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The missus is getting frustrated with her 12 yr old 17" Toshiba laptop so I need to source a no frills replacement
She really only surfs the web and makes a few video calls so nothing fancy is required but I'm concerned that buying off a FB marketplace ad might leave me with a unit someone's shifting because of problems. I'm not sure how you get round that issue when buying privately ? Is there any software you can chuck on a USB stick to give the laptop a health check ...or online service perhaps?. Reliability is more important than performance .
Otherwise I guess it'll be an older used unit from either a local source or online ,hopefully with a short warranty.
Has anyone got any suggestions,tips, advice ..I know it's peanuts I'm spending but income is low so I have to spend carefully.
Thanks in advance.
Bill
Hi Bill
I have a 4gb laptop ram stick you can have. It might speed up the old one.
If you want second hand advice get a ThinkPad t440 the little red button in the keyboard is rubbish but everything works really well. Mine is 7 yr old and still good for most things.
That's a very kind offer Markoulini
Her laptop has 4gb ram but just seems to struggle these days and not perform well . I have reinstalled and downloaded windows 10 . Would a Ram stick make a difference ..iirc the model would only allow up to 4gb ram but maybe thats just the limit on the hardware side?
Sounds like ideal use case for a chrome book to me
Look for ugly second hand business machine with best CPU / RAM combo you can find:
Lenovo Thinkpad
Dell Latitude
Maybe even pick up a MacBook Pro Late 2013 onwards with min 8GB /i5. The 2015 are great machines with no touch bar and loads of ports.
2015 onwards with i7 / 16GB and your laughing.
They all good…
I have had good success at this price point with items from ITZoo, they sell on refurbished ex lease corporate machines, so a bit older but durable, things like Thinkpads as suggested above
Old, failing, spinny hard drive will make it slow. Swapping to an SSD could help but it’s well old so not worth chucking any more money at if the free RAM don’t work.
If it's windows laptop get them to fire it up and then open up the reliability monitor. That's always a good place to long to see if a machine has been crashing a lot
Try Dell "Scratch and Dent" i bought one from their before and could find neither a scratch nor a dent on the machine.
I know slightly less than nothing about specifications and all that jazz for laptops and am a Luddite end user, but there are a few for sale on there for slightly north of £250.
Which i know its more than your budget and the difference might be an issue but its singletrack after all and i seem to have nailed two of the criteria, exceeding your budget and recommending what I already drive 🙂
I have a laptop that I was about to stick on Facebook/ebay. It works fine, but I was trying to use it for photo editing which is just outside of its processing power. It does Skype/Zoom etc just fine. I bought it a couple of years ago and now have a bigger budget so I treated myself to a Mac a few weeks back.
It's in great condition. It's a HP hp 14-cm0503sa (what the nice person at Currys recommended at the time) and works fine. If you're interested for more then ping me a PM :-).
Another 4gb wont help if it can't take anymore. Windows 10 is probably hard work for an old machine try Ubuntu , it is very windows like and easy to use.
Neverware Cloudready as an OS and a fresh Ssd and you'll be flying even with only 4gb Ram.
My old (6years old) i3 is super speedy on it.
Cloudready is basically Chrome OS without the play store on it. Is being updated regularly now Google themselves have bought the company.
Stick the os on a USB stick. Chuck in the new Ssd and boot from the Ssd and install. If it doesn't work you can go back to the old hard drive and see if more ram will fix it.
Only thing it lacks is an email client so you're stuck with webmail/Gmail.
https://www.neverware.com/freedownload#intro-text
Sounds like ideal use case for a chrome book to me
This.
Yep
She really only surfs the web and makes a few video calls = Chromebook
I will be replacing my 8 year old laptop with a Chromebook if it ever breaks as I just use web and zoom even when working on it for 8 hours a day
Old, failing, spinny hard drive will make it slow. Swapping to an SSD could help but it’s well old so not worth chucking any more money at if the free RAM don’t work.
My old laptop was ready for the bin but I put a new SSD in it and it really did give it a new lease of life. Kept it going for about another 4 years and I only replaced it as I finally got fed up of the really noisy fan.
I’d get a Chromebook now for that use.
@smokey_jo I still have said laptop, I might give that a go on it.
If you've maxed out the RAM (check you have on the Crucial memory website) the only other things you can do are swap the spinny hard drive for an SSD,get as much fluff out of the fans and case as possible and make sure you haven't got any McAfee/Norton antivirus hogging resources - just use Windows defender.
I'm still using a 15 year old Toshiba 17" laptop (was Vista now W10) which is fine for web and office stuff. Does struggle with playing high Res videos off Vimeo etc - not sure if that's due to graphics or WiFi limitations so need to check with an ethernet cable and downloaded videos. Not sure how it would cope with video calls as haven't used it for that but if you've done all the above and it's still struggling then it may be new machine time. As others said look at ex corporate machines or chromebooks but you probably won't get a 17" screen.
My laptops not much newer (~10 years and a 2 core/2 thread i3 with 4gb of DDR3 RAM).
SSD will help with load times, no need to spend £££, even the cheapest will probably max out the bandwith of the motherboard. I think I've got some spare I recovered from old laptops you can have for the postage if needs be. They won't speed up how quickly it runs, but programs/files at least load/save quicker.
Web browsing, especially in Chrome, can use a lot of RAM. An SSD might actually help this too as once STW has filled your RAM with adverts chrome dumps them to the hard drive when you change tabs, the SSD should mean they re-load almost instantly (and without a spinny noise).