Looking for a decent laptop for $600 or less

For video editing, you really want at least a 1920x1080 (full HD or FHD) screen. Unfortunately, those are very hard to find in sub-$600 laptops. At that price range you're usually looking at 1366x768 (HD) screens, which don't have enough resolution to display 1080p video natively.

The Toshiba you've linked has a 1920x1080 screen. The others are 1366x768. So of the ones you've listed, I'd say the Toshiba is the front-runner (note: I have no idea if the screen is actually any good in terms of viewing angles and color gamut). Unfortunately it's a 14". If you're young, 1080p on a 14" screen is just fine. Once you get into your 40s and 50s though, the pixels are really too small for accurate work unless you wear reading glasses.

Otherwise, the Toshiba looks fine - i5 processor which turbo boosts to 2.7 GHz, expandable to 16 GB RAM, HDMI out, 2 USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet port, 802.11ac wireless. The 5400 RPM HDD will be the bottleneck. You may want to replace it with a SSD at some point. Also be warned that Toshiba has been having trouble getting its ac wireless drivers working correctly. The Intel AC-7260 has been problematic for everyone, but most manufacturers have gotten it into a semi-stable state with driver revisions. Toshiba hasn't had much luck on that front. People are reporting speed and connection problems with it, especially on 2.4 GHz routers (5 GHz seems to work fine).

Other 1080p options I currently see in your price range are the Lenovo Flex 2 and Lenovo Z50 with coupon. Unfortunately, I have not heard good things about the screen image quality on these two notebooks.
http://slickdeals.net/f/7612004-lenovo-flex-2-14-59423166-4th-gen-core-i7-4510u-500gb-8gb-sshd-599
http://slickdeals.net/f/7611746-lenovo-z50-laptop-i7-4510u-8gb-ddr3-500gb-hdd-15-6-1920x1080p-599-free-shipping

Otherwise, you can get a 1366x768 laptop and hook it up to a 1080p external monitor for when you're video editing. Or if you're OK with refurbished, both Dell and Lenovo Outlet stores frequently have nice 1080p refurbished laptops in your price range.
 

tendoboy1984

Honorable
Sep 11, 2012
3
0
10,510
What about the AMD laptops I listed? The HP touchscreen laptop with an AMD A8 processor and 8GB RAM for $430 is an amazing value.

I don't need 1080p to do video editing. My older Samsung laptop had a low quality screen and I was able to do video editing just fine on it. And I don't need an SSD when hard drives have more storage for the same price. I've used hard drives in my game consoles and they work fine.