Travel Laptop

I am using a Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook Plus with an i3 chip. Solid machine with excellent battery time. I would stay away from any cheap computer unless it is for someone who is likely to be rough on it...
 
Offline any differences in usage?
I am not that well versed, but there my Excel spreadsheets are cloud based but are available offline. I do not have a qualified answer. But for everyday use, my Chromie is king. I haven't got Python running on it yet, but that could be the operator...

You can run your own experiment, if you have $500 to $600 to play with. Buy a decent Lenovo Chromebook from Costco and use it for awhile. Test the heck out of it. You have 90 days to return it. Do not buy an i7, they consume too much energy cutting battery time. The Chrome O/S is super lightweight. Speedy and conservative power use. Office 365 is your friend in a Chromebook Plus scenario.
 
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I’ve been buying laptops for our team for nearly 20 years. Dell latitude has been the sweet spot for cost/performance/reliability. We tried a couple of XPSs but they don’t seem to age as well - driver entanglements, burned memory socket, and overheating or three problems I saw with XPS laptops in 2023.

agree on dellrefurbished.com. Just found a xeon-grade precision workstation with external facing drive bays, caught it at the right time for $350. Added a used cpu and 32GB additional ram, and this machine 3 years ago would have cost $4k. they had a 50% off deal on these, normally $750 or so.
 
Look on BackMarket website or Swappa you can find some excellent deals on those sites. Just read the seller reviews on BackMarket but I’ve never had a problem with any of them. Personally I’d stay away from any Windows laptop but that’s just me. If you do want that then go Lenovo they are a great brand. I’d never buy another Dell or HP they are not good from my and my family’s experiences with them. I just bought my MacBook Pro on BackMarket for around $800 but they have plenty of budget laptops of all brands on there. I just replaced my 2015 Lenovo with the MacBook. But still keeping the Lenovo around for mom to use as she wanted a laptop.
 
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