Laptop Buying Advice

I am lost in the sauce when it comes to computers... If one of you guys could point me in the right direction I would be greatly appreciative!!!
Use:
-Online classes using Blackboard (Must be able to use Java)
- Forum browsing
- YouTube
- Listening to music...

Conditions:
I will be dragging this thing all over the place. It needs to be small enough to easily be placed in a backpack and not take up a ton of room. Somewhere in the 12-15 inch range would be ideal. Battery life isn't a huge deal since I will be close to an outlet for the most part but 6 hours or so would be awesome. It must be Windows 10...

Price:
I'd love to stay under $500.

Opinions?

 

Any cheap laptop will be able to do those things easily. Shoot for something with good battery life

 

I love the size of my 14" Thinkpad. It's nice to type on, and 1920x1080 is a nice resolution for that size screen.

I also have a 11" Lenovo Yoga, I find it a bit too small to spend a significant amount of time using.

 

I looked at some of the Lenovo T series laptops online and hope to find some in person to check out.

 

Check out the Dell website. They are having some sales right now. Lots of good options in your price range. I am looking at an XPS 2 in 1 for school/business.

 

Not sure what retailers are near you. Back to school specials might start soon. Make sure to price match, as places like Best Buy seem to conveniently not update sales prices in store.

 

Finding any in store around here is proving difficult. I'm gonna head to best buy this weekend and see what they have in stock. I'd like to get a feel for a few befor I pull the trigger.

 

Go for a laptop with touchscreen. Quite useful.

 

ASUS makes decent laptops, as does Dell as someone mentioned. I would not recommend buying from Best Buy as you can easily find the laptop online through Amazon or Newegg cheaper. If you do decide to buy from Best Buy make sure you do not get suckered into buying anything from Geek Squad.

 

I had planned on going and getting a feel for a couple different models and then price shop for them online. I buy pretty much everything on Amazon but I find it kind of difficult to shop for computers on Amazon if you don't have a specific model you are after. There are tons of refurbished units on there and it's hard to tell for me what's new and what's a 6 year old laptop with windows 10 on it. I ordered a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 when luckily a coworker advised me that it was at least 6 years old if not older.

 

Try looking at laptops on newegg.com. You can filter the laptops by (modern) hardware. I don't think Newegg carries anything too old, unless refurbished items marked as such.

Then you can see if Amazon or someone local carries the model or similar that you like.

 

Thanks for everyones advice and ideas! I ended up ordering an Acer Aspire E15. It had a 1080 screen, expandable memory and hard drive plus a TON of good reviews. Hopefully it serves me well!

 

To anyone that cares I got my new laptop in yesterday and LOVE it. Its very easy to use, wasn't packed with bloat ware and seems to run very very quickly (by my standards). I am going to expand the memory and add another 4GB of RAM and a buddy highly suggested changing to a solid state hard drive. For the money there wasn't another laptop out there under $500 with a full HD screen, backlit keyboard and the gen 7 Core processor.

 

at least a quad core right? :O

 

First thing I do with any unit, laptop or tower, SSD for main OS drive. Makes any unit faster than shiza...

 

true and i have been out of computers for a while but trying to get back into it but IIRC they are bottle necked by the connector and for faster speed you can use an m.2 SSD and is faster?
also since he is starting fresh i would partition the drive so it doesnt keep trying to write to it. made that mistake when i built my mid tower. will end up slowing down and shortening the life of the ssd

 

Not a quad core, for what I will be doing with it this will be more than enough. Streaming 4K video is about as demanding as I will be on it and it does that flawlessly. It come with 4gb of ram and I will be getting another 4 from Ballistix and I will be swapping the 1TB hard drive for a 250gb SSD down the road if it slows down. I really happy with the performance now so anything above this is just icing on the cake if you ask me. Here are the specs on the new i3.