Cheap Laptop for Programming (Visio, Visual, Eclipse, Android SDI, Oracle, Microsoft Project)

People may judge me for this but I do know what Im talking about here. Intels are typically the superior processor I look for but in some scenarios, the architecture of the processors may not be optimized for certain task. Programming for example. I used an old A8 amd laptop for my programming courses which included VHDL, Java, C and its variants, etc. I actually swore by that processor during these courses. My computer never locked while compiling and it was reliable. I do recommend you monitor the temperatures. I did replace the thermal paste that asus had on my laptop, it went bad. Once I did that, I never had another heat issue. I wish manufacturers would use better paste for hotter processors. That all being said, I would recommend an Asus with a newer A10 in it. It doesn't have to be the most current model, but any a10 will handle the workload easy. You might be able to find an I5 for about the same price, but I wouldn't do that. The A10 series tends to have more cores and an optimized architecture for multitasking. Not all software you compile will be done in multiple threads, but often you can keep working on other stuff while compiling is going on. When I did my matlab work, it would take about 2 hours on a xeon, and 1.5 on an I7. My A8 took it down to about 50 minutes or so, and it didn't lock at all while I was doing this. Keep in mind, this was the earlier gens of the I series and A series from the two.

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231521

Agreed. An AMD processor is perfectly suitable within your budget range and your direct programming needs. Unless you plan to do video processing or play GPU-intensive games, an AMD (recommended by Adventmind) will perform nicely.

What I did was buy a copy of VMWare Fusion, install it and then install Windows 7 on top of it. No need to reboot, Windows runs in a ......um.. Window. You can allocate some of your ram and processor to Windows and use it like you would any laptop. I run Office, Visio, SQL Server (for development purposes) and on Apple's hardware it runs better than many PCs I've been stuck with over the course of my working career. Now that Microsoft is trying to move on from Windows 7 finding a copy at a discounted price shouldn't be too difficult.