intel i7 laptop

No such thing in a decent laptop.  At the time I bought this one (2 year ago), the I7, 16 GB of RAM and the 1 TB SSD drive was $1,000 on top of the computer.

i7 laptops  are approx double your cost.  i3's inspiron-15-5570-laptop $899
i3 inspiron-15-5570-laptop $599

Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon $2800 w/coupon code THANKSGIVING $1959

anything lower than 6-700$ will point to  the lowest consumer quality available.
is that what you want?

the only other option i see is refurbished system, or ebay

Closest thing I could find was $599:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-1366x768-i7-7500U-dual-core-Bluetooth/dp/B077QYYFMK

Just bear in mind what everyone else is saying - you're sort of asking for trouble when you try to put a low price point on good specs. More often than not, you'll end up with a laptop that doesn't perform very well. You get what you pay for.

The better question might be:
"I want to buy a laptop for... <if not yourself, then the age of the person> that will be used for... <your purposes here>. Some of the applications that are expected to be used are... <examples of apps, games, etc>. My highest possible budget is... <$$$ here>. Is this possible? Are there any compromises that might lower the cost?"

1. Usage matters a lot. For example, playing modern games on laptops usually requires a separate, dedicated video card. Since powerful video cards generate so much heat, it's hard to fit really good video cards into laptops. This makes those kinds of laptops a little more expensive (usually). Older or simple games (e.g. Minecraft) don't require hefty video cards and can be played without dedicated cards.

2. Video editing is typically VERY resource-intensive. Having a modern CPU matters a lot, and you usually want lots of fast storage. I wouldn't expect to find any kind of quality video-editing laptop for less than $1500 at minimum. However, if you're just wanting to edit video and you don't care how long it takes, then you can use just about anything. Just don't expect your video to be done rendering in the same day.
Generally speaking, any professional media use will likely follow the same formula (e.g. sound editing, photo editing, etc).

3. If there's light-or-no video editing and light-or-no gaming, and you're just looking for something that can play music and do some basic office work (email, documents, spreadsheets, web browsing), then you don't need an i7 CPU. In fact, you'd probably get better or comparable performance out of a latest-generation i3 or i5 than compromising on an old i7. You also don't need a lot of disk space, either, and you could probably even skate by with 4 GB of RAM.

4. Bear in mind you can almost always upgrade the RAM and the hard drive in a laptop. There aren't a lot of other components that can be upgraded, but those two are usually accessible and the price of better components drops over time.

In addition to what was said, it has Windows Home which I never recommend. Get Pro.

In a laptop today you want an SSD drive for weight reduction and low battery usage.

@John:
I'm curious... what are the features of Pro that you find generally necessary?  I certainly recommend it for certain users, but many can get by without it.  What am I overlooking?

People purchase Home to save money and then they need functions in Gpedit or like, or need to run Business Software, or find out they want to be on a domain. It has never been worth the savings from in my experience.

@John:
Thanks for the input.  The other features that I find needed sometimes are Bitlocker and Offline files.  With that said and including your input, I do find some home users can safely save the money.  Going with Pro is certainly the "safe" route.

Closest thing I could find was $599:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-1366x768-i7-7500U-dual-core-Bluetooth/dp/B077QYYFMK

just regular java programming. not much fancy

You need to lower your sites.  i5, 8GB and 512GB SSD will do just fine and cost a LOT less.

i have i5 with 8gb ad 1TB hdd disc hp laptop. when i start taking 20 minutes to just starrt up to do any thing wasting lot of time

Any decent laptop with a 7200-rpm hard drive will be up and running smoothly in 5 minutes. I have such a machine (ThinkPad X230) as a Windows Insider machine. Works great.

i7 and 16 GB will not speed this laptop up.  Check the speed of the drive - how fast?

Maybe put a 512 GB SSD in it and that will give it a new lease on life.

It is 2 year old cpu.. And my 10 year old i7-2700K has 1/3 more performance and Rzen 2700X is 3x the performance of this 2 core processor
Passmark Ratings:
Intel Core i7-7500U 5170      
Intel Core i7-2700K  8715
AMD Ryzen 2700X   16968

Any decent laptop with a 7200-rpm hard drive will be up and running smoothly in 5 minutes. I have such a machine (ThinkPad X230) as a Windows Insider machine. Works great.

how to check.

i have two i5 laptps one 15 inch other 17 inch both slow

Maybe put a 512 GB SSD in it and that will give it a new lease on life.

how to add? how much to buy and technician fees to install?
how to know if my laptop supports it?

Ask your local computer store about installing a compatible SSD.

You may be getting low priced machines with 5400-rpm hard drives and those are as slow as molasses.

