Help finding cheap laptop w/decent screen + SSD

[Yuriman]

My brother asked me to pick out a laptop for his roommates yesterday. They were looking to spend ~$600, and would:

-Not be gaming, so IGP is fine
-Not be unplugging it (much), so tiny battery is fine
-Not be moving it much, so thin and light are unnecessary
-Not be doing more than Powerpoint and M$ Word
-Not be downloading movies and such, so not much storage is necessary

They want a ~15" laptop.

I'm thinking Haswell Celeron/Pentium + 4GB RAM + small SSD + 1080P screen would be perfect, but this doesn't seem to exist. As prices go up, it seems most laptops jump from BayTrail dual (and occasionally a quad) to i3/i5/i7, 8GB RAM, discrete GPUs, etc. before resolution goes past 1366x768 and mechanical drives go away.

Normally I'd just order a separate SSD and have my brother swap the drive out, but even finding an i3 or lower with a 900/1050/1080P screen is basically impossible. Oddly, I've seen a few Chromebooks that fit the bill, but they need M$ Office.

This sounds to me like a nearly ideal use-case for a desktop, but they're pretty set on it being a "portable".

Any ideas?

 

[Trombe]

New inspiron 15 7000 series is $650 for the base model comes with 1080p ips touchscreen and broadwell i5, but you'll need to get and install your own ssd which would bump up the price a bit. There's probably a coupon somewhere to lower the price at dell direct you can find too, like 50 off 600 or so.
http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productdetails/inspiron-15-7548-laptop

 

[Ketchup]

Tell him to go to BB (or whatever is nearby) and pick out a good laptop that is $100 less than he is willing to pay.

Have him buy one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148820

Use a free app (I like Todo Backup) to clone the hard drive to the SSD.

He will not only have a fast hard drive, he won't have to worry about making recovery media, or ordering some later if needed.

For laptops, there are a lot of options, but something like this looks great:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...38&ignorebbr=1

or pay a little more and get a Broadwell:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...36&ignorebbr=1

 

[Yuriman]

Sadly both of those are 1366x768, ketchup, but I appreciate the recommendations. Battery life and processor speed are pretty much irrelevant in this use-case as long as it's not Bay Trail / Cat cores.

As for the Dell, $750 is hard to swallow for a web browsing and M$ Word laptop that will probably never be moved.

 

[Ketchup]

Gotcha. It's going to be hard to get past that resolution on a 15" at that price point. Here is one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...09&ignorebbr=1