Gonna go counter to Sibley's recommendations with my seemingly ancient advice as I've been saying some variant of this for nearly a decade:
Buy a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T series (430/530 is the sweet spot feature/price wise currently), or Dell Latitude E series (The E5430/6430 models are the sweet spots here). US Micro has a good refurbish program, good prices, and decent warranty. Following these recommendations, you shouldn't have to spend more than $200-300 for a solid laptop built like a tank and easy to repair/upgrade.
Don't get too lost in processor speeds. Pretty much any 2-4 core i3/i5 will be plenty for most anyone. The biggest changes hasn't been so much processing speed as power consumption and battery life for some time now. There's some screaming multi-core processors out there, but they're not worth the premium given that all but specialty high-end applications and games don't need them to run. Even Windows 10 doesn't have much beefier system requirements (beyond RAM/graphics) than XP SP3 and Win7. Don't sweat it, and care more about how much RAM the thing has... that'll be the biggest performance booster. Aim for 4-8GB.
It's short, pithy, but lacks detail. I finally fixed the lack of elaboration after the post quoted above wound up getting me interviewed for laptop shopping advice by The Simple Dollar back in December. Their editors gutted the advice I gave on laptop shopping for
reasons but still left a couple sentences and a link, so I capitalized on their clickthrough traffic and posted this:
How to Laptop ShopCovers most major points. Repair, replace, etc. About the only thing I'd change at this point is the light Linux distro recommendation. It's not that Lubuntu or distros with the Mate desktop aren't great, but I found a Lubuntu variant called
LXLE that's just mind-blowingly lean, even by light Linux distro standards. I've been using it on an absolutely ancient Lenovo Ideapad S10 here recently, and the laptop is actually quite peppy and responsive... and we're talking about a nine year old
netbook (not even a full laptop) running an Intel Atom N270, a 32-bit processor so gutless that some Celeron processors five years its senior (we're talking circa 2003, here) were about on par, and it's paired with only 1.5GB of RAM. I'm so impressed by its performance and actual usability with LXLE that I'm considering pulling it back out of retirement for a go-bag toss-in since it's about the size of a tablet but a little thicker, better built, has a GSM modem, a physical keyboard, and isn't Android. Might even toss in a cheap $20 SSD just for giggles just to see what happens.
So keep this in mind next time someone tells you (including yourself) that switching operating systems isn't worth it, or that a seven year old i5 processor is too slow to consider repairing a laptop that may otherwise still be stable, electronics-wise. Any electronics you keep out of the landfill and exhaust its full lifespan on before replacing it is a
good thing. Be open to change or climbing out of your comfort zone to learn a new skill for that reason alone. If it potentially means learning a new operating system or fiddling with a few small screws to be a good steward of the resources you've been so fortunately blessed with, then be open to the idea.
...this said, the Satellite is plenty speedy configuration wise. If the motherboard and RAM check out fine but the HDD is actually failing and not just suffering years of bitrot, stuffing an SSD in will still give you more than enough machine from a machine you already own. Even if the hard drive
isn't dying, the SSD would still be a good upgrade.