Garden Variety Laptops come with 2.5" hard drives. Any SATA SSD will do. It is usually undo 2-4 screws on the bottom of the laptop, pull out the old drive, sometimes put the new drive in the old drives carrier and pop it back in. It is a 2 minute procedure.  What takes the time is imaging the old hard drive to the new hard drive (connected via USB)

most laptops come with a 5400 RPM drive - which slows everything down, and even with a small cache
all laptops i know accept a normal SSD drive
But you have then 2 options : reinstall all software and drivers, o r image the drive to aan SSD
**replacing the laptop drive is easy in 99 % of the laptop models : opening 1 or 2 screws in the bottom, and that's it
****imaging software is free -  well known ones are paragon and AOMEI
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/download.html

i have i5 with 8gb ad 1TB hdd disc hp laptop. when i start taking 20 minutes to just starrt up to do any thing wasting lot of time

If it's taking you 20 minutes to start up with those specs, your laptop's problem probably isn't hardware. Yes, installing a SSD will make things a bit faster, but it won't take you from several minutes to a few seconds.

I'm guessing 20 minutes is an exaggeration, but I'm assuming it might be in minutes.

Think back to when you first got the laptop or when you first installed Windows - that should give you a better idea of how fast the laptop CAN be. Usually a fresh Windows 10 install will take less than 30 seconds to boot up. With an SSD, I'd expect more like 10-15 seconds.

1. Once you start adding applications, your performance will suffer little bit by little bit. Lots of applications will add little things to the registry to keep their settings, or add things to the Windows shell, and over time, all those little things will add up to a lot and make your system slow. Sometimes reinstalling Windows is just a good step to take.

2. If you're on a non-SSD, then make sure your hard drive has been defragged somewhat recently. SSDs don't need defragmentation (in fact defragging can hurt their lifespan), but non-SSDs -do- need defragmentation from time to time, especially if the data on the drive changes a lot (deleting and adding lots of things). Even if you don't normally do that kind of activity yourself, it still happens all the time naturally as part of Windows.

3. Malware is more present today than ever, and if you're not taking steps to protect yourself, it's not hard to get infected. You might not even know you're infected. For example, some malware just steals your CPU to run bitcoin mining, making everything slow but not giving any other visible notification that you're infected (because they just want to run as long as possible - they don't want to harm your system). If you don't have any other security software installed, I'd suggest running Neuber's Security Task Manager and looking for any suspicious or hidden processes. The free trial (no time limit) will show you enough info to let you know whether there's something amiss like a hidden Java process.

4. Java programming is unfortunately often associated with NetBeans and Eclipse. Both programs are known to have performance issues, even when you're not doing anything. My wife's computer sits behind me and if she leaves NetBeans running during the day, I hear the fans on her PC spinning up and down and when I've rolled over and checked her process list, I see NetBeans chugging away. There might be settings to fix it (I'm not sure), it's definitely not a high-performing IDE in my opinion, and she's on a powerful desktop CPU with 16 gigs of RAM and an SSD. There's only so much better hardware can do.

Just a final note on drives - while 5400 RPM is slower than 7200 RPM, and traditional hard drives (spindles) are slower than solid state drives, it can easily be a red herring if you have more significant software problems. You could replace a 5400 RPM drive with the best SSD and might only see a few seconds of difference if the problem is more about software than disk I/O.

personally, i don't agree with "Yes, installing a SSD will make things a bit faster, but it won't take you from several minutes to a few seconds."
imo that is just what it does

Also, installing an SSD means re-installing and cleaning up the OS which should help alongside the speed of the SSD.

imo that is just what it does

I've never seen an HDD-to-SSD performance difference of several-minutes-to-a-few-seconds, and I've upgraded a lot of machines over the years. Perhaps if the HDD is heavily fragmented or you're copying a monster-sized file...

Like John said, installing SSD usually also means re-installing Windows, which usually gives the BEST performance bump because suddenly you don't have the overhead of dozens of applications. But that's because of the software circumstances, not because of the SSD.

Don't get me wrong, an SSD is still a nice performance boost, but when equally compared (same software environment, same underlying hardware/bus), it should not be minutes-to-seconds for the same activity. I still have a couple laptops running some 5400 RPM HDDs that work just fine - nothing takes minutes.

I would agree that if it is taking a VERY long time (20 minutes) to boot, there is either a hardware issue with the drive (error reading it, successful after retries) or you have some software issues as mentioned above.

I would disable all services and all startup items and see how quickly it boots.  If it is reasonable (say, 2 minutes), then selectively restore (start with Microsoft services, then other services, then startup) and see if you can identify the culprit.

and i have seen in every case the startup time lower from several minutes to under 30 seconds

@nobus:
Just trying to clarify....   your experience involves imaging a working HD to a new SSD (not a reinstall) and you are seeing boot times drop from several minutes to under 30 seconds?

