Asklemmy

43901 readers

1138 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

What second hand laptop should I buy? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My use case: I'm an engineering student, I need something with a lot of storage, hopefully SSD (right not I have MatLab, Anaconda and KiCAD taking up most of my 128 GB HD, and I had to uninstall the STM32 cube IDE from lack of storage), and reasonable processing performance so I can actually run these things at a reasonable rate. I need to stay within the windows/ms office world to simplify collaborating and file sharing etc. I'm not using it for gaming. Don't need a massive screen, or touchscreen or anything fancy. HDMI port would be reasonably important.

I want it to last me at least the next 4-5 years, and I'm hoping to not spend more than about £300.

I know a lot of people reccomend ThinkPads, what's a good model to get cheap at the moment? Or any other suggestions?

Is Windows 11 so bad that I should only be looking at ones that come with Windows 10 installed?

Thanks for any helpful advice!

Edit: Thanks to everyone for taking the time to advise me, I've ordered a refurbished T480 with 1TB ssd, plenty of ram, and a 1 year warranty for £340.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Thinkpads are a solid choice, and since all the software you listed runs on Linux as well, it's a good option if you change operating systems to extend the lifetime of your laptop down the road.

[–] jagermo@feddit.org 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you get one, try to buy one without the RAM soldered on (i think most of the s models). When jt breaks, you basically brick the device - i had to throw out a Samsung notebook because of that.

[–] Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

From what I could find out I think most T480 have 8 GB soldered and a slot for replaceable ram. But then the seller I got mine from was offering them with 16, 32 or 64 GB ram, so hopefully that means two non-soldered slots.

[–] Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah I'm planning to install Linux on my old laptop for just home use so I can get familiar and learn a bit of command line stuff, and hopefully make the switch fully at some point. But for now I don't feel confident that the Linux learning curve wouldn't slow me down to much, so I'm about to face the horrors of Win 11 Pro (-_-)