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.
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.
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.