Refurbished Computers.

Just skimmed through this thread for the first time. I would not recommend either of those laptops. Those older amd mobile CPUs were dog poop.

I picked up a Walmart special a couple months ago with a 10th gen i5 and ssd for 250. The screen is not good at all but the guts of this thing is an insane bargain. I would continue looking if I were you.

 

I should also point out that right now is probably the best time EVER to build a desktop. SSD, ram and CPU prices are very low right now. You can get a 6 core/12 thread AMD ryzen 5 1600af (a new CPU not 1st Gen ryzen like the name implies) for 85 dollars.

 

I grabbed a low end Lenovo laptop a couple of years ago -- specs look great but I feel like the AMD chips make it slow.

 

Best bang for your buck will always be in desktops.

Used workstation/professional laptops are nice if you move around, but ultimately a little bit more expensive.

 

I've Acer spin3


Pro:

touchscreen on bar with an iPad ,crispy and responsive. The rest of hardware is adequate, battery will last 8hours

Con.
Edges will break, scratched from the first bike's fall
Keyboard can be sticky sometimes, depends on weather and your favorite drink's spill

 

The generation prior to Ryzen was really awful. They ran hot and performed poorly vs Intel. If you buy an AMD chip it must say ryzen. Take a look at this comparison to see how far they've come.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-A9-9425-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-3500U/3278vs3421

 

Get this one. https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-l...ile_laptops_16_5nv50av-1_hp-laptop---17z-touc

 

The specs on that are not bad at all. Are you comfortable with a 14" laptop? I thought you would want more of a desktop replacement type laptop.

 

Have you looked at Slickdeals.net?

https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.ph...orumchoice[]=53&forumchoice[]=30&q=laptop&r=1

 

You sure you dont want a desktop?

So much better value.

 

with his price range, gotta be lookin at i3 processor instead.

 

I would research into xps models and ask questions around this. Prob knock a hundred less for i5
i7 4k-https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XPS-1...sh=item288c4f8a80:g:0NIAAOSwNw1eGSG7#viTabs_0

i5 fhd- https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XPS-1...398178&hash=item288c27130b:g:-zMAAOSwq1NeFpFk

The laptops you're listing are ultrabook quality, which has the distinction of having U at the end of every processor model. If you want a desktop replacement, used workstations are your way to go. They're meant for working so you get what you pay for.

It takes more effort to understand if you're getting a great bargain or raw deal.

A tip for ebay buying is to look for resellers that hawk enterprise rentals. You can then check their feedback for the same model and the price range they've sold around. Eventually, you might get impatient and look at individual buyers, but those are far more riskier.

 

They do. I'd stay away from these and look for nothing lower than an Intel I5 chipset with at least 8GB RAM. If possible get an SSD hard drive to speed up system performance. I've had great luck with systems from discountelectronics.com. I picked up a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with 16GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD for $450 from there and it is running great. Plus discountelectronics.com gives you a 1 yr warranty on all refurbished systems. It replaced my 5yr old Thinkpad E550 which I donated to Good Samaritans of Garland.

 

This is interesting, but how much faster is an SSD once the computer is up and running on an old system?

 

It depends what you're doing, like if you're loading programs (or using disk intensive apps) /browsing websites/downloading (with very high speed internet) or transferring large files the SSD will make an insane difference vs a normal drive. Like if I'm downloading a game from steam, I can saturate my entire bandwidth available to download files fast (400-500 mbit/s), so to put that in perspective, I can download a 50 gigabyte file in roughly 15 mins. With a mechanical drive it will start sort of fast and slow down and state "waiting for the drive to write" - so constant throttling (thus slowing the internet rate down).

I stopped running mechanical drives on all OS drives roughly 7 years ago and never looked back, SSDs are honestly the biggest improvement I've seen in computers other than incremental cpu bumps or the bigger gpu bumps, the only time I recall a huge difference in performance was the time I went from 4MB of RAM to 8MB in the 90s on a 486... And looking back it might have been more nostalgia like since it's what got me into building computers.

To add additional perspective, I don't know why mechanical drives are even sold as the os drive on current systems, for example... I can easily take a 4-5 year old i5/7 system (maybe older but some of the latest 10 updates seem to like the cpu being a little more relevant) install an SSD and have it run circles around a current i5/7 system using a mechanical drive (assuming both are running the latest version of windows 10 etc). I mean while it won't help with say gaming fps, it sure as hell will beat the newer computer in most every other use that involves accessing the drive (so even something mundane like searching for a file on the drive is fast, while on a mech drive it's awful). I will only use mechanical drives to back up data at this point.