RIGHT that's what happens everytime - not counting the bios time of course, since that's hardware related

My recommendation for the last 30 years is to buy the best that you can barely afford now and the lifetime of the machine will be longer and end up costing you less in the long run. I just finished replacing my i7-2600K (7 Years of daily/heavy usage) because encoding h.265 was painfully slow.. with a ryzen 2700X it is acceptable fps processing. Boot times with the nvme ssd is about 1/4 the boot time of even a SATA SSD.
Windows Insider build update has gone from about an hour to 15 minutes
Visual Studio 2017 toolbar loads are almost instant compared to a several minute wait.

I recommend a desktop for normal usage and a laptop for on the go and not as your primary computer.

For most laptop tasks IMHO a chromebook is sufficient for a large portion of laptop users.

RIGHT that's what happens everytime

That sounds really bizarre. An SSD simply isn't THAT much faster than an HDD in terms of raw speed. Yes, it is faster in every way (access time, I/O throughput, etc) but for -that much- change on a re-imaged drive, your HDD would have had to be unbelievably fragmented or had just metric tons of tiny startup files/drivers.

Even a Windows 10 install, which is about as I/O-heavy as you can get, the difference is about 50% (SSD takes about half as long as the HDD).

YouTube is filled with videos of people doing SSD vs HDD comparisons. The only one I could find that was between minutes and seconds was an app-heavy laptop that took about 2 minutes to completely load all the way to the desktop while it took just over 58 seconds on the SSD (which is essentially still 1 minute).

If you can show me a video that demonstrates someone going from 2+ minutes to under 30 seconds on a cloned drive where the HDD was properly maintained (defragmented, not completely running out of space, etc), then I'd be really surprised.

In any event, I think the OP gets the point that the SSD can give a nice boost in performance. However, a 20 minute boot time indicates something seriously wrong with the software side of things. Anything beyond 4 minutes for a full load should be examined for more significant problems (e.g. corrupted files, failed updates, lots of unused apps loading at startup, overlapping A/V, overactive backup, malware, etc). It would likely be easier to do a fresh install on the 1 TB HDD drive and basically get back to a faster, fresher state (and then restore / reinstall what's necessary) without spending a penny.

For those with a good budget, I totally agree with David. I usually expect to spend about $1000 - $1500 every 3-4 years for either a brand-new build or a significant upgrade, and it serves me well. I don't need the absolute best components - usually the 2nd-tier stuff is much cheaper and gives almost as much performance as the best stuff. I bought an i7-920 back in 2009 or 2010 and it beat the performance of just about every new chip for 6 years (maybe not on EVERY task but on most things). I just built a new i7 PC this year and I expect it to last me for another 5 years  or so. Desktops are much cheaper when it comes to parts (plus, programming is usually easier on desktops, since you always have a full-sized keyboard and mouse, and you can easily have multiple monitors so code is on one screen and results on another).

you have your idea, i have mine, and stand by it
if you don't believe me, look on the net for people that switched over
you seem to forget that an hd has rotating platters - for laptops even slow drives with 5400 rpm often. then you need to position the head - takes 10-15 ms
then you have the latency on track
+a small buffer
while an SSD is simply MEMORY about 10.000 times faster, and random access

I don't really want to turn this into an SSD vs HD debate, but did want to add a comment about "10,000 times faster".  Keep in mind that with SATA devices, whether SSD or HD, they are still constrained by the speed of the SATA bus.  If we're talking about NVMe SSDs (which weren't mentioned), it's a different story.

I doubt that gr8 forgot about rotating platters.  His experience is similar to mine.  SATA SSDs are significantly faster than HDs, but I've not seen the dramatic difference that nobus has when a drive has been imaged (vs. new, clean installation).  

I agree that a 20-minute startup time isn't caused merely by a 5400rpm drive.  There's something else going on.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS765US765&ei=lqQSXJ_zH6yIggeBoxg&q=hp+elitebook+840+g3&oq=hp+elitebook+840+g3&gs_l=psy-ab.3..35i39j0l9.40319.43036..43233...0.0..0.227.1284.0j5j2......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71j0i67j0i20i263.5orwq8VjL_s

i have above also which is bit faster compared to

hp pavillon intel i5 with 8 gb ram and 1TB disk

By the way, also go into your BIOS and make sure Intel Speedstep is disabled. That "feature" is fine if you prefer a little more battery life while sacrificing performance, but personally I hate it. It always leads to more sluggish performance and the battery life isn't really that much longer with it enabled.

even less cpu performance
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-6200U-vs-Intel-i7-7500U/2556vs2863 and a generation behind.

https://www.pcrichard.com/catalog/catalog-product.jsp?prodId=15-DA0079NR&gclid=Cj0KCQiAjZLhBRCAARIsAFHWpbGNThemWTN02wBTsLwFWfvb2rXHZQkuvQzIRrFr_slhdbvH9hctLnMaAjAwEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
i just found above intel i7 laptop less than 450$
hope that is faster one?