Hey guys, so I’m possibly the least computer savvy person in the US, I haven’t used one in probably more than a decade and don’t own one. We don’t have reliable internet access at our house, so we are doing the DVD version of BJU. My wife has tasked me with finding a laptop with a DVD player built in for our older kids to watch their lessons on, with a $500 budget. Does such a thing exist? We only have one TV, and a bunch of kids, most of them not old enough for school, so I’d imagine she wants to keep the TV open for the other kids to watch a movie while she does school.

FYI you can get whatever laptop works for you and then get an external DVD player that hooks into any laptop via USB cable.

Literally just about any laptop can play a DVD and let a kid do simple homework or web browsing.

There are such things as "mini-computers" that are either point of sale computers or as "thin clients" (that connect to a server and are just a basic computer) where you could get a regular keyboard, regular mouse, regular monitor and sorta hide the computer.  Laptops have the drawback in that a spill on the keyboard means whatever IN the laptop. Separating the touched by kids portions from the actual expensive bits might be worthwhile.

I would recommend a Macbook.  Yes, I know it's much more than your stated budget, but considering it's boring reliability and the fact that you are not computer savvy, you won't be spending any time on fighting viruses, trouble-shooting, etc.  Perhaps you could even look for a refurbished to keep the cost low.

If your budget is firm, you may have better luck asking the question in the Urban Commandos subforum.

Check the Dell outlet. For that price you’re probably going to be looking at Inspiron.

You want i5 processor, 8gb ram minimum and a solid state drive. Applications are heavy and video streaming can be sub par below that.

Let me see what I can find, but I will say Covid and being picky about your laptop are at odds right now.

Here you go, see if this works.

I k ow it’s more but if you’re not tech savvy you might consider upping to 3 years pro support. It’s the shit and they’ll help you with on-site repairs and they will even take a stab at 3rd party software like installing your outlook etc.

https://m.dell.com/h5/m/r/outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7UdbQQoqPbVCQcOqIavXWaiv5zXh4THe9RfOSd5OKG2Eao%2f1wz57whxZyyrA9lTqlQe7UWhpDkteoSqckNbne8dGahLHBiPwPRVS%2fVO97rl2Lj7vU58OOz3ljvyCMIc%2f7PCPvjSdNEwXSqwlFvx670r%2bkK%2bN7%2bpx5WrCzlvYbNT%2bhu6e5QWeDIvhA%3d

https://notebooksforstudents.org/homeschoollaptopdiscount.htm

Is a non-profit organization that supplies refurbished computers for homeschool students.  They start around a couple hundred bucks.