Best productivity notebook around $650?

[alkemyst]

My friend's laptop's LCD went out and the machine is not worth repairing. She's a single mom with a career in Social Work so she's not making a ton of money.

She'd love a Mac Book, but unfortunately the closest is around $850 refurbished that I could find and only a 13.3"...she was hoping to stay with a 15" screen.

She will carry this to all her clients and mostly work on Word and Excel, plus email/web.

Pretty light duty, but she needs something reliable.

Thanks

 

[Puddle Jumper]

With that budget I would go with the base configuration of a Dell Latitude E5520 and add 4gb of ram and the optional 9 cell battery to it. That should come out to ~$670 and would give her a good business class system with good battery life and enough power for anything she should need

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/latitude-e5520/fs

 

[alkemyst]

i forwarded her that. Not familar with the i3 chips as much as the i5/7's.

I love my i5 in my MBP.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

i forwarded her that. Not familar with the i3 chips as much as the i5/7's.

I love my i5 in my MBP.

They're basally the same as the i5's with some features like Turbo Boost removed to hit the lower price point so they are more than sufficient for the average user.

 

[alkemyst]

she just updated me that she can usually plug in and she can pay $1200 if $100/month for 12 months.