The Lemon Fool

My old laptop has died, it's been on it's last legs for a while but it has finally had it. I need a new one.

I use it for internet surfing mainly, watching DVDs when away from home and some light computer tasks, no video editing. Ideally it should have good sound as my hearing isn't great and is getting worse. WiFi and Bluetooth would be good. A 15'" screen, Windows 7 ideally but 10 if I must (I suppose I'll have to switch at some stage. One thing I would like would be SSD.

Can anyone point me towards a good deal new or grade 1 refurbished, I'm not fussed. I just have no idea what a good deal looks like.

I bought a refurbished laptop from these people - http://www.eflexcomputers.com/

Happy to recommend them as I feel I got a professional grade laptop for about £300 and I'm confident it will outlast anything I could have bought for that price in PC World. What's more it came with a lovely clean install of Windows 10 and absolutely no bloatware or junk programmes.

I got a Lenovo Thinkpad T430 Certified Refurb laptop.
I had Windows 10 pre-installed as this was a free option.
The other specs were 8GB ram, 240GB SSD drive, WXGA++ 1600x900 screen.

Take a look at some youtube video reviews of the Thinkpads - they are still pretty well regarded. I'm really happy with mine.

sg31 wrote:My old laptop has died, it's been on it's last legs for a while but it has finally had it. I need a new one.

I use it for internet surfing mainly, watching DVDs when away from home... Windows 7 ideally but 10 if I must (I suppose I'll have to switch at some stage...

You'd be hard pressed to find anything with Windows 7 these days, so it's likely to be Windows 10. DVD drives are becoming less common too...

One thing to note, as the licences required to play DVD video were becoming expensive, Windows 10 does not natively include the ability to play DVDs. You'll need to install a third-party app to play them. VLC is a popular (free) one...

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-w ... en-GB.html

Windows 7 support ends in a couple of years, so it might be time to bite the bullet and move to Windows 10.

Or even Linux!

--kiloran

Make sure the SSD is 250mb. Smaller SSD are full of Windows 10 files, with precious little room for extra applications or (esp.) video files.
A 14" screen is more common and cheaper than 15.6".
Check out the screen image quality - my new HP 250 G6 i7 (matt screen) does not look as vivid as my old Acer Aspire V5-571 9 which had a glossy screen, which is better indoors)
Not much point in getting anything better than Intel i3. I don't notice that my i7 is any faster than my old Acer with i3. But the SSD makes a big difference in startup time.
Is battery life important (e.g. long airflights)?

kiloran wrote:Windows 7 support ends in a couple of years, so it might be time to bite the bullet and move to Windows 10.

Or even Linux!

--kiloran

Or both!

I am quite enjoying my foray into W10 host OS with a Virtualbox VM and Linux Mint guest.
I'm about five snapshots in and got it running pretty smooth now.

SG31, if you want things like 10bit HDR video support for H265 codecs and the like (4K and streaming) then you'd need generation 7 or 8 Intel CPU's as anything earlier won't do it.

So just be aware that although the refurb route is good for value, if you get stuck with old hardware it's shelf life maybe limited in terms of OS and app./standards support going forward.
The sweet spot is probably hardware that is no more than a couple of years old, where you'll get a decent discount and reasonable future proofing.

To give you an idea of specs v price and what good deals are (or not...) have a look at this link.
https://www.hotukdeals.com/tag/laptop

Edit: Many laptops come with M.2 slots and a standard 2.5" drive bay these days. Which means if you see one advertised as such with a HDD you could still add your own SSD as a boot drive and keep the HDD for files and other bulk storage duties. And even if it doesn't have the extra M.2 slot you could swap out the drives and use the old HDD in a USB caddy as an external storage drive. No need for huge SSD's (which are expensive.)

Thanks or the replies.

I'm tempted by Gaggsy's recommendation for a think pad and this one seems to fit the bill..

http://www.eflexcomputers.com/products/ ... 00900-cert

It's probably a bit over the top for my needs but it does have 240Gb SSD, and the screen is decent. It has DVD drive which I need, I use VLC on my desktop so that isn't a problem if I go for Windows 10

Infrasonic, 10bit HDR video support for H265 codecs That goes over my head I'm sorry to say, if it means I won't be able to watch in 4k definition that's not a problem. It may be used for streaming ordinary quality video but I can't imagine that would be a problem.
How does this stack up against you comments reasonable future proofing?

