1y ago

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.

69 comments

$300 is a really difficult price point for what youre asking for new. At the price, youre in the chromebook range, where even the windows machines are going to be as barebones as possible.
You want to step into the used market if you want customizable for $300. Getting something good thats a few years old like an lenovo carbon x1 looks possible, and they are a dream to update. The above supports linux with no issues.
- I see. There's not much of a choice outside the used thinkpad range then. Very well. Thank you
  
  Honestly, the value proposition of old business computers is almost unbeatable.
  Yes, it's not the most recent hardware, but decent enough, especially the chonky boi ThinkPads are very easy to repair/upgrade and built like tanks (though only Russian ones, they barely withstand an RPG hit, which is a shame).
  
  Yes. This is the way.
- As a follow up, if the price point were a bit higher (much higher? idk), what would the options be like for this request? edit: also thx for the current answer 🙏
  
  If you're looking at the customisable/upgradable thing, then Frameworks are great for that. You can buy them without (or with) a Windows licence, you can buy them without RAM or a hard drive if you want. But they are on the more expensive end of the scale. However, in future you can upgrade the guts without replacing the case/screen/etc.
- Cheap Chromebooks tend to break just like other cheap laptops. The only difference is that the OS may feel more responsive initially.

Framework announced their B-stock systems for $500. That's going to be your best bet for relatively new, upgradable, and kind close to $300.
Otherwise, gonna have to go used, and good luck with upgradability since everyone's been soldering everything on for a decade.
- Came here to make sure this was represented. $500 is a great price for a fully upgradable laptop.
- Plus the cost of your own ram, storage, etc.

Thinkpads will get you what you want. A T480 can be found at around that price and is basically fully upgradable and Linux compatible
- Yes this, everything new at that pricepoint is complete garbage, ewaste straight out the factory.
  The T480, while getting a little bit up there in age now, is still very capable having a quad core CPU, if you get both the internal and largest external battery it will rival M1 macbooks in battery life, two ram slots.
- This is what I have and I was in your situation, op.
- Thanks, and yes I'm looking at the used Thinkpad market. I was just curious if I could purchase anything of the sort new in my budget
  
  new budget computers are horrible. don't get them. they're old designs sloppily put into tacky new looking chassis for a higher price.
  hell there's probably a $300 budget laptop that's slower than my fucking <$100 11yo thinkpad t430

I got a used ThinkPad for that price a year ago. Needed a laptop, and was a broke student. Really repairable - it's easy to take apart, not glued, and most parts seem to be available at Aliexpress for reasonable prices. It's still doing it's job, and even though I could afford upgrading it now, I don't really see a reason to.
The last time I had a look at the market for new laptops, most things 300€ (which should be close enough to $300) would buy you where, judging by the components, bound to be painfully slow. If it really needs to be new, I'd look for stores that have discounts, and look up the model on iFixit or a simmilar resource to check how repairable it is.
- Thank you, I was simply surveying the market to see if there are any new laptops in this range to look at. Seems like that is not the case, so off to the used market I go.
  
  It doesn't necessarily need to be a ThinkPad either. Any used good quality business laptop should do the trick. My grandmother recently got an used EliteBook, and it's working quite well for her. I'd look for mid- to high-end models, with parts that aren't soldered - you should be able to find that out on the data sheet for the model in question.
  Any i5/R5 and up in a machine that isn't too old should handle pretty much everything most people expect from a laptop - for me that is running a browser, a Latex editor, a notes app, and an IDE, for the most part.
  I'd reccomend Linux, but that might be based more on my personal convictions, and a machine like that should also be able to run current Windows with no problems.

Upgradeable parts = non-soldered RAM and SSD?
- Partly

Do you need a laptop?
A mini PC may be a better bet - $300 on a mini PC will get you more hardware than a laptop at the same price as you're not paying for the screen or chassy but you'd then need to supply a screen (TV would do), keyboard and mouse.
If you need the mobility then it's a no go, but if you're more looking for a device at home a PC is better value.
If you do need the mobility of a laptop, then you won't get anything much new for $300 as others have said. You'd either need to increase your budget or look at second hand as others have said.
- Chassis
- May I recommend further a good desktop pc w/upgradable parts and a used thinkpad laptop for travelling? You can get a good thinkpad for work and small games for $20-50 and they tend to last forever and be easy to repair. my favorite is X series

You will struggle to find anything decent at that price new.
Plenty of good used options though, a used ThinkPad will have great Linux compatibility and be serviceable. They can be very cheap depending on how older hardware you can tolerate. There are other business grade laptops from Dell, HP etc that have good refurb deals too.
- I'm starting to realise that myself. It might just be a better idea to go used after all. Thanks

Most laptops won't allow you to update parts, especially at that price. I think you're better off getting a cheap laptop that has good reviews and you verify that Linux works in it. Personally, I've converted a few chromebooks to linux (making sure first that the CoreBoot BIOS/firmware works on these laptops).

