Refurb Laptops. A good deal? Or is it buyer beware?

Hardware
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I have a few days booked away for a “photography holiday” down in Northumberland at the end of August.

So I think it’s time I treated myself to a “new” refurbished laptop, as the refurbished one I bought for my holiday to Skye in 2017 is now starting to show it’s age. Current laptop is an HP Probook 6450b, with 250gb SSD, and 8gb of ram, and a sloooow 1st Generation Intel i5 520m CPU. Plus it’s battery is no more as it no longer charges :frowning:

Currently I’m considering a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad something or other, preferably a 15" screen, 16gb ram and a 520gb SSD as a minimum, or a similar spec HP Probook 450 G6 something or other.

A 1080p screen is what I’d be looking for (as a 4K display makes everything too wee to look at), preferably an IPS screen as well for colour accuracy (although I’d be calibrating it using my hardware screen calibrator).

Main use will be looking at the day’s photos and pre editing them until I get home and do full edits on the desktop.

Budget wise around £280 absolute maximum. And I’d probably be installing Linux Mint / Ubuntu or similar on it.

There are random “Refurbished super fast laptops with Linux Mint or Ubuntu” advertised on Ebay, but it is potluck with the seller sends you.

So I’d probably buy somewhere from a recognised reseller.

I’ve also seen a few Lenovo refurb laptops advertised, with discrete Nvidia GPUs, however they are Quadro or MX250 and similar. Which may result in difficulties getting drivers installed on Linux as they get depreciated from even the Nvidia legacy linux drivers.

So that means something with either Intel HD graphics or AMD would probably work best.

Any other recommendations?

2

ThinkPad T490s is a good laptop to find refurbished. It can get i5-8365u or an i7-8665u, both pretty good CPUs. These laptops go for about 250 to 350 euros depending on the specs and where you get them. I got one for my mom last year and it works perfectly fine with Win11, the battery seems to be in mint condition too.

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Hi,

good choice, it seems wiser to find a seller you can trust.

It seems that AMD processors are less expensive, run cooler, and are well-suited for image processing.

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Yeah there could be some large reseller of refurbished laptops, I’d look there first as you’ll get warranty.

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