Need some help picking out a laptop for my son.
I know nothing about them.
$500 budget.
It’s for school but I’m sure he’ll play games on it.
Any help is appreciated.
how old is he?
BestBuy has a decent Dell for just under $500:
IF you’re willing to go with a refurb, Amazon and Reebolo both offer inexpensive options with very fast processors, plus up to 2 years warranty. You can get a whole lot more machine for the same money.
I’ve had four different Lenovo Thinkpads from them, all blazing fast. Still using two of them. Each arrived looking essentially new.
That said, I don’t know how appropriate a Thinkpad would be for a Gamer. They’re durable with metal chassis and solid state Drives - but aimed at Business/Industrial.
I love their Trackpoint and Touchscreen options.
Just bought a MacBook Air refurb off Amazon. 2019 model, was about $200 and change. Looks and performs as if its brand new.
Gaming is a whole different world, though. That requires more hardware than a laptop simply for working.
Turning 17 next week.
Gamer.
Blazing Processor, as much RAM as you can possibly stuff into it, and some Video Card that’s essentially a dedicated coprocessor with gigantic RAM of its own.
Those are the three things they want.
It’s all expensive, too.
if it were me i’d do what GG suggested and go with the best buy dell option. specially because of warranty, machine is pretty good, can do most of the stuff most 17 year olds will do, yeah its no major gaming box, but if hes a hard core gamer, he’d already be telling you what he wanted and sure as hell wouldnt be a 500.00 rig. @TheAirHawk is right about get the most ram and best processor you can afford. add to it the most video card/video ram, and voila youve got a dang good box.. Dell is what we use at the University, and what we recommend to our students to buy. They’re durable, they have SSd’s good form factors, great warranties, and are encryptable as well for security reasons. all of which we do as well. 500 is not tons in high end laptops, but you can still get a good all around rig for him for that if you dig in a nd look like GG did there. hope that helps some.
Check with the school. Sometimes they have an arrangement with a computer manufacturer to sell laptops to students. Also, some manufacturers may offer a student discount to anyone with a student ID. I know Dell and Apple do, or used to.
I have bought my last couple of laptops off ebay. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad that I have about $100 in. It is a fair number of years old, but runs Windows 11. I had to install a drive in it, but it is mostly used to surf the internet and word processing.
i dont know why i didnt mention this cause we do ourselves, with Dell at the medschool. so yeah. great advice.
Lenovo / ibm thinkpads ive always been skittish over ever since they found and they admitted that there were specific spy on me chips in there by the chi coms years ago.. i mean i know its in all of em probaly, but just dont go out there and make it blatant that it can be found, and then admit it too.. 
The chicoms stole my data from the federal government at least a couple of times during my career there. As a result, I am provided lifetime credit monitoring. Other accounts have been been hacked several times over the years. I don’t think anything is private anymore.
If you haven’t bought one yet.
Thank you , still looking but that looks good to go.
I was just looking through “Today’s Deals” and that one popped up and I remembered your post.
The Celeron chip might be a poor choice if he wants to do some gaming.
That’s very similar to the one I just bought (except for I got a touchscreen model and an i7 processor)
A high-end gaming rig with a 17” screen will be three grand or more. My last one (thanks to WA’s asinine ban on highpower laptops) came from XoticP, a Sager NP9380 back when the industry gave “user upgradeable gaming laptops” a try about ten years ago.
ryzen > intel.. i run a few amd boxes and the m3 apple.
Im also in the AMD over Intel camp.