I am looking for a good laptop for when my tax return comes around and I am having troubles finding one.
My budget is anywhere from $450-500(about what I will have left over after paying of bills and getting cought up etc)
I am look for something with a good processor over 2.5ghz or so( would like to have a 3ghz)
At least 4gb of ram or more, at least a 15 inch display, and 500gb of storage
I know it ain't much to go on but I am not wanting one of those crazy "gaming" laptops that cost over $1000 just something that can play a few games (I got steam games I could never run) and be able to emulate ps2 games and all that fun stuff, and I figured I would ask if anyone on here would have a good lead for me.
$450 to $500 USD isn't going to get you much on the laptop market ATM. Unless you get really lucky with a sale/deal.
Brands to look into right now are Leveno, and Dell (Dell seems to be returning to it's good manufacturing days of late).
In that budget range absolutely STAY AWAY form HP and Toshiba you may be able to buy a laptop with usable specs from them at those prices but it will break inside 2 years.
Something you may want to consider is searching Amazon, Newegg, and TigerDirect for refurbished deals. If you pair a refurb (which interestingly enough often have better fault statistics than the non refurnished products do to consumer protection laws.) With a consumer product warranty (refurbs don't normally have a manufacture warranty, at least not one longer than a year/ 6 months) you can end up with a better product for cheaper.
I got a Dell about 2.5 years ago and I can vouch for them making a comeback. I'm quite satisfied with my laptop.
So I finally got a laptop that serves what I want to do with one and got lucky to find at the pc store where I live.
I got ASUS ROG GL551JW-DS71 for around $780, and I am happy with it. I know it isn't the newer model or anything but it ill be more than enough to run the stuff that I am wanting to.It took awhile to decide on this laptop too, I didn't want to spend over $1000 and they had other selections in my budget range of at least $850(took Ryex word on about not getting much for $500 and uped it since I just got a raise in pay) the but most of them weren't as powerful as this one sad to say, and I have a friend who has one so I know it works good.
Sounds like you found a good one. I don't personalty have any experience with Asus's laptops but they are a good brand sadly they never appear on shelves inside the US
You better pray to laptop Jesus that your fans stay in good shape, because on my ASUS, my fans got worse and worse until my motherboard overheated, and I ended up spending $200 on repairs and still ended up buying a new laptop.
In terms of the computer itself though, everything was solid, good performance, no driver errors or stupid bloatware.
The place I bought the laptop from, offers a 3 years warranty that you can pay a bit extra for, so I got it just in case when I bought the laptop.
And I do hope that the fans hold out as well, I'm ordering a cooling stand to help it stay somewhat cooled down most of the time.