Rent to Own Laptops Specs

After years of faithful service, my Toshiba Satellite is ready to retire. I'm still in college, and like most of my peers, still broke. My parents bought my first laptop, but this time the bill is on me. Since I can't drop $1000 on something cool(or for some of you decent), I have turned to rent-to-own like Aarons, BestWay, RentACenter, etc where I can make payments.

As a benchmark, my Satellite had an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600. I would like something at the very least the equivalent. But I would really prefer something better obviously.

Based on the retailers I've been to, they all offer Pentium or AMD Processors. As far as I've known Intel is the best and AMD is more for just a dedicated gamer. I don't game much on my computers but I was considering Star Wars: The Old Republic when I made my purchase. But regardless I still need all around performance. Also, didn't Pentium originally come out back in like the 2000s? I remember my mother's first Desktop PC had Intel Pentium, but from my research this new line is Dual Core? On the flip side, there was one retailer that offered an i3 Processor, which I know is close to the top of the line so that will probably be my safe bet.

To keep from listing every single processor on the laptops I run across, I will only list those that I believe to be the "best" in the lineup. But for those more savvy than me, feel free to chime in with suggestions. I will list the few AMDs though because I have no clue how to decipher how they measure up to Intel's product line, if at all. It seems to me though that all the "high end" laptops these retailers offer have AMD processors, but I am just hesitant about the brand. I thought if I could get a few experts to put the specs in easy to understand verbage I might feel a little better about the whole thing.


Intel i3
i3-3217U

Intel Pentium
987
B980
B950 (2B)
T4500 (Listed only as "Dual Core", but I assume it is Pentium)


AMD
E-300
C60
A6-4455M
A8-4500M
A4-3305M
Athlon II

Ah, hire purchase. I'd be wary of that since it often costs more and if you can't keep up with payments, then you either lose the money and don't keep the laptop or end up running debts up.

In terms of life, why is the Toshiba laptop nearing end of life? Equivalent performance would come at a fraction of the cost now, due to hardware advances... a laptop that has the equivalent price than the Toshiba had when it was new would be higher spec. I'd recommend trying to think of a budget first.

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The Pentium brand did come out in the 2000s but the CPU itself is kept as the low end spectrum (not the lowest, that falls to the Celeron). The new Pentium CPUs are based on the current architechture but with a lower spec. Without looking at benchmarks, I would imagine the Pentium to have similar performance to the Core 2 Duo. However in this day and age I'd recommend a quad core. Decent quad core laptops aren't that costly. I'm not familiar with the E-300 or the C60 CPUs from AMD but the Athlon is the low end of the AMD processor spectrum. The A4, A6 and A8 are APUs (CPU and GPU on one chip) aimed at the netbook and nettop markets. Come with decent performance at a decent price.

I've heard plenty of "horror stories" about RTO but really what choice do I have? Sure I could save but I need to still finish school, I can't go an entire semester or more without a laptop. I barely get by getting to the library and mooching off friends as it is. Based on the plan which is only 12 months, they make about $200 off me compared to the actual retail price. Being in sales formally myself I understand the verbage pretty well. It's their own version of financing. I could do the same thing at the big box stores such as BestBuy, CompUSA, etc. The only thing is their versions come in the form of a credit card. But they only approved me for $300, which won't get me much at all.


The Toshiba Tech on the phone told me it sounds like it needs a new motherboard. It shuts off randomly and when it turns on the screen sometimes won't work. He said it would need to be diagnosed to be for sure though. It costs $250 for them to do a diagnostic including shipping costs. That $250 will be applied towards the repair work as well; which he said could cost as much as $700. This laptop cost around that when it came out, so I don't see a reason to invest in it further.

It makes sense that due to the strides in technology the Pentium would be on par to my Core 2 Duo. I will look at Intel's site and I guess compare side by side the Pentiums and my current Core 2 Duo to see which comes out more as an upgrade. However if the money is not far off, I may stretch for the i3. I will eliminate the AMDs completely out of the equation if I can't get any real information on them.

If you absolutely need a laptop right now, just get a chrome book. They're affordable, pretty reliable, and have decent batter life. IIRC, Samsung has one for 250. In the meantime, you could save your money for something better.

quote hiigaran

so how much money are you willing to spend?

If I can make payments it doesn't really matter. I don't mind paying for something nice. But as far as cash in hand only a couple hundred bucks.

3-4 months maybe. Which APUs would those be? I can try to look for them.

quote harbin91

That would largely depend on what he needs the laptop for. Chromebook is fine for largely browsing the internet and listening to music but since everything sits in the cloud he would require constant internet access. I know it uses a version of Linux but I'm not entirely sure how it works if you lose connectivity. If he was gonna use a Linux OS then I'd recommend something else than that TBH.

If he's a student, I'd say he's probably gonna use this laptop primarily for school work, which would be ideal for a Chromebook because it saves documents to the cloud, meaning he could access his documents from any computer. Also, AFAIK, most colleges and universities have internet access throughout their campuses, so I doubt that connectivity would be an issue. Even so, Chromebooks can still function while offline (google docs WILL work, IIRC).