Best laptop under $500 of 2020 from HP, Lenovo, Acer and more - CNET

Wading through cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is a chore, especially if you need one right now for work or remote learning.

If you suspect you'll be holding onto your new laptop a while, though, see if you can stretch your budget to buy a slightly more expensive laptop to accommodate a little more memory or a processor with more cores than you were otherwise considering.

Even better, if you're comfortable with it, think about an affordable laptop with a replaceable battery, upgradable memory, graphics card and storage or all of the above.

But if your internal storage is a slow-spinning hard drive that comes in a lot of cheap laptop models, even fast external storage is unlikely to help speed up loading Windows or applications.

As long as you manage your expectations when it comes to options and specs, you can still get quite a bit with a budget laptop model, including good battery life and a reasonably lightweight laptop body. .

You'll see a lot of cheap laptops listed as coming with Windows 10 S, a stripped-down and locked-down version of the operating system intended for use by schools -- it only allows you to install applications from the Windows Store, forces you to use Microsoft's Edge browser and includes a subset of the administrative tools in Windows 10 Pro.

It's easier to find inexpensive Chromebooks than Windows laptops, making it one of the most popular categories of budget laptop options on the market, though we're also seeing a lot more Chromebooks in the $500 to $1,000 range.

That's because Google's Chrome OS isn't nearly as power-hungry as Windows (check the specs), so you can get by with a lower-end processor, slower storage and less screen resolution or memory -- just a few of the components that make a laptop expensive. .

But the flip side is that while Chrome OS isn't as power hungry as Windows, Chrome and Google apps are unfortunately more of a memory hog than you'd expect, and if you go too low with the processor or skimp on memory, the system will still feel slow.

Read more: Best cheap gaming laptop under $1,000 to get in 2020   .

For a cheap gaming laptop, though, you'll still have to break the $500 ceiling to suffice for most games.

The least expensive budget laptops suitable for a solid gaming performance experience -- those with even moderately powerful discrete graphics processors, will run you closer to $700.

Although, if you like to live on the bleeding edge, cloud gaming services such as Google Stadia and Microsoft Game Pass Ultimate will let you play games on laptops with specs that hit the under-$500 mark.

With that comes a need for a faster processor with more cores, more memory -- 8GB is the bare minimum -- and more storage for applications and the operating system itself.

Considering all specs and options -- from battery life to storage space, screen resolution, screen size, core processor performance and general machine and battery performance -- these are a few of our top picks for 2020's best Windows laptops and Chromebooks under the $500 budget, along with their pros and cons.

It's somewhat small with a 13-inch, full HD display, but the Flex 5 delivers convertible laptop convenience as well as excellent performance and battery life for the money thanks to an Intel Core i3-10110U processor, 4GB memory and  64GB SSD storage

 Amazon currently offers a Core i3 8GB model for $480 -- you'll also see listings with 4GB RAM, but that's way too little memory for Windows, which barely gets by on 8GB

Newer models are on their way -- not quite in stock yet -- and there's a 2020 model that just squeaks under $500, but it's got a higher-end Ryzen 5 processor and more storage