Used business/enterprise stuff is generally decent, HP Elitebooks, Lenovo Thinkpads, etc..
Notebookcheck.net has an incredible search tool and they'll have info about how difficult it is to open up and what items can be replaced.

ThinkPad 470 is not mentioned? Was it a bad choiseI? I want fedora om it?
- There's nothing wrong with the T470, it's just an older model. If you find a really good deal on one then get it. If not, then go for the T480 since it has a newer CPU and better battery life.
  
  I think Ive got a great deal, it works fine now, hope it still will do woth fedora 39
- I was simply asking for newer laptops. I am considering the used thinkpads alongside any recommendations here so I feel more informed
  
  Business Dells are also worth considering. They’re comparable to the Thinkpad.

Thinkpad.
A 30 series would do. I heard the series afterward are going downhill, except for W541 and T480.
I myself am rocking an X230 and W530.
- i love my t430 <3
  i've heard the t440p isn't that bad though, if you replace the trackpad with the one from the t450
  
  Ooh, you might be right! The biggest complaint on the 40 series seems to be that touchpad. The T440p seems like a solid machine. I've heard T440 and X240 are utter trash.
- Thank you, I'll keep those models in mind along with the slightly newer T480 model

The last thing you should be worrying about when buying a budget laptop is the expandability of the ram. it seriously doesn't matter if you only have 4gb, Linux is so lightweight it runs completely fine.
imo you should be worrying about:
display quality (even some ips displays look horrible)
build quality (physically feel the keyboard, chassis flex, etc)
battery life (for heavily used laptops account for the price of a replacement. for old thinkpads you can extend it dramatically with bigger bstteries)
cpu speed (core count, single core performance, hyperthreading, etc. new celerons lose to i5s from 2013 lmao)
storage (MAKE SURE IT'S NOT EMMC!!)
- I would say 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum you should consider buying for desktop Linux now. With 4GB, you need a lightweight distro if you want enough RAM left to run a web browser without swapping.
  
  And don’t forget that someone running Linux might need to have a Windows VM for some situations. So you need to have at least 8Gb of RAM to be able to allocate 4Gb to this Virtual Machine.
  Otherwise if you just use Linux 4 might be enough but really limiting.
  
  Yup, KDE is out of the question with 4gb
  
  really? my kde laptop manages fine with 4gb with a few heavy ff tabs open
- 4 GB RAM is not enough if you plan on using multiple tabs on a browser. And I don't mean a ridiculous number of tabs. You might run out from 4 tabs or so.
- Thanks for the comment, but my workflow will require some RAM. I'll look towards the older thinkpads, thanks!

Get a used Thinkpad. Shop around eBay for a T480 or T490 which should be at that price range. Solid machines with great Linux compatibility. Anything new will be much worse at that price point. If you desperately searching for something new maybe a HP 255 G9 with a Rzyen 3 would be fitting. Not as good built quality wise and I'm not sure about Linux compatibility but at least it is upgradable. (https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c08017466)
- Thanks, yes, I'm looking at the T480 as an option. I was just curious about what I could find new in this range that fits my needs, and so far it seems like there isn't such a product.

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: https://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.

Framework laptops
- Framework machines are great, and certainly upgradeable, but $300 they are most certainly not.
  
  True ....My bad, forgot about the 300$ budget part

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).
- 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
  
  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

With budget, soldered is what you're going to get because budget means they're going to save every penny they can even minor things like so-dimm sockets.

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.
https://frame.work/marketplace?outlet[]=Factory+seconds&outlet[]=Last+gen&outlet[]=Refurbished&availability[]=in_stock&availability[]=coming_soon
- 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.
  
  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.

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...🤣

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