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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

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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.

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

Thanks for your comprehensive reply. It made me realise I've never even slightly considered a mac as an option. I was brought up on 'PCs', and in later years have only ever thought of moving over to Linux. Instinctively, the idea of moving to MacOS makes me want to throw up a little, but maybe that's my prejudice based on the people I know who use their phones. I also suspect it would make things difficult for working on shared documents for reports etc at uni, but maybe I'm wrong.

[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

I can understand that perspective.

Things might be slightly different in the eurozone, but it’s almost impossible to have an incompatibility problem in the us. Macs are extremely popular in higher education and a lot of the software that is used in the academy differs from the stuff used in industry specifically because cross platform is a priority in education.

I have some macs and some apple phones and tablets and some android phones and tablets and a bunch of linux machines and some virtualized windows environments. They’re all just tools.

Getting acquainted with macos will cause you to develop a whole new set of psychoses unrelated to “I’m a Mac/im a pc”. Think “I hate systemd/wayland” for Linux or “I hate settings app/centered start button” for windows.

If you can get past the initial hump of learning it, as a university student you’ll probably never be in a better place to use a mac.

If nothing else, you’re unlikely to lose money if you hate it because they retain value like crazy.