Deal Of The Day: Score A Dell 15 Laptop For Under $400 And More Great Bargains
We're well into the back-to-school season at this point, and if you put off buying a laptop in hopes that some better deals would materialize, you're in luck. That is, if you're looking for a relatively cheap workhorse for general purpose computing chores, like researching projects and hammering out reports. For under $400, Best Buy's 'deal of the day' is a pretty good bargain.
Specifically, Best Buy is serving up a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop with a touchscreen display for $379.99 (save $250) right now. That's essentially higher-end netbook pricing (remember those?), except even the best netbooks back in the day were generally sluggish.
The big knock on this system is that it only has 8GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, which is paltry by 2024 standards. You can upgrade the system memory on your own, however, and still remain in the realm of affordability. And we'd recommend doing exactly that—as configured, only one of the two memory slots are occupied, so you could jam an inexpensive second 8GB memory module into the system for 16GB total.
Other specs include a 1920x1080 resolution (thankfully, Dell didn't cheap out with a regular HD display), powered by an Intel Core i5-1235U processor (10C/12T, up to 4.4GHz, 12MB L3 cache) and 512GB of solid state drive (SSD) storage. Sure, you're not to going to break any benchmark records, but not bad for a sub-$400 laptop.
If you have a bigger budget to work with and want something a bit of gaming chops, another laptop that's on sale is the HP Omen 16.1, which is marked down to $999.99 at Best Buy (save $400). It's bigger and badder (in a good way) in every sense, starting with the 16.1-inch IPS display, which offers up the same 1920x1080 resolution but at a much faster 165Hz (versus 60Hz) refresh rate, with NVIDIA G-SYNC support to boot.
This one is powered by an Intel Core i9-13900HX processor (24C/32T, up to 5.4GHz, 36MB L3 cache), 16GB of DDR5-5600 memory, a 1TB SSD, and a GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. It also features Thunderbolt 4 (with USB-C) connectivity, a four-zone RGB keyboard, HP Fast Charge support (HP says you can go from 0-50% in around 30 minutes), Wi-Fi 6E, and various other odds and ends.
Here are some more budget-friendly deals...
