I bought the cheapest laptop with 64GB RAM for just over $800; here’s how I did it
Learning the tricks of the trade when it comes to refurbished
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Ultra-portable laptops withmobile workstationfeatures are all the rage ever sinceAppleunleashed its MacBook Pro 16-inch behemoth earlier this year.
Although no Windows laptop can exactly match Apple’s features, theDellXPS 15 comes near, and another Dell product, theLatitude 7490, offers something else that might lure prospective power buyers looking for a bargain.
For $789, a massive 67% off list price, you get abusiness laptopthat weighs just over three pounds, with three year onsite warranty, a 14-inch full HD display, a quad CoreIntelCore i5 CPU,Windows 10Pro and a 256GB SATA SSD.
DIY paradise
Where the 7490 outranks other portable laptops is that it is eminently upgradable, which we know as purchased one second hand. It has two memory banks so you can upgrade the system memory to 64GB using two 32GB SODIMM; which we did.
Newegg sells a pair of these for $257, so altogether you are looking at an outlay of about $1040, a bargain assuming you can open the chassis and pop the modules in and out; we did it and it took just over two minutes.
We purchased a refurbishedDell Latitude 7490 from Webuy in the UKfor £355/$467 with an additional 64GB memory for £260/$341; Webuy provides with two year warranty as standard but the laptop we purchased came with two-year Dell ProSupport as well, from the three-year warranty that come by default with the laptop.
You can swap most components inside and it has three M.2 expansion slots. The rest of the specs is not too shabby; a backlit keyboard, three USB ports, an HDMI one and a Type-C/DisplayPort one, a microSD card slot and a 60Whr battery make it a very attractive proposal at this price.
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Other affordable, quad-core laptops with a small footprint, a full HD display and capable of taking 64GB RAM include theLenovoThinkPad E495, the Lenovo ThinkPad E490, theHPProBook 645 G4,HP Elitebook 840 G5and G6.
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
Google puts Nvidia on high alert as it showcases Trillium, its rival AI chip, while promising to bring H200 Tensor Core GPUs within days
A new form of macOS malware is being used by devious North Korean hackers
How to turn off Meta AI
