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
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.
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.
I would recommend opting for a dedicated GPU with 4GB VRAM whose driver supports OpenCL, if this would still be within your budget. darktable will for sure benefit.
I had an ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 (Intel i5-8265U, 8GB RAM) with a GeForce GTX 1050 (Max-Q) with 4GB of GDDR5 which was my base for darktable on Win 11 (assuming that Linux Mint will run faster on such hardware). Worked fine and reliably. Of course, it’s not a burner with respect to speed, but it worked well - especially, since the developer team (thanks to @hannoschwalm and others) made huge improvements also for such “low RAM” systems.
This is not true for laptop processors, especially newer generations as intel’s mobile architecture is very efficient and overall better than AMD for battery life and multi-threading performance
With regards to Linux, it seems that elderly Nvidia GPU drivers are slowly getting discontinued. So It’s probably safer I don’t buy anything with a Nvidia GPU. If I was using the laptop for fully editing photo shoots, then I’d opt for something newer, with a more recent GPU. However the laptop will be used for reviewing a days shots, doing culling, and basic editing. Full editing I’ll do when on my home desktop machine.
So something with integrated graphics will probably do the trick.
I’ve managed to get a good deal on an HP Probook 450 G8, with 16gb ram, and a 500gb SSD Drive for £250. It does come with Windows 11 but I’ll probably wipe it and put Linux Mint / Kubuntu on it.
10 year old GPUs are being discontinued, which doesn’t seem too bad all things considered. At the end of the day you’re probably better off spending just a bit more money to get a 5 year old GPU instead, with all the money you will save on the power bill due to efficiency gains.
Getting a Win11 machine for that price is quite good, if you think about it…
Also, my view of Win11 is quite skewed by running a 3-year-old version, so I have very little of the recent crap like the Slopilot integrations… I fear what would happen if I updated, because I’m quite satisfied with Windows at the moment
If you hear me swear at Windows you’ll know what happened
Half an year ago I got a refurb Laptop on Ebay and I’m still happy with it (now running KUbuntu + DT):
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 G1 Core i7-10850H 32GB 1TB 15,6" 1920x1080 nVidia RTX 5000
I dont know much about internals and performance but I bought my Probook two years ago, pre-owned from a local dealer with a warranty.
Whatever about the make and model, the warranty counts a lot.
Back to the drawing board. I got an email from the retailer today:
Hi Brian,
I hope you’re well.
Our warehouse team has carried out the pre-dispatch checks on your order, and >unfortunately, the unit has failed. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more in stock as a >replacement at the moment.
I can look for an alternative option for you or, if you prefer, issue a full refund. Please let me >know how you’d like to proceed.
Apologies for any disappointment caused, and thank you for your understanding.
Thank you
I have since received a full refund, so I’ll have another look online at refurb laptop resellers and see what I can see of a similar spec. Fair play to them though for letting me know rather than them just shipping the laptop. Plus they were quick to process the refund.
At least I’ve still a few weeks yet before I go away on holiday!
A bit more hunting around, and I’ve (fingers crossed) bought a Dell Latitude 5530 15-inch (2022) - Core i5 - Gen 12 (U) - 16GB - SSD 256 GB from backmarket for £360, in “Good” condition.
Refurbished ThinkPads are always a good idea. I personally bought refurbished
W541 - workstation with 4th gen i7
T490 - laptop with 8th gen i7
T14 G2 - laptop with 11th gen i5
always about three years old at purchase, I always upgrade the SSD (2 or 4 TB) and they always perform flawlessly, none has ever let me down.
My updates generally go hand in hand with new cameras, higher pixel-count or video resolution. The T490 i7 16 GB is perfectly capable of handling the 36 MP files coming out my D810 cameras, but it really (!) sucks for editing 4k videos, especially when you have a few slow-motion sequences at 120 fps. The G2 is really a huge progress in this sense.
Obsolete ThinkPads go to the local school. I am no collector, I don’t need a backup-computer, all my important files are on the NAS and if I ever loose my ThinkPad or damage it beyond reasonable repair, another refurbished one would be bought within hours.
I even convinced my wife - she was very much in love with her shiny metal-surface laptop before, but has switched to refurbished T470 and recently T16.
but I’ll probably wipe it and put Linux Mint / Kubuntu on it.