This past year I’ve been checking local listings for used cheap laptops because it’d be neat to have a small portable Linux machine.
It’s just surprisingly difficult to confirm what specs a given model has or to find reviews for it. The sellers don’t always do the best job listing the components and googling the model numbers may not give you too many results either. Some manufacturers keep reusing the same model name year after year so you have similarly named computers with wildly different guts, or often a specific model number will only give you very local and very limited results which makes me think some SKUs are only sold in a few countries for a short period of time
Buying phones is much more simple in this regard
If you want a daily driver laptop, get a used business laptop. Businesses sell or recycle their old computers when they upgrade. Business laptop are easy to disassemble and easy to repair, have readily available replacement parts. Lenovo Thinkpad is often recommended. Thinkpad is very Linux compatible, some them you can even replace the motherboard bios with Linux CoreBoot. Dell Lattitude and HP Elitebook are the main competitors to Lenovo Thinkpad.
This is what I did and it worked out great. The only extra thing to be aware of is there’s a possibility the BIOS may be locked. I can’t disable secure boot on mine because of this, which limits my options for Linux distro. Thankfully Mint does everything I want 😄
The manufacturer says that if a bios is locked by a password, you’re supposed to replace the motherboard.
One time I bought a Thinkpad laptop with a locked bios for very cheap. The bios password was stored on a rom chip on the motherboard. When the computer booted, I pressed a screwdriver to the pins on the password rom chip to make it unreadable. Then I went to the “set password” screen on the bios, removed the screwdriver, and set a new password.
The bios couldn’t read the bios chip because the screwdriver interfered with the chip and the bios thinks no password is set. When I told it to write a new password, I removed the interference so that it could write to the chip.
After I had set a password, the bios allowed me to remove the password by typing the password that I had set.
this looks like a correct guide https://milaq.net/thinkpad-password-removal/
Might not work on newer laptops.
Wow! I had never heard of this. Bookmarked for when I’m feeling up for pulling apart a laptop again. Thank you so much!
Cheap Linux laptop = second hand Lenovo ThinkPad t14 basically lol
Those go for about 400€ used. I’m trying to find something for less than 100, ideally 50
Yeah that’s tougher, maybe something similar in age to a t470?
The Thinkpads I can find at that price point are usually from 2012 and older. The one’s that aren’t outright museum pieces are mostly Acer and Asus, with some Dell and HP
Linux on laptops has always been a notoriously frustrating subject and still is today.
Not for me. Just buy a thinkpad and all your trouble will go away. x270 or t440 can be found refurbished for 100 bucks. I used them for my job (i’m a dev) and they never let me down.
Yeah the T series have been really reliable for me. Very good grab if you can snag one.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/ has been a site I used for a long time when comparing.
If you aren’t looking to hardcore game - I’d argue a tablet is more bang for your buck.
If you can buy an old laptop from your work its usually so much cheaper by comparison it doesn’t matter what the specs are
Buying phones is simple because they’re all just Qualcomm Snapdragon systems-on-a-chip and they’re super proprietary. Do phone specs list the model of the RAM or storage? I guess finding some info is easier because you can just look up the SoC and find what sub-components it has. I agree it’s insane that you can’t even see the list of part models in laptops on the website even though they’re written right on the parts themselves if you open the computer up. Even when a part is listed, it’s probably made up of a more specific integrated circuit that you would still have to track down. Even though that’s important info that determines how reliable that part is, and sometimes even what features it supports.
got my first ever Christmas bonus this year, and as such intended to retire my 12 year old dual Xenon workstation.
Spent a few hours looking at laptops in person, and on various websites and just came out worse for wear. It’s frustrating.
If you’re looking for a laptop that can play games. Look for a laptop that has a high wattage charging brick. A low wattage charge would indicate that the graphics card is underclocked.
Even if 2 laptops say that they have the same graphics card, one might have worse performance because it underpowers the graphics card.
depending on how cheap you want to go you can always get a used/refurbished Chromebook Plus model (they have 8GB of RAM and 128gb+ of storage and a Ryzen3/Intel i3, so not terrible) for $200 or less, and then dual-boot into a Linux distro or just flash the BIOS entirely. Took me maybe an hour to get Lubuntu installed on an old Chromebook 4 (the old 4gb RAM/32 GB models) and it runs great given it’s only got 2 cores. Great battery life but YMMV. There’s a script that automates the BIOS flashing, and there’s a pretty good walkthrough/explanation about getting it going on various models here: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/
I typically just check out Newegg refurbished laptops if I’m looking for one to recommend for somebody. They have pretty good information listed and good filtering imo.
Its a holdover from their desktop pc origins, its a way to grift/ripoff and the last a lot of times the sellers themselves don’t know what’s up they just know sell laptop get $. Reverse image can help somewhat,
I focus on cpu, ram and if its upgradable, storage and then reviews on those when I look. People are offloading after their semester/for holiday money so now isn’t a bad time to hit up ebay/FB Marketplace if you want second hand. Lenovos tend to be very customizable, easy to repair and built like tanks.
Reverse image can help somewhat
Not really, these aren’t product photos but ones snapped by the seller themselves
Can help narrow the model down sometimes, have to do this at work when people return items without tags, sometimes Google/Yandex recognizes what it is, sometimes not.
Used macbooks are pretty good
I got a refurbished 2018 pro a few years ago, and it’s been a p good experience. Still some annoyances that come with learning to use MacOS (can’t use Linux full time coz of work) but it’s very good bang for your buck
