Frequently asked but rarely answered,what's the best 550$ laptop?

[jadtheone]

Hello,now the reason I'm typing this is because I would like a 4th?7th? backup plan incase the PC plan fails.
My question is,what is the best NEW laptop under 550$?
This is frequently asked but I never find a good answer,every answer I found is either outdated or on a used/sale item and the laptops are actually about 1000$ and not 500$,so I'm hoping to find an actual answer.
Now there's a few things the laptop needs to have:
8GB RAM minimum. (6GB at the very least.)
A quad core cpu,doesn't necessarily need an intergrated GPU. (I'm not sure if AMD fx-series is desktop only but AMD cpus are very cheap and good the fx-6300 is 55$ and has 6 cores.)
At least 2GB VRAM. (Nvidia is much cheaper than AMD Radeons.)
At least 500GB storage HDD.
Screen size doesn't matter all that much,I'd be fine with about 12".
Battery life not all that important since I'll keep it plugged in,3 hours minimum.
A CD drive,there's no way I'm downloading 351GB on 60kbps-80kbps,a CD drive is very important.
Please no sale/refurbished/used/rebate prices.
Other laptop related questions:
Can you change the storage of a laptop like if I get 500GB now can I change it to 1TB later?
Other questions:
After I'm done with this thread should I post a new one or edit this one and post a comment to "bump" it?
I appreciate the help,thank you for your time.

 

[jadtheone]

Well if I was to give you a list it'd be a lot longer than 500 laptops.
And I've checked Digitalnet-Syria before,everything there is a complete lie.
I found an i7 8gb laptop for less than a dollar over budget but when I looked up the laptop it turned out to be a way worse one.
For the money conversion,I think it's about 520s.p per dollar.

 

[Karadjgne]

Budget + electronics + Syria + Good = impossible. You'd need to be looking at $350-400 laptops US to get anything around $550 after you pay shipping and customs fees etc. Unless that's already in consideration and the remainder is US$550.

Availability on Syria is dismal to say the least. Most local shops will buy cheap as possible, just to make their money back after they pay the shipping etc. So most things end up as cut rate junk, dual cores, 4Gb of ram, 500Gb hdds, integrated graphics etc.

You may end up searching Greek, Saudi, Egyptian, Australian, Singapore websites and see if they'll ship to Syria because locally will rob you blind and US/European websites will charge far too much for shipping and customs.

 

[jadtheone]

Well actually shipping would be 100$ the taxes are probably about 200$ and I would prefer a 4gb ram dual core over a 64gb STORAGE 512mb ram single core laptop.
To be fair Syria+good is like dividing by zero.