Well... Chromebooks are great if you are working almost exclusively on the cloud or through Web Apps like Google Mail and Google Drive. And there’s a bunch of stuff available
https://chrome.google.com/webstore
But if you are used to a particular app on your laptop that can’t be used on the web, like for Windows, you’ll need to get a machine that knows that OS.
I only mentioned it, because he mentioned the need for a cheap option. They’re the cheapest around for an Intel/AMD platform.