In general, most new business line machines with Windows 10 Professional will have downgrade rights. In practice, even if sold with Windows 10 (non-Pro, what used to be "Home") most Dell and Lenovo machines will have a royalty-OEM key in the BIOS, and be downgradeable in practice even if not technically licensed for it.

Keep in mind that on the next generation of machines post-Sky Lake (coming out late this year, probably early next for real retail availability) will officially be unsupported with any earlier OS, and while it's not clear that means you can't use Windows 7, it does mean that driver support is going to be a lot more limited.

I haven't encountered an HP (of any description) yet that didn't still have the SLIC keys for Windows 7 baked in. This includes the HP Stream Mini that I had to temporarily install Windows 7 on for compatibility reasons.

Correct, access to the license. If it is baked in, no worries. This isn't always the case, and as mentioned in the future it won't be possible at all to use an OS older than W10.

How old of the Dell laptops take the cheaper 8GB DDR3L 1600 (PC3L 12800) 1.35v Laptop Memory that is $30-$40 a stick ?

and do any of the lower priced Dell laptops have Nvideo card ?
A program I would like to use checks for a Nvideo card :(

looking for a $200-$300 used Dell laptop and then add 8gbx2 memory and SSD

Thanks for your help

Any of the i5-2xxxM and i5-3xxxM generation machines from Dell will take that memory (e.g. E6x20 and E6x30), and will go to 16GB memory. The older of the two generations (E6x20/i5-2xxxM) will not get the power savings advantage of the DDR3L/1.35V memory as they are too old but DD3RL will work just fine at 1.5V.

Machines older than that (e.g. anything Core 2, or the first generation i5 machines -- E6x10 /i5-520M) is going to be limited to 4GB DIMMs and 8GB memory total.

I think you mean "Nvidia"

None of the 13.3" or smaller business machines of those generations (from any manufacturer I'm aware of, not just Dell) have a discrete GPU, whether AMD or Nvidia.

There are some smaller 11"-13" consumer ones that do like the 1st-generation Sony Vaio Z or the Alienware m11x or Alienware 13

Look at the E6420 or E6430 (14") although I don't know if you'll find one with the Nvidia GPU in that price range.

Plenty of E6420s and some E6430s available in that price range on eBay. Some even include SSD. eBay also has a filter you can apply for dedicated graphics vs. integrated to easily sort through the machines.

I don't think it's a particularly good deal, especially for the OP given his lack of interest in touch screen, but the Dell Inspiron 11 3000 is probably the closest current-gen equivalent to a netbook that I can think of, and the config linked to below is surprisingly high-end with Skylake i3, AC WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, SSD, and back-lit keyboard. I still think I'd wait to see if the LG Gram 13 came back in stock at Microsoft Store for $497, but if you're 100% married to something 11.6 or smaller, the Inspiron 11 3000 is probably the most modern equivalent outside of the Asus T100HA.

Even though it's a tablet/hybrid, I thought I'd point out that the very capable Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (64gb/4gb/Core M) is on sale for $300 INCLUDING keyboard at A4C.com (coupon code TECH25). I'm actually considering this myself up against the less powerful Asus T100HA ($300, Cherry Trail Atom), but the lack of a true clamshell keyboard has me second-guessing (which is the main reason I ditched my Surface Pro and my original Surface sits on the kitchen counter 100% of the time (though it does still get a lot of use for casual email/text/security cam/epicurious)... there is at least a clamshell keyboard available for the Venue 11 Pro, but it's relatively pricey ($120 new, $60-$75 on eBay) and it does double the battery life to 15+ hours. If my new employer tries to saddle me with a heft laptop, I'll have to decide between the Venue 11 Pro or the Asus T100HA.

I have the one-generation older 7130, with 8gb (and an i5-4300Y processor an upgraded 512gb SSD) and the clamshell keyboard. I paid about $500 total between the two, and am very pleased with.

I don't get anywhere near 15 hours use, but the battery life on the 7130 is slightly worse to begin with and I'm a heavy user (and have terrible eyesight and tend to run my screen on the brighter side.)

