What ThinkPad/Latitude models are cheap and usable right now? I’m just looking for something to browse the web, but not something so low-spec that it couldn’t handle heavier desktop environments.
I’m currently using a T580 (i5-8350U). The refurb model cost me $440CAD. It has a 15.6" screen, backlit keyboard, came with a 512GB NVMe drive and 16GB of RAM. It charges with a 65 watt USB-C cable. It also has dual batteries (one is internal, the other is hot-swappable) and together give me 10-14 hours.
I’ve been using it for 8 months now and its been absolutely fantastic and no laggy performance or thermal issues. Zero driver issues on install. I run Debian/XFCE.
Define cheap. The least expensive laptop on Dell Refurbished currently is $180 and would easily run any desktop environment, including the heavyweights. Specs are here:
CPU
1x Intel Core i5-6300U (2-Core, 2.40 GHz)
Memory
8 GB (1x 8GB)
HDD
256 GB (1x 256 GB SSD)
Display
14" HD (1366 x 768)If you’re thinking cheaper yet, you’ll want at least a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM. Just about any business laptop from the last 10 years or so would work, as long as you stay away from bottom of the barrel Celerons or AMD processors and <4GB of RAM. You can run Linux on a very low spec machine, but you’d want to use a lightweight DE and web browsing wouldn’t be a fun experience.
You can get some pretty decent refurbished laptops on Amazon:
…you can even return them if you don’t like it.
How cheap is cheap? Imo the sweetspot is the T480
You should probably specify your budget and preferred screen size, as it would help with recommendations.
I’m using a Thinkpad X220 with upgraded RAM and SSD and USB 3 ExpressCard as a secondary laptop and it’s still useable for daily tasks, with the odd little slowdown. It’s also got the classic Thinkpad keyboard.
I have like 10 old laptops that I mess around with. Got various Linux distros on them.
I have patience as I know some of these machines are older.
I’m basically going to say for me. Specs doesn’t matter. What matter is a good quality display. I value that highly for web browsing. Yes, all the laptops I have here have shitty displays 😞
I have a couple of old tablet/convertable netbooks. They have quite nice displays, just small. 2GB RAM and Intel Atom CPUs. They are quite slow but the display more than makes up for it heh. (HP and an old MS Surface)
