I forgot to mention that I'm technologically illiterate. Can you elaborate a bit on that?
How fast your computer is is largely determined by how powerful your CPU is, because that's almost always the bottle neck. Having a faster hard drive (i.e. a solid state drive) helps with stuff like opening files and opening programs, but you probably only do those things perhaps a few times every time you use your computer, so having to wait a couple of seconds for your browser to load is probably not too bad. There's other stuff as well but you probably don't have to take that into account.
If your CPU sucks though, your computer is going to be slow all the time, and that gets frustrating really easily. A good CPU, however, consumes a lot of battery life, so either you're going to need a good CPU
and a kickass battery, which I would imagine to be impossible given your budget, or you're going to have a good enough CPU for basic every day usage (but not good enough for serious gaming, video editing, or other very CPU-intensive tasks) but it will consume the entirety of your battery life way faster than 6+ hours, or you're going to have 6+ hours of battery life on a very slow computer.
If you absolutely need to get it for less than $250 and it absolutely needs to have 6+ hours of battery life, then there isn't much of a choice. However, especially when you don't have a lot of money just lying around, it's really important to not make any purchases that you won't be entirely happy with, so I would recommend at least saving up some more money before buying the computer, and preferably also making a compromise regarding the battery life in favor of a faster computer.
A good way to find out how good each respective CPU is is to look up CPU benchmarks for that model and comparing the numbers with the benchmarks of a CPU in a computer that you know is frustratingly slow and the benchmarks of CPUs in the recommended specs for games that you might want to play.