It used to be that laptops were pretty rare in a classroom, but in the past 5 years or so, having a laptop has become a necessity, especially with so much of the coursework being online. To that end, grabbing a laptop is important, but you don’t have to spend a ton of money on one of the best laptops to get something that’s perfect for a student workload. In fact, Dell has a couple of laptops that work great for students, like the Dell Inspiron 14. While it usually goes for $500, Dell has discounted it quite heavily down to just $280, so it’s almost half of and perfect for those who are on a budget.

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There quite a few configurations of the Dell Inspiron 14, but if you don’t need anything too fancy, this configuration brings the price down quite substantially. Under the hood is a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which is the sort of processor you’d find on some of the best phones. While that does mean it isn’t as powerful when it comes to running Windows 11, it’s more than enough to get the basics done, such as accessing content online, or running something like the Google Suite or Microsoft 365.

Besides that, you get 8GB of DDR4 RAM, which is the baseline for Windows 11 that we’d like to see, and should handle most tasks relatively well, as long as you don’t have dozens of tabs and apps open at the same time. Similary, the 256GB of storage is pretty good for this price bracket, and you can always upgrade the internal storage, or grab yourself one of the external hard drive deals instead. The Inspiron 14 also comes with a 1080p FHD webcam for any online meetings you need, and you should be able to get up to 16 hours of battery life in the best case scenario.

Overall, while the Dell Inspiron 14 might not be a powerful laptop, it’s good at what it does, especially for the $280 discounted price from Dell. That said, if you do need something a bit more powerful, be sure to check out these other student laptop deals, or our general roundup of laptops deals.

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