I'm looking for a laptop, the budget is tight at £50. I'd like to get the
best laptop I can for the money.

Not super fussy on lots of things - screen size, weight, battery life (I
assume the battery will be knackered at this price point), RAM, storage,
etc. It's to run Windows 10 for everyday stuff like web browsing, email,
movie watching, video calls, etc. I don't want to get a weedy
Celeron/Atom/Pentium thing, so only looking at Core-i CPUs.

At this price point I'm probably down to scouring ebay for auctions as they
come up. I'm happy to do a bit of post-receipt fettling.

I'm looking at ex-business laptops from ~10 years ago, so roughly in the Ivy
Bridge (3rd gen) or maybe Haswell (4th gen) era. Something with decent
build quality that might last a bit longer, rather than a consumer thing
which is already worn out by this stage.

Beyond the usual suspects of business laptop brands, which I think are:

Thinkpad
Dell Latitude/Vostro/Precision/XPS
HP Elitebook (others?)

are there any other brands that are worth considering?

Thanks
Theo

On 26/11/2021 21:43, Theo wrote:
> I'm looking for a laptop, the budget is tight at £50. I'd like to get
> Thinkpad
> Dell Latitude/Vostro/Precision/XPS
> HP Elitebook (others?)
>
> are there any other brands that are worth considering?
>

I've got an old Acer. Solid not pretty becomes an advantage as the
flimsy ones get hinge problems etc.

Ebay first hit gives something like:

<https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334232054833?hash=item4dd1c86c31:g:TXoAAOSwsGFhn0rI>

On 26/11/2021 22:05, Pancho wrote:
> On 26/11/2021 21:43, Theo wrote:
>> I'm looking for a laptop, the budget is tight at £50.  I'd like to get
>> Thinkpad
>> Dell Latitude/Vostro/Precision/XPS
>> HP Elitebook (others?)
>>
>> are there any other brands that are worth considering?
>>
>
> I've got an old Acer. Solid not pretty becomes an advantage as the
> flimsy ones get hinge problems etc.
>
> Ebay first hit gives something like:
>
> <https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334232054833?hash=item4dd1c86c31:g:TXoAAOSwsGFhn0rI>
>
>
I have an Acer E5-572 (in fact two, I bought another as a spare) dating
from 2014 and can confirm they are pretty solid machines. I did replace
the hard drive of one with an SSD recently, this has speeded up the
booting considerably but takes it outside your budget. I also upped the
memory from 4 to 8 while I was at it. It's had some, but not a lot of,
mobile use. The hinge feels to me slightly less robust than a Dell,
Thinkpad, or HP. I don't recall replacing the battery but I suppose I
might have done.

newshound <newshound@stevejqr.plus.com> wrote:
> I have an Acer E5-572 (in fact two, I bought another as a spare) dating
> from 2014 and can confirm they are pretty solid machines. I did replace
> the hard drive of one with an SSD recently, this has speeded up the
> booting considerably but takes it outside your budget. I also upped the
> memory from 4 to 8 while I was at it. It's had some, but not a lot of,
> mobile use. The hinge feels to me slightly less robust than a Dell,
> Thinkpad, or HP. I don't recall replacing the battery but I suppose I
> might have done.

Thanks all. It turned out the 15" category is a bit harder to fish in that
some of the smaller sizes that I'm more familiar with. In the end I set
what felt like a million ebay watches and waited for the pings as they came
due. I ended up with ...

A Dell Latitude 3590, about two and a half years old. Respectable mid-range
CPU of i5-8250U, 8GB RAM/128GB mSATA SSD, in good order apart from a broken
ethernet port (don't care about that). Battery health is good, charger
included. Downsides are being very plasticky (but relatively light), and a
less than impressive 15" 1366x768 TN display. It'll do.

Runs Windows 11 very nicely, and with official support.

Not bad for £100.

Theo

On 10/12/2021 23:24, Theo wrote:
> newshound <newshound@stevejqr.plus.com> wrote:
>> I have an Acer E5-572 (in fact two, I bought another as a spare) dating
>> from 2014 and can confirm they are pretty solid machines. I did replace
>> the hard drive of one with an SSD recently, this has speeded up the
>> booting considerably but takes it outside your budget. I also upped the
>> memory from 4 to 8 while I was at it. It's had some, but not a lot of,
>> mobile use. The hinge feels to me slightly less robust than a Dell,
>> Thinkpad, or HP. I don't recall replacing the battery but I suppose I
>> might have done.
>
> Thanks all. It turned out the 15" category is a bit harder to fish in that
> some of the smaller sizes that I'm more familiar with. In the end I set
> what felt like a million ebay watches and waited for the pings as they came
> due. I ended up with ...
>
> A Dell Latitude 3590, about two and a half years old. Respectable mid-range
> CPU of i5-8250U, 8GB RAM/128GB mSATA SSD, in good order apart from a broken
> ethernet port (don't care about that). Battery health is good, charger
> included. Downsides are being very plasticky (but relatively light), and a
> less than impressive 15" 1366x768 TN display. It'll do.
>
> Runs Windows 11 very nicely, and with official support.
>
> Not bad for £100.
>
> Theo
>
Can't go wrong for that. I've just spend £70 on an extra 16GB of RAM for
my old Dell desktop.