Refurbished laptop

[jim555]

My laptop was from 2008 and has become so slow that is basically unusable.  I bought a refurbished laptop for $135, an i5 Sandybridge, 4 GB ram.  To speed things up I put in a cheap SSD and replaced Windows 10 with Ubuntu 18.04.  The thing is VERY fast now.  A new laptop would have been $300-$400.  Best of all it has ample ports and connections since it was a "business class" machine and it is very sturdy.  The new machines are very light and flimsy.

[DreamFIRE]

Good job.  I can sometimes purchase used laptops from work that are taken out of service, and I recently bought an HP Elitebook i5 Sandy, 6 GB RAM, standard HDD, and Win10 for $50.  Very solid.  I bought it for a family member.  My HP Ivy bridge with 8 GB and SSD is still better than what they're phasing out at this point, but it's plenty fast with Win8.1, so I'm in no rush to replace it.