There are two honest ways to buy a cheap computer, and one dishonest one. The honest ways: a refurbished business desktop (off-lease office machines with real CPUs, sold at a fraction of their original price) or a budget laptop chosen for what it actually does well. The dishonest one is the bottom shelf of new Windows laptops — underpowered machines that feel slow on day one. This page tracks live prices for all of them so you can see which is which.
The best-kept secret: refurbished business desktops
Corporate off-lease desktops — ThinkCentres, OptiPlexes, EliteDesks — are the strongest price-to-performance in computing. These are machines that sold for $700+ new, with desktop-class processors, now tracked at prices that undercut the cheapest new laptops:
What to check on any refurb listing: a 6-core or better Core i5, 8GB of RAM minimum (16GB is worth a small premium), an SSD rather than a hard drive, and the refurbisher's warranty terms. You'll need your own monitor and keyboard — see our live monitor price list for budget pairings. Planning to game on it? The best gaming system guide shows how these same towers take a graphics card.
Cheap laptops that are actually worth buying
Ranked by live tracked price, cheapest first:
Two rules keep you out of trouble at the budget end:
Chromebooks are the safe floor. At the same price, a Chromebook runs its lightweight OS well while a Windows machine struggles. If your life is in a browser, it's the better cheap laptop. Buying for a student? The back to school tech page pairs these laptops with dorm monitors and backup storage.
On Windows, 4GB of RAM is a dealbreaker. Windows 11 alone consumes most of it. Hold out for 8GB and SSD/UFS storage rather than eMMC — the price difference is small and the daily experience is not.
Refurbished laptops: the middle path
Off-lease business laptops hit the same value curve as refurb desktops — machines like this were built for corporate durability and sold at consumer-junk prices:
How to tell a cheap computer from a bad one
- Price the machine against its history, not its list price. Every machine here links to a price chart. Budget hardware "sales" are frequently the everyday price with a banner.
- Prefer last generation's mid-range to this generation's bottom rung. A refurbished i5 from a few years back outruns a new bargain-bin CPU in almost everything.
- Count the RAM and storage type before the brand. 8GB + SSD is the floor for a usable Windows machine; 4GB + eMMC is e-waste on a delay.
- Budget for the whole setup. A refurb desktop needs a monitor — factor a budget display into the comparison against an all-in-one laptop price.
Building up from parts instead? Our live component trackers price out CPUs, memory, and storage daily.