The Core i3 and Ryzen 3 processors are fine for casual use and basic schoolwork but aren’t the best for multitasking the Core i5 and Ryzen 5 are faster and better at multitasking but rare in this price range.
You could buy a laptop with a hard drive and replace the drive with an SSD later to save some money, but that’s more upgrading than most people feel comfortable doing, so we concentrated on models that came with flash storage. But avoid Windows laptops with less than 64 GB of flash storage-you can’t even run Windows updates on them without an external drive. In our testing, we found that having flash storage (ideally an SSD, but an eMMC drive is also fast enough) instead of a traditional hard drive dramatically improved everyday performance, even more than a faster processor or more memory.