Until recently I provided the IT Support for about 200 users, using a mixture of Lenovo desktops, T430's and the T440. The laptops were pretty much bomb proof and reliable. The newer T440 was frowned upon by some users as it didn't have separate trackpad buttons so was considered fiddly to use without an external mouse. In my opinion, there's a world of difference between a business laptop and a "home" laptop, the former being much more rugged. Also, an i5 is worth it and you will notice a difference compared to an i3.

Last year I bought a refurbished ThinkPad T410i (i3) from Season Domestics on Amazon Marketplace for £175. What they actually shipped was an i5 T420. I'd read in the reviews that this was possible so was hopeful that would happen.

I upgraded it myself with an SSD and it's great.

Scott.

I used to carry a "professional" laptop. Lenovos Toshibas. Dell etc.

Rugged builds come at a price - not £££ but weight! If you are going to be toting your laptop around, make sure you are comfortable with the weight (including any peripherals like power supply etc).

Due to the nature of my work, I carried pretty high spec laptops (computer modelling for clients) but when I eventually switched to one of the ultra models, the shoulder-relief was ecstasy!

VRD

swill453 wrote:Last year I bought a refurbished ThinkPad T410i (i3) from Season Domestics on Amazon Marketplace for £175. What they actually shipped was an i5 T420. I'd read in the reviews that this was possible so was hopeful that would happen.

I upgraded it myself with an SSD and it's great.

Scott.

Think these might be the same people (it's in the same unit.)
https://www.grabalaptop.com/

The money people behind them...http://www.justdevelop.it/locations

And the all important accounts/directors details...https://companycheck.co.uk/company/0909 ... house-data

Redmires wrote: The newer T440 was frowned upon by some users as it didn't have separate trackpad buttons so was considered fiddly to use without an external mouse.

I've seen that on Hewlett Packards as well. Surely this is a retrograde step for usability, so why are manufacturers doing it?

vrdiver wrote:I used to carry a "professional" laptop. Lenovos Toshibas. Dell etc.

Rugged builds come at a price - not £££ but weight! If you are going to be toting your laptop around, make sure you are comfortable with the weight (including any peripherals like power supply etc).

Due to the nature of my work, I carried pretty high spec laptops (computer modelling for clients) but when I eventually switched to one of the ultra models, the shoulder-relief was ecstasy!

VRD

One thing to be aware of with the super slim and lights, ultrabooks is that they often don't have user upgradeable parts, partly for reliability (no bits to come loose) and partly because the overall profile can be kept slimmer that way.
RAM, SSD, discrete graphics chips et al can often be soldered to the motherboard, so what you order upfront is what you'll be stuck with (unless you have ninja level soldering skills and don't mind voiding the warranty.)

Thanks for all the advice and assistance. I've bought the Lenovo I mentioned in my previous post. It appears to do all that I require and more at a reasonable price.

My laptop supplier of choice is Cash Converters (which is how I can afford to have spare ones for testing purposes ).
https://www.cashconverters.co.uk/search ... top&page=1

They seem to be pretty well cleaned before resale, but usually I 'factory reset' them before use.

I appreciate the OP has bought something but if it helps others on a similar mission here is my 2euc worth:

About 30-months ago I bought a clutch of Asus 305F 'Zenbook' laptops for work. Basically me for myself and the other travellers. We run Win10 on them and they have been absolutely fantastic. When desking we plug them into screens & keyboards, and when travelling not. These I bought from John Lewis and/or Dixons and one one occasion a power supply failed and they replaced the whole thing by return. There are more recent versions of the same thing from Asus, here is a typical review:

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-ma ... 384/review

I'm not brand or form factor sniffy. Everything else at work is Dell, and for years my own work laptop was a Dell Latitude (which is their high-end engineer's etc unit) but I must say that these little Zenbooks are absolute shoulder heaven. I am literally relieved by the difference. The whole thing weighs less than the power brick on my old Latitude.

FWIW we run Win10, Office 365, and OneDrive (and our case ODFB, and Sharepoint) and the whole thing works like a dream. One of the Dells karked and I pulled out a spare and issued it with new logons and had the user up and running within 15-minutes with all their files and software to hand. Just as it should be.

regards,dspp

PS. my GF is in the Apple economy - and my Asus gives her laptop envy