The machine is a bit too chunky for real "tablet" use to any great extent, but it makes a great PDF reader, and as a second travel notebook it is just fast enough to be really useful, and just large enough to be really useful. It's a bit bulky for an 10.8" machine -- it could easily have an 11.6 and maybe even a 12" screen just by having narrower bezels --but the keyboard is by far the best I've used on a machine this small, and insanely better than the keyboards in el-cheapo 10.1" and 11.6" netbooks I tried out 6-7 years ago when those were a big thing.)

OTOH, as you note, it's a $120 keyboard, and the cheapest netbooks for under $200 for the whole system.

Saw this Amazon deal of the day and figured it was worth highlighting in this thread: .

Probably slightly heavier than the OP's desires, and the drive is 128 GB instead of 160--but it's a solid state drive. One of the reviews indicates that the battery lasts about six hours, which sounds about right given the specs.

Celeron... yuck...

I saw that one on slick deals and was going to post it before I double-checked the PassMark scores of that CPU. It would need to be in the $150 range for me to recommend that to anyone, and then it'd probably be very specifically to someone that refused an equivalently speced thinner and lighter tablet/hybrid. That said, the talk in the SlickDeals thread seems to praise it with very little, if any, complaints about the CPU. Most of the focus seems to be on the durability/ruggedness and it seems to be mostly people who don't want a tablet/hybrid for whatever reason.

I used to be of the rugged business laptop mindset, but 2 years of working on super thin/light consumer machines has shifted my opinion and I'll probably never again carry anything over 3lb, and nothing over 1.5-2lb for a screen 11.6" or less. I can understand why someone managing an IT department wouldn't roll-out this kind of device, but if it's my choice and my dime if it tumbles to the sidewalk, I'll take thin/light and pretend to have some faith in my own manual dexterity.

Celeron by itself is not the problem. The names "Celeron" and "Pentium" vaguely mean a slower CPU than i3/i5/i7 but by how much, that's not decided by these names. In short: an U or Y after the model number indicates a usable CPU.

If the CPU has a prefix like D,N,Z,J (not G though!) then it's some sort of Atom. These are - in broad terms - crap, especially in single thread performance. A seven year old desktop CPU wipes the floor with the fastest Atom today (of course, the Atom will have a much lower TDP but that doesn't help in itself it's slowness). Typical names are Atom D525, Pentium N3700, Celeron J1900.

If the CPU is called Pentium / Celeron some-number and has a postfix like E, U or Y (E is perhaps embedded, U is ultra low I guess, hell knows what Y is but it's even lower TDP than U) then it's a mobile CPU based on the same technology as i3/i5/i7 and has much better single thread performance and not worse overall performance. Typical names: Celeron 847 (I believe this was the last to actually not have an E/U/Y postfix and only three digits so the naming is different), Celeron 1017U, Pentium 3556U. The number of thousands is the generation: the 847 is Sandy Bridge, Celeron 1xxxU is Ivy Bridge, Pentium 2xxxU means Haswell, the 3556U Broadwell, although the Celeron G39* is Skylake. There is some method to this madness just not much. The Y CPUs for Broadwell and Skylake are called "Core M" not Celeron or Pentium.

Celeron and Atom are brand names. A Celeron J1900 is not an Atom processor. It's a Celeron processor.


Categorically, Celeron processors are targeted at budget computers, and performance reflects this. They are much slower compared to Intel's Core processors in the same generation. The Celeron badge is enough reason to look elsewhere.

Atom is also used as a generic term for a family of cores mostly used in Atom processors. The present generation of Celerons combine a mix of Atom-based (Bay Trail/Brawell/Airmont/Cherry Trail, etc) and Core-based (Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake) cores.

The J1900 is based on the Bay Trail core, which is a generation-back core also shared with the Atom processors. It's a quad-core, and actually almost decent -- the Bay Trail and newer Atoms are out-of-order CPUs (like Intel's mainstream processors since the Pentium Pro, but unlike the original Pentium and older Atom chips/)

Just depends on the cost vs. performance balance; the J1900 is a great chip if your goal is to put together a sub-$150 new desktop as say, a media player or for embedded use, or as the core of a NAS. It's almost tolerable for light general use.

As chx1975 noted, the Core-based dual-core Celerons are actually halfway decent; I wouldn't buy one in a laptop (in general, I recommend nothing less than a U-series i5), but the newer-generation desktop ones have higher clock rates and are perfectly tolerable for general use.