet these days. As such, I'm looking for a new laptop. I hope to spend around $800 or so, but I think given a good deal I'd stretch to $1000.

It's a bit of an odd buying choice because I don't imagine I'll be keeping the laptop long term. I already have a desktop and a suitable school laptop, so I plan on selling whatever laptop I buy when I get back to Canada in the spring.

I think I'd like to keep screen size between 13"-15.6", and the only real performance benchmark I'm looking at is 60fps in Dota 2, which isn a particularly high bar at low/medium settings. So far I've been looking at an Ideapad Y410 and similar models, wondering if anyone had any other suggestions.

The other caveat is resale value. I'm considering a Macbook Pro or a new Macbok Air with a Haswell CPU depending on how well they hold their value, even though they're over budget. Would it be reasonable to expect a $1000 Macbook Air to sell for $650ish when I get back to Canada?

OS is irrelevant to me as well, honestly I'd probably end up mainly using Windows on a Macbook if I got one.
 
I like to buy my laptops used and put linux on them to keep them lean and fast. But that'd be more like the thinkpad you're getting rid of. I bought a couple of thinkpad x200s about a year or two ago for $200 each. They work really well. I also bought a new larger HDD for at least one of them. I was planning on getting new batteries for both of them, but I found that if I shopped carefully I could actually find some with batteries that were in good shape (likely had been replaced since the original).

Edit:

Two ways I can think of to spruce up an old laptop are to expand the ram and go SSD or a faster HDD.
 
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I was considering throwing an SSD in it, but I still run into the issue of only having a 4 year old Intel Core 2 Duo's integrated graphics. I'll likely put an SSD in the Thinkpad anyway and use it for school when I get back to Canada, but to use it as my only PC for 8+ months the integrated graphics just aren't strong enough.
 
Ended up ordering a Lenovo Y40 Ideapad today. 2 weeks ago there was a pricing error on the y410p laptop and it was being sold at $279 which is an absurdly low price. I knew it was an error but figured I'd place an order on the off chance they'd honour the pricing.

They ended up cancelling the orders but everyone affected was given a $100 coupon. Used it today on a Y40 which was on sale for $829, so with taxes, fees, and shipping included I bought it for just over $830. Unfortunately doesn't come with an SSD but the model with a 256gb SSD was $300 more expensive, for that amount of money I'll just install one myself later on.
 

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