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Affordable laptop recommendations: budget £350-£450

GRADE C- but cheap!

  • Condition - Grade C
    Laptops show noticeable signs of use. These laptops have scuffs to the casing and display, and have pressure marks on the screen (white marks shown in pictures)

Lenovo X1 Carbon, 256 SSD, 8 GB ram, 4th gen i5 processor, Full HD screen (refurbished) - tier1-outlet eBay - £249.99
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon i5-4300U 240GB SSD 8GB Win 10 Home Touchscreen Laptop | eBay

found on HUKD caveat emptor innit

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Throbbing Angel said:
GRADE C- but cheap!

  • Condition - Grade C
    Laptops show noticeable signs of use. These laptops have scuffs to the casing and display, and have pressure marks on the screen (white marks shown in pictures)

Lenovo X1 Carbon, 256 SSD, 8 GB ram, 4th gen i5 processor, Full HD screen (refurbished) - tier1-outlet eBay - £249.99
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon i5-4300U 240GB SSD 8GB Win 10 Home Touchscreen Laptop | eBay

found on HUKD caveat emptor innit

View attachment 149545
Click to expand...
I haven't got round to trying win 10 yet and wondered if this will take win7 as you can get the pro version quite cheap now
 
If you ever need more physical storage you can fit a cheapo mSATA ssd next to the RAM slot.. might be useful if only 35 quid or so. IIRC you can even upgrade the processors on em

They are great laptops tbh. Bit bulky maybe. Only real limitation I'd say are the OEM battery capacities being low after years of use/disuse. My x230 thinkpad battery I bought for 25 quid has 88% capacity though and Im sure there are a fair few similarly decent genuine batteries out there.
 
Unwrapped it tonight. Amazed at the quality given its a refurb, as new. Really good build quality. I dont care about the weight. It will rarely if ever leave the house.
I'm having fun sorting it. The SSD is new to me and wow. I am really impressed overall thus given it was £250.

Only issue is windows 10? I mean what the fuck is going on? How do I navigate? I rather liked win 7.
 
Win 10 is a bit of a mission and I put a mates laptop onto Win7 the other day as windows update killed it. I did a complete format of the HD via a usb stick. I think these sticks are great for storage now you can get 128gb for under a £10!
 
r0bb0 said:
Win 10 is a bit of a mission and I put a mates laptop onto Win7 the other day as windows update killed it. I did a complete format of the HD via a usb stick. I think these sticks are great for storage now you can get 128gb for under a £10!
Click to expand...
Mental when you think how much they've managed to compress storage over the years. It doesn't feel that long ago when a 1GB hard-drive was a thing of wonder.
 
TopCat said:
Bought a refurb Lenovo ThinkPad T430 8gig ram for £250.
Being Urban please do feel free to point out limitations.
Click to expand...

I've found one of these, looks like a bargain. 128GB SSD, Win 7, 8GB RAM, for £200.
I can afford it and am in the market for a new laptop to see me through the next couple of years.
Should I?
 
mojo pixy said:
I've found one of these, looks like a bargain. 128GB SSD, Win 7, 8GB RAM, for £200.
I can afford it and am in the market for a new laptop to see me through the next couple of years.
Should I?
Click to expand...

First thing is work out if 128GB of storage is going to be enough for your needs. Once it's formatted and Windows is installed, as well as any other applications you need, that's going to take a severe dent into what free space is available. So this will depend really on what your usage case is.

One other thing to consider is Windows 7 goes end of life in less than 12 months, so no more updates, and perhaps more importantly, no more security updates, which is when we'll probably start seeing cyber criminals really targeting the OS for holes that they know will not ever get fixed come end of January 2020

Windows 7 End of Support

You can upgrade to Windows 10, but again, Windows 10 and 128GB of SSD is probably going to be a problem down the line, especially with it's constant 6 month cycle of feature updates, which saves the existing installation to the drive in order for you to recover to it, if there's problems.

Personally, I'd look for 256GB of storage minimum if you're keeping data local.
 
Good to know, thank you.

I understand the issues with Win 7 too, may bite the bullet of an extra 50 quid for 250GB and Win 10. Makes it less impulse buy and more reflection on the ifs and buts. Still, it's a good price for what appears to be a good machine - and keyboard is important given how much I write.

Edit .. 1Tb HDD drive as the 250 SDD isn't available with Win 10 .. so it'd be either 250GB SDD / Win 7 or 1TB HDD / Win 10.

Now I'm not sure. Win 10 / 1TB HDD is a tenner cheaper.
 
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Fair enough, I had no idea the difference was so great. Anyway it looks as if my choice is SDD with Win 7 or HDD with Win 10. I think the SDD with Win 7 + later upgrade to Win 10 may be the answer.
 
mojo pixy said:
Fair enough, I had no idea the difference was so great. Anyway it looks as if my choice is SDD with Win 7 or HDD with Win 10. I think the SDD with Win 7 + later upgrade to Win 10 may be the answer.
Click to expand...

256GB SSD drives are in a nice sweet spot price wise, so simply upgrading the drive and using some software to mirror the existing drive at a later date is also an option. Assuming you can get to the drive to swap it out of course. Haven't looked up the model you mentioned.
 
I would always get 256GB+ SSD after reading something about quality and speeds being lower with 128 models sometimes.

If you need more storage then you can fit an mSATA small SSD card like so which will run at half the speed of your SATA III main SSD but will be great for cheap light physical backup. And much faster than a HDD.
 
I went for the 256GB / Win7 version, the idea being it'll be easier and cheaper to acquire and install another OS. I'm thinking since this is a laptop only for work I might put Linux on it.
 
I'm old and not very techie at all and understand very little about about modern hardware, help!

I'm currently working on an old HP laptop now that is about to die (overheats alot). I use it to access internet, email and use word and excel for my own admin /record /accounts (I don't even have a full version of office and it drives me mad)

I've found out I can get an old laptop from my work for about £50 - is it worth it?
no idea what it is how old etc might be a HP model not sure yet - only that it will probably have Windows 7 on it, everything else wiped clean and no software. What else do I need to know? what do I need to ask?

If it has windows 7 will I be able upgrade? will that be too expensive?
Can I even get a proper version of office these days - last time I looked I was completely baffled by the idea of paying monthly for what, renting it? - can that be avoided?

all advice welcome. thank you
 
friendofdorothy said:
I'm old and not very techie at all and understand very little about about modern hardware, help!

I'm currently working on an old HP laptop now that is about to die (overheats alot). I use it to access internet, email and use word and excel for my own admin /record /accounts (I don't even have a full version of office and it drives me mad)

I've found out I can get an old laptop from my work for about £50 - is it worth it?
no idea what it is how old etc might be a HP model not sure yet - only that it will probably have Windows 7 on it, everything else wiped clean and no software. What else do I need to know? what do I need to ask?

If it has windows 7 will I be able upgrade? will that be too expensive?
Can I even get a proper version of office these days - last time I looked I was completely baffled by the idea of paying monthly for what, renting it? - can that be avoided?

all advice welcome. thank you
Click to expand...

Ask for the exact model number, then we get the specifications on if it's worth the hassle or not.

Windows 7 goes end of life in January 2020, so it's got limited life span. It would be worth asking them if they can put Windows 10 on it, but I guess it depends on how your company licenses stuff, but if you don't ask, you don't get.

Yes you can still buy Office standalone, 2019 edition has recently been released. Again, depending on how your company licenses Microsoft software, they may even be part of the home use program, where employees can buy Office for £10 as part of the companies license plan with Microsoft. It's worth asking as some companies are part of this, yet don't really bother to advertise it to their employees because they don't want the hassle.

If you use Office 365 at work, then most employees are also allowed to install it on their home devices too, just log in to the office 365 portal with your company log in, and they'll be a download office 365 button.
 
cybershot said:
This seems a good price for a new Lenovo with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. No expierence of the AMD Ryzen processors mind! £370

Lenovo V330-14ARR AMD Ryzen 5 2500U 8GB 256GB Radeon Vega 8 14 Inch FHD Windows 10 Laptop - Laptops Direct
Click to expand...
AMD is up with Intel in performance these days, but they still generally have worse battery life. There's a hardware flaw that prevents them going into ultra-low power mode. The practical upshot of which is that they last the same amount of time in continuous use, but in the slightly more real-world usage scenario of lots of idle time they lag behind.

Looks nice, though. Good to see RAM prices have come down enough to get sub-£400 laptops with 8GB again. Hopefully 4GB laptops will never return north of £300.
 
For some reason I got a morgan computers catalogue through the mail this week.
Loads of A1 refurbs for plantymuchcheap. Quite surprised at the range of brands and availability.

Lenovos here: Buy Cheap Laptops & Netbooks > IBM/Lenovo at Morgan Computers £130 up to £300

Laptops/Notebooks front page: Buy Cheap Laptops & Netbooks at Morgan Computers

Age of units? Reliability of batteries? Warranties? No idea - caveat emptor, innit. Check the listings carefully.

Have used Morgan in the past without issue, YMMV.
